by Meggie Royer

In a past life my great-aunt
believed she was a monk,
resplendent in marigold robes,
offerings cloaking her doorstep like a shroud.
There was a heron against the water
in her dreams,
so pale it shone like hair.
In the life before that
she was a boy in a cave,
younger than I could ever picture her,
hiding coins in the dirt.
It was a privilege, to end one life
and wake in another,
to falter in the way love falters,
to see her likeness
moving around the corner like a cloud.
When I knew her, I knew myself.
I saw her; I saw what she buried,
I saw that some of us spend our whole lives
moving away from what moves toward us.

Meggie Royer (she/her) is a Midwestern writer and the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Persephone’s Daughters, a journal for abuse survivors. She has won numerous awards and has been nominated several times for the Pushcart Prize. She thinks there is nothing better in this world than a finished poem. Her work can be found at https://meggieroyer.com.

by D.W. Baker
​pantoum collage after Martha Lundin

To be a witch is to love the natural world more than the things human hands have made.
We name women who spend too much time with nature Witch,
but the line between goddess and witch is thin--
I was always sure of my identity: I was part of her.
 
We name women who spend too much time with nature Witch.
(We name things we want to control after women.)
I was always sure of my identity: I was part of her--
In this one body, there is no need for names.
 
We name things we want to control after women,
but the line between goddess and witch is thin:
In this one body, there is no need for names--
To be a witch is to love the natural world more than the things human hands have made.

D.W. Baker is a submerging poet from St. Petersburg, Florida, USA, who writes about place, bodies, belonging, and the end of the world. His work appears in Green Ink Poetry, Snowflake Magazine, Feral Poetry, and elsewhere. He is a poetry reader for Hearth & Coffin. See more at linktr.ee/dwbaker​

by Patrick Wright 

you post pictures of funny-walking seagulls
and crumb-loving pigeons. from a distance
I imagine a mother and child, clambering 
over rocks, eating crêpes, paddling waist-high. 

as lifeguards supervise, your message arrives 
on ‘the uncanniness of arcade machines,
a run-down town, a rag-and-bone tumbleweed 
place, a bustle of back streets, antique shops …’

meanwhile, my device is streaming blue skies,
terns perched on promenade lights, a laughing 
sailor: come laugh with Jolly Jack. I reply: 
‘I hope to never meet him under moonlight.’

you heart this line. you’re far, while I’m at a 
loose end. you text as you trudge up the steps, 
put the fun in the funicular, sign-off with emojis 
and gifs, nothing but a screen of hieroglyphics.

Patrick Wright has a poetry collection, Full Sight of Her (Black Spring), which was nominated for the John Pollard Prize. His poems have appeared in Poetry Ireland Review, The North, Southword, Poetry Salzburg, Agenda, Wasafiri, and London Magazine.

by Alana Kelsall

we arrived as couples
at the rebirthing centre     mats lined up
like rafts     his arm around
my shoulder     I dropped
     to a crouch   
angled my huge belly into line
wondered who would succumb first
to the tug of sleep     draw up
     the flood of their birth?
our best friend trumpeted his snores
in no time     roped back sheepish
into the shadowy room
     whale music probing the walls
feeling like a cabbage adrift in a field  
I slipped towards a dark watery eye  
     was it a fish?  
 
how human is it to breathe?
the Denisovans once roamed across
vast mountain ranges     leaping
     from crag to outcrop
without losing their breath  
a gene they bequeathed to the Tibetans
where did they come from those climbers    
     how did they die out?
were they somewhere between a fish and a bird
able to lean into storms
     with breath and bone?
how did my body erase my
fearful mind during labour
with each surge
     to the end?
will our children’s children have to breathe
through water     learn how to float
     to higher ground?

Alana Kelsall is an award-winning writer of poetry and prose who lives on unceded Wurundjeri land. She recently won second prize in the June Shenfield Award, and was longlisted for the Liquid Amber Poetry Prize. Her poetry is forthcoming in the Australian Poetry Anthology.

by Steph Amir

Blue ink exploded
onto unidentified viscera,
or perhaps it’s four
co-dependent animals
huddled in a grisly lump,
with a jellyfish wobble yet
not jellyfish at all.

Steph Amir’s poems have been published in Australian Poetry Journal, Foam:e, Plumwood Mountain, Rabbit, StylusLit, TEXT, and others.  In 2021, she was a Writer’s Victoria Writeability Fellow and in 2022 was shortlisted for the Melbourne Lord Mayor’s Writing Awards for poetry.  She recently published her debut collection, “Pieces That Fit."

by Frank William Finney

Meat cutting class.
Lesson of the day:

How to cut a veal flank steak.

My classmates
took it all in stride:

the glassy eyes,
the hindlegs bound,

the sheet of blood
beneath the calf’s head,

flies on the walls,
and drunk in the air.

Blood on the blades
of the ceiling fan.

Outside the room,
the fields smelt green.

Horsetails swished
in the afternoon sun.

Frank William Finney is the author of The Folding of the Wings (Finishing Line Press, 2022). His poems have appeared in Flora Fiction, Freshwater Literary Journal, Metachrosis Literary, and other places. He lives and writes in Massachusetts.

by Polly Grant Butler 

inside an ad there is an ad 
and it is saying eat me

I tell myself even mary would have 
gagged on cock, after all was said and done

a laptop on a bed 
brings the devil into focus

it says the ring of fire is a 
burger and a 

breast 
the breast is the bottle and its 

absence is a presence
to fuck is to eat and 

abstaining is 
transcendent

sliding down my hands I want 
it fat and wet

like a morning shit like I’m 
doing it quick

the taste of butter
curdling in my spine

I sip the day like a cheap
charade 

book film or play
it’s all 

you. anyway.
how your milky taste 

belies the body
but this is a body, a stuffed 

buffet
fisting into fullness.

the news has a sponsor with 
a finger down its throat 

I bargain with delivery drivers
to see the world up close

I want you like 
I am a baby and you are the nipple

on the screen they say I’m loving it, 
the eternal sauce I’m loving it,

to be hungry is to be unspecific
and I refuse anything not vague 

mustard licked hands 
fluorescent screaming light

Polly Grant Butler lives in Adelaide, where she works for independent publishing house Wakefield Press. She writes poetry and short stories. 

by Liam Wallace

A boy drowned some years ago
On a beach with a name that I forget.
 
No one saw him enter the water
So nothing can be said for his intention
His purpose undetermined
His face a blank canvas marked by
Only a smattering of freckles
 
A surfer noticed the boy
Swept up by a rip, unable/unwilling to untangle
Himself from the pull and tug
Of increasingly harsh
Ocean water.
 
The surfer called out
Before he paddled towards the boy,
Thrusting his old waxen board underneath
A succession of waves
Unsure of whether he was more than
A speck viewed from the shoreline
 
The boy sunk further out and further down,
Only hands flailing above unforgiving
Blue.
I do not know
When the surfer returned to shore. Only that
The boy did not.

​Liam Wallace (they/them) is a recent graduate from the University of Wollongong in environmental humanities, history and sustainable development. They love reading and are also a keen runner. Liam tutors primary school students and enjoys getting to share ideas about writing with them.

by Nikita Kostaschuk

my housemate tells me
I am a chore
to live with, says I am always
coming home in chaos,
says the mess and jumble
of it is too much for him.

doesn't he know about the bumble
of bees in my head?
I swear he did.

I swore he could hear them
through the walls
in his room when I am trying to sleep.
all they do is dance
their paths to the pollen stuck
to everything I say.

they only want to make honey.
they wax
lyrical, build hexagons
in my head to contain it all.
all the mess and jumble of the world
is too much for me
to contain alone.

I thought he could taste the sweetness
that leaks
from my every word
but he just leaves the world hollow.

he doesn't understand
that I am the swarm,
the secateurs, the flower,
that within me lies
an eternal Spring.

Nikita Kostaschuk (ink.eyta) is a spoken wordsmith hailing from meanjin/brisbane. a background in English Literature interplays in their work with their lived experience of autism, gender, trauma, humanity and brokenness. a facilitator of spoken spaces, ink.eyta organizes SpeakEasy Poetry Open Mic. 

by Audrey T. Carroll

We know nothing about gender
& even less outside our species
 
There are categories of hummingbirds
we have named along a spectrum:
 
male-like males           female-like males        male-like females        female-like females
 
& even this we only glean
from an exterior, the observable:
 
plumage brightness                 &                     bill length                   &                     tail length
 
It is quite possibly impossible to know
anything beyond this, anything about their
 
gender roles                 gender expression
 
without imposing foreign concepts
 
 
Gender is a complex web, something
 
             known but unknown              
 
                          inside of us but beyond us
 
                                               named but individual              
 
                                                                          performed                               
 
                                                                                       expressed
 
                                                                                                    seen                                        
                                                                                                                unseen
 
                                                                                                                                cultural                                   
                                                                                                                                               social
 
                                                  the us to whom we speak in the dark
 
Our own gender is a cosmos
& we are children with plastic telescopes
hoping to catch a glimpse of Venus or Mars
or something in between & mostly what we see
are a million stars we cannot name,
a million stars we can barely even describe

Audrey T. Carroll is the author of What Blooms in the Dark (ELJ Editions, 2024) and Parts of Speech: A Disabled Dictionary (Alien Buddha Press, 2023). She is a bi/queer and disabled/chronically ill writer. She can be found at http://AudreyTCarrollWrites.weebly.com and @AudreyTCarroll on Twitter/Instagram.