by Madeleine Dale
I break the surface of anger unexpectedly, like a diver prising the bay into halves, a knife through muscle and shell. The oyster reefs were licking the tide clean, honeycombed on their racks, varnishing their little hurts without philosophy. Helpless as swell, I have painted indifference over injury, and it has turned so heavy. My body lolls in the estuary, where silt meets salt. Broken shuck catches my skin. I carry the pearl-weight of love out to sea. Madeleine Dale grew up on Tamborine Mountain and now lives in Brisbane. She holds first-class honours and a Masters degree in creative writing from the University of Queensland, where she is currently completing a PhD. Her first chapbook, On Fire with Dangerous Cargo, was published by Queensland Poetry in 2023. Her first full length collection, Portraits of Drowning, won the 2023 Thomas Shapcott Prize and is forthcoming from UQP.
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by Rae White bloated catfish surge at the cusp of river’s oil-licked lips. the bent elbows and legs of rocks have grey foam and bottle tops in their crooks. at my side, your fist is clenched like balled-up lunch wrap. ‘what a mess’ lingers at the edge of my teeth before I swallow it down with my throat’s impatient bile. a waning moon flickers behind wind-ruffled blue gums. another storm is on the way. Rae White (they/them) is a non-binary transgender poet, writer and zine maker. They're the award-winning author of poetry collections Milk Teeth (UQP 2018) and Exactly As I Am (UQP 2022), and the Bitsy game stand up. Rae is the founding editor of #EnbyLife, a journal for non-binary creatives. by Genevieve Osborne Coast Dawn A slow light fingers into cracks and angles Spills over cliffs and pools; Pinks the streaming manes of skittish mares And combs the fur of foxes loping to their lairs; Works into a weighty nest of sticks To hone the eagle’s beak; Glints the scales of mullet rising in a wave And pokes the rosy bones of fruit bats fallen in a cave; Sidles through a valley to a farm And flames the windows of the sleeping house; Bloods the veiny ears of pigs blinking in their pens Then primes the udders of the waiting cows; Wakes the rooster shatters in his crow And showers in shards and prisms on his hens. Garfish
Is it the way a shaft of winter light leans into the kitchen that lets these distant pictures play now sharp and clear? Hands lift a parcel test its weight fold back white paper garfish I watch my mother line them up on the old marble topped table slim silver bodies each with a slender sword watch her sprinkle on the flour rub it gently on the cleaned slippery skin and place them side by side in the hot oil in the pan with their tails curved up one side and their snouts pointing over the edge of the other watch her turn them deftly and lift them out onto a plate lined with kitchen paper a row of pale golden fish with skin just crisp moist white flesh to drizzle with lemon and separate carefully from the almost invisible bones. Genevieve Osborne is a Sydney writer. Her poems have appeared in various journals including Southerly, Meanjin, Island, Red Room Poetry's The Disappearing and The Emma Press Anthology of the Sea (UK). She was joint winner of the Henry Lawson Prize for Poetry and runner-up in the Gwen Harwood Poetry Prize. Genevieve spends a fair amount of time thinking about food and cooking. Her favourite place to be when growing up was in the kitchen, watching her mother cook. She says her mother was the best cook she has ever known. by Alisha Brown
There is no room in a heron’s beak for blame, just the slow, tender gulp of a fish down the gullet See how he stands, still as an icicle, dripping little droplets that break the rippling pool of his body’s dim mirage on the lake When the swans come, they bow their heads Drawn, like all things, to hunger and violence Knowing, like all things, that beauty breathes heaviest in the brief, lean space between lifefulness and after The heron seems to float above himself for a moment, eyes locked on the marsh, backward legs and feather-tufted chest strung tight toward his unseen target, and when he darts his executioner’s strike, spiring the perch cleanly and plainly, he carries the flickering wet body, the silver-wet body to the bank where he drops it, lets it rest awhile, emptying its share of the unknowable into the sun before it is swallowed Alisha Brown is a poet and traveler born on Kamilaroi land in Australia. She won the 2022 Joyce Parkes Women’s Writing Prize and placed second in the Judith Rodriguez Open Section of the 2021 Woorilla Poetry Prize. You can find her work in Westerly, Griffith Review, and the Australian Poetry Anthology, among others. by Caroline Reid
how did we live before grief became a cruise ship pressing on our necks. before the white assassin who proclaimed love skimmed smooth black stones over our pink lake. these are the colours of my house. from my boat i spy footprints in the mud. big toe missing on the right foot. trout ate toe. destiny ate trout. so it goes. how did we ever live before women gobbled their own feet. i have other questions too. are we seen. are we valued. are we felt. look. i’m not saying grief is easy. imagine. all your earthly life you’re a poet. then you keel over. life is a double-parked dream. but don’t worry. it’s not contagious. when we’re afraid to cry we tiptoe drunk over aeons of silvery scars. hungry as cabin boys we sniff out honey in the hull. steal thunder. sail into blame. until we remember it’s connections between things that save us. now that i’m drowning in seawater i will cut you a mother moon from this old skiff. how did we ever even begin to live before tough-talking secrets slipped unnoticed from the shore. joyfully jumped ship. into the heaving body of poetry. Caroline Reid (she/her) found her feet as a writer in theatre and has since developed a diverse writing and performance practice. Her debut collection SIARAD is published in print and audio by Spineless Wonders (ES-Press). Storytelling, dark humour and a whiff of rage are at the heart of all her art. by Andrew Millar
CW: body horror, gore, and cannibalism I want to taste the drying blood around his mouth, Flecked and pooled in mauvish patches on his lips With slivers shorn off spindly supraspinatus Draped on white incisors; dripping velvet curtains. I want to feel his eyes on me when we eat, As though he ate with mouth and gaze entwined, Through greedy gulps of blood and sybaritic glances; Prostrate at the altar of flesh. If he asked I’d press my lips to crimson, streaked And stretched from pointed chin to pearly navel; I’d taste the roughish ferric glide of tongue on tongue, Our fingers interlocked and webbed like sinew. When my teeth tore through his pectoralis I felt myself inside him, not he inside me; He moaned and cried and kissed me hard-- He begged to eat more, eat more; bones and all. In another life our bodies lie enwound, Edenic on the Holy Plains of Flesh, In a world that’s ours; where I am his-- Darling, I want you inside me forever. Andrew Millar is an emerging writer based in Brisbane/Meanjin, studying literature and philosophy. He writes poetry, fiction, and non-fiction essays. Some of his poems and non-fiction can be found in Jacaranda Journal and Exordium. His never-ending project is a quest for a poetics of embodiment that feels authentic to lived experience. by Clare Roche
the inky dog circles close I breathe out midnight blue, soundless mist descends I stagger, pulled by violet undertows that sweep me to my knees I taste the wind, watch the restless fish that dart and twist through my chest I dream of eggshells and snow -soft feathers brushing against fine bone cages that trap, close and dark I am undone until one day, a sliver, an opening, swell of light and I exhale a riot of colour. Clare Roche (she/her) lives and loves on Gadigal land in Sydney's inner west. Her poetry has been published in online journals in the UK, the US, Germany, and Australia. Her commercial fiction manuscript 'The Garden' was shortlisted for the Harper Collins Banjo Prize (2022). by Carl Griffin
Other power countries built skyscrapers and dipped their shoulders in outer space but we drilled to the mantle of the earth beyond the depth of an ocean trench. To understand himself, a man must mine his own heart. To understand the immense complexities of his lifespan, he must dig down through layers of the organ he did not know existed. First, the crust. Get beyond that, you reach a whole new perspective. How hard we tried with a drill pipe and rig, and torque and two decades, through fossils, through scepticism and rock crystals. Every year you age, the earth becomes hotter, you can’t even dream of the heat to come, the burns, the suffocation, the awareness that survival is the highest privilege. Our eyebrows raised so high they came clean off, the drill bits frazzled by the centimetre. Until a man could fall for four minutes and not land. Guard your heart or hell will surge up until the pressing must be reeled back to keep dark seven miles that barely cut the crust with a metal hole cover and a dozen rusting bolts. I was the last worker out of the drill room but we will reassemble. We will understand. Carl Griffin is from South Wales. His first poetry collection, Throat of Hawthorn, was published by Indigo Dreams Publishing in 2019. In 2020, his book-length poem, Arrival at Elsewhere, written for charity with the help of one hundred poets, was published by Against the Grain. by Mark O’Flynn
It’s Australia for God’s sake. Here are the swimming cozies, the varieties of sauce, but where is the mythical snow? Out there on the mulga chilling the champers for the opal miners, that’s where. The way they talk the deserts should be full of it. Occurs only once in a pinkish moon, if then. Weighs the branches down to breaking point. Do we really see ourselves as a skiing nation? A land of snowmen in white bowling cricket balls of hail. Ski-jump girls like upside down helicopters. The slippery images slide like loose gravel, an old cardigan with holes in the elbows, a tipsy uncle with a carrot for a nose, like panthers left behind by American soldiers to run wild after the war. All good means of describing snow, its aftermath, its myth, its place in the national interest how like everyone else we aspire to be. Mark O’Flynn’s novel The Last Days of Ava Langdon (UQP) was short listed for the Miles Franklin Award, 2017, the Prime Minister’s Literary Award as well as winning the Voss Literary Award, 2017. His most recent collection of poetry is Einstein’s Brain (Puncher & Wattmann, 2022). by Laurie Donaldson Dragonfly That long day the dragonfly died, its wings now almost transparent, but still seeming to change hue. Gossamer, I thought, not sure if the hopeful summers to come would ever be the same. A thin movement of air lifts its slender frame, its marking you can’t define, iridescence lost. The dreaded call comes faintly, that it was time to go, to move on from this favoured spot. I cup its floating impression, unsure if it has weight at all, and try to blow the insect back to life, into the air, to snub this terrible interruption, before I climb into the stuffy car and fold my newly formed wings into myself, hoping that drab will become colour, will be my future. Scorpion grass
High summer, sun wheedles, heat pulses, and forget-me-not tinsel waves below black-headed gulls pulling at sky threads. All feels slackened, motes on careless random air, mouse ear foliage on display, impossible blue with yellow dot target, inviting me to you. Such metallic growth with machine age sheen, self-loving to earth, buds cloistered with promise, grace note brittle. Don’t forget me, I say as you turn leaves towards autumn. And I fold myself into frayed pages, to flatten my old spurned love, so that one day I’ll find you again a flash of lost colour unexpectedly slipping from a book I had meant to read again. Laurie Donaldson (he/him) is a member of the Greenock Writers’ Club and the Federation of Writers (Scotland). He reads at open mics, and has had poems in Dreich, Cold Moon Journal and the Primo Poetica Collection, and in anthologies, and he reviews new poetry for the Glasgow Review of Books. |
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