Eureka Street

Author: Brendan Ryan

ARTS AND CULTURE

Mekong coconut workers
- Brendan Ryan
- 12 December 2016
Watch the man in his stained shirt barefoot under the palms. Adrift from younger workers he manages a rhythm, a cigarette-dangling-from-the-lip focus. His lined face belies the strength of his forearms, thrusting each coconut onto a metal spike that is his altar. Seven days a week he splits coconuts with the precision required to not sever a wrist in a country with no health insurance. Upriver, in the seamy heat of the Mekong Delta, it could be the 19th century. I don't know where to look.
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ARTS AND CULTURE

Car park hunger
- Brendan Ryan
- 26 August 2014
1 Comment
A topless man shuffles into Coles. The Big Issue seller is liked and avoided. Buskers who specialize with the night, streetlights mooning the spaces that never close.
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ARTS AND CULTURE

The last talker after Mass
- Brendan Ryan
- 09 April 2013
7 Comments
The straggly lines of his arguments follow cow paths ... He laughs as much as he spits. Veins in his cheeks, grey hair testament to frosty mornings, a bull bowling his wife over in the yard ... My father had developed a bad habit of listening.
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ARTS AND CULTURE

Supermarket and cemetery conversation
- Brendan Ryan
- 09 November 2010
At the IGA, the woman at the check-out peppers her speech with Darl. Her friendliness, the way she packs my plastic bags, greets me two days later – a connection Facebook can’t provide.
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ARTS AND CULTURE

Lying in the confessional
- Brendan Ryan
- 01 September 2009
2 Comments
inventing sins to keep the peace .. Were the priests cheated too, as I was? .. Or did they come to trust a congregation .. by the stories told in confession?
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ARTS AND CULTURE

Inventing terror
- Brendan Ryan
- 07 October 2008
newspaper sub-headings — 'war on terror' .. each page apportioning blame .. every fridge doing its bit .. modest ceremonies for the men who jumped .. to enlist, to escape
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CONTRIBUTORS

Brendan Ryan
- Brendan Ryan
- 17 May 2007
Brendan Ryan's first collection of poetry, Why I Am Not a Farmer, was published by Five islands Press in 2000. A forthcoming poetry collection with Five Islands Press is due March 2007.
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ARTS AND CULTURE

Fluttering locusts stripping the paddocks bare
- Brendan Ryan
- 27 February 2007
1 Comment
Their flickering rises to a crescendo / unsettling, like a threat the ground / moves beneath me.
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ARTS AND CULTURE

Talking to Auntie
- Brendan Ryan
- 05 June 2006
1 Comment
Poem by Brendan Ryan
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Author: Brendan Ryan