Timothy Liu Nothing but the Truth So Help Me God Nine lamps in the shape of teeming censers hung from a courthouse ceiling, forty wooden chairs facing a video screen. This is America. Jury duty and the token fanfare of breaking from our daily routines, men and women with baskets of tropical fruit on top of their heads. Justice for all and some time off. Dionne Warwick in a floor-length gown not singing. Trying to hook her fans instead on the Psychic Friends Network: Touch me not for I have not yet dialed that 1- 900 number. America, talk to me. The clock stops ticking, but someone still keeps holding a microphone to our lips.   From issue no. 132 (Fall 1994)

 Les Murray

Echidna

Crumpled in a coign I was galactic with my hatchling
till he prickled.
He entered the earth pouch then
and learned ant-ribbon,
the gloss we put like lightning on the brimming ones.
Life is fat is sleep. I feast life on and sleep it,
deep loveself in calm.
I awaken to spikes of food-sheathing, of mulling fertile egg,
of sun, of formic gravels,
of worms, dab hunting, of fanning under quill-ruff when
budged:
all are rinds, to sleep.
Tongue-scabbard, corner-footed, I am trundling doze
and wherever I put it
is exactly right. Sleep goes there.
 

From issue no. 117 (Winter 1990)