by Mark O'Flynn
for Kate Fagan Against the empty storm clouds those white cockatoos like rents in canvas drift through the air left by fire. The clean sheets of their wings vivid as charcoal on snow. Acoustic cries fill the ashen void between scorched tree and leaden sky. They strip the blackened bark like metal at a car wreck fossick with primitive impatience on the verge of food. What language do they croak? what devious vernacular of proclamation and waste? Arranged phonetically with blundering morphemes like hacksaws grumbling through the air’s dirty paragraph. You lean from your window oppressed by rain as one stone age cockatoo in the face of desolation shrieks relentless greeting across the heavy sky hello hello hello. 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 Undercoat (Liquid Amber Press, 2022).
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by Leni Shilton White smoke in the trees lifts slowly, it weaves through the empty frames. They hang from the branches like mirrors. She hung them there looking for herself, her mother – for all the mothers. For the women who were once here she listens in the stillness for their voices. The smoke winds sleep-like from her campfire, drifting this side to that. She puts the billy to boil and the crack of flames is the only sound in the wide yawn of quiet. A honeyeater alights on a frame its call startled and loud, the whole forest alert watching for the smoke. The frames rock in the breeze. Unblinking eyes capturing the forest, the birds the distance. She paints late into the day forgetting herself until the sun drops, the cold comes in. As the light lowers, she walks about reaches into trees collecting frames. They clatter into her bag, into darkness like eyes closing. She empties the billy onto dry leaves, breathes in eucalyptus. She packs away her paintings her paints, the perfect blend of green, of grey. She tips water on the campfire steps back from the blast of steam. The last of the coals scattered, she heaves bags on her shoulder trudges up the creek bed, feet slipping in the dry sand. Behind her, the forest is itself again No frames to look through, no fire or smoke just itself for a thousand miles, stretching and shaking in the breeze. Leni Shilton is a poet and verse novelist. Her book Walking with camels won the 2020 NT Chief Ministers Book Award. Leni’s poetry work appears in journals and anthologies, and she judged the 2020 Stella Prize. After many years in Mparntwe | Alice Springs, she now lives on Dja Dja Wurrung country. Image credit Pam French
Fowlers Gap/Broken Hill area, acknowledging the Wilyakali/Wijaali peoples Poem from exhibition: Mother Mother with my sister, visual artist Pam French Newstead Arts Hub, Newstead, Victoria, Dja Dja Wurrung Country, 5-27 October 2024 by Allison Camp Ode to the corpse “The Dermestid Beetle, sometimes referred to as a carpet or skin beetle, belongs to the family Dermesidate. This beetle species feeds on dry-moist animal material, ensuring that decaying and dead flesh is recycled. Invariably these beetles will show up at a carcass to aid in decomposition…” -Skull Taxidermy My dear, cold dead damp rotting at roadside, a generous splay. Your sweet stench lures me. Intoxicating cadaverine and putrescine, pungent perfume which I fancy ambergris envies. My probing mouth lovingly caresses each metacarpal, vertebral arch. No pulp evades my insatiable maw. My wormy form burrows under your fur in gluttonous consumption. A grotesque Hungry Caterpillar. Your crevices are scraped clean in my wake, elegant bones gleam white. Now, you are gone my decomposing darling. I will hide -- secret, sealed, corporeal melt, dream of decay. The circularity is not lost on me. Jumbled soup congeals, my form recombines, your muscle now mine. Spotted elytra and wings unfurl. I fly to find you again. Roadkill
more like murder via high-speed habitat intrusion more like killer road more like vehicular slaughter more like we kill anything that gets in our way more like paved graveyard more like corpse corridor more like a gruesome museum of local wildlife – mangled specimens only. Allison Camp (she/her) is a Washington State native now living and working in North Carolina. She is a scientist by training and has a deep affinity for biology and the fascinating details that abound in nature. Connect with her on Substack: https://allisoncamp.substack.com/ or Instagram: @eclectic.curiosity. by Paris Rosemont
Your little yuzu sapling should have tipped me off to your love of zest. You tended to it with the care and patience of a zen master cultivating inner peace. I have begun craving the tart tang of tangerine tickling my tastebuds, imagining you on my tongue as I dip into the pink flesh of a grapefruit wedge—sweet, bitter and sourish—bright as a sharp slap prickling pungent as smelling salts. My lips pucker as I suck the rind bare as my cunt—a slow kiss laced with a lick of vinegar. Love flays me—I tingle. My senses awaken to you; the blood orange dribbling acidic into each tiger stripe of my wounds. I become an ouroboros, consuming my own marrow, marinating in your secretions. I am raw—my translucent flesh transformed by the lime of your love. Paris Rosemont is the author of Banana Girl (WestWords, 2023), shortlisted for the Association for the Study of Australian Literature’s 2024 Mary Gilmore Award for a first volume of poetry. Her second collection, Barefoot Poetess, is due for release in early 2025. Paris may be found at www.parisrosemont.com. by Kate Compston
The other world is here, just under our fingertips. --Charles Wright Child in the garden mines the winter soil for worms to tempt a cocksure robin. The pulsing of a worm, of earth within the worm, shocks her at core. No-one has told her all the world’s a dance. Woman in the darkness plays her lover’s octaves of vertebrae, rehearses notes and space between the notes, teases sonatas out from bone, skin, woken whisperings of blood: a music played by heart. Mother in the dawnlight soothes her baby: sorrows for her own crass roughnesses, is awed by contours of her child’s unblemished landscape. Under the fontanelle, a dragon huffs a lifetime’s threats. Mourner in the hospice strokes her father’s watercolour hands; wants to paint in oils to bring back colour, vibrancy. Under tissue-skin, the merest flicker — as though he stops to bless her. Then the slipping past. Kate worked as a counsellor in the NHS, then voluntarily in a hospice setting. She lives by the Atlantic in Cornwall, has been involved with XR, and is trying to learn BSL. (She dislikes abbreviations …) She feels writing itself is enough to quicken the blood — publication an affirming bonus. by Glen Hunting
This place’s wounds are sacred ranges, sagging houses, scarified sedans. But body art can’t disrupt the eruption of buffel. Only the blossoms move with the seasons: spectra in rubble waiting beside the rails. Standing room only for refugees after rain. Glen Hunting is a writer from Perth, Western Australia (Boorloo, Whadjuk Noongar boodja), now living in Mparntwe (Alice Springs) on Arrernte country. His poetry has been published in Plumwood Mountain Journal, Meniscus, Portside Review, London Grip New Poetry, Burrow, and elsewhere. He was the recipient of a 2024 Varuna/Arts NT residential fellowship. by Zoe Odessa
My heart is too big for my body / So you take a piece and hold it under your tongue / Hair between fingers, criss-crossing / (weaving I love you I love you I love you) / into the back of your head / Peals of laughter, choking sobs, stony silences / Head to toe on your bed / breathing in time / You’d kill for me / I’d kill for you / Halving clementines and sharing gum / He doesn’t deserve you / You stick your fingers down my throat / To clear out the dust / Hold my hair back as I retch / Then kneel as if in prayer / So I may hold back yours / And yes there are moments / Stretches / Of silence / Of wondering / Where have you gone / But you spring back / as ever / And our hearts meld as one again and / Forever Zoe Odessa (she/her) is a 23-year-old poet and writer who wishes to be utterly consumed by words. Currently based in Cairns, Australia, on Yirrganydji land, she is at the tail end of her USYD B.A in English Literature. She loves difficult women and challenging feminist literature. She has previously had poetry published in Sour Cherry Mag. You can find her on her instagram @zoe_odessa_ by Dave Clark
I go on a trip overseas and get these messages saying that I seem to be doing a lot more than usual I am making the most of packed-away moments and several people are still surprised and subtly criticise when they see me enjoy life Micro-aggressive texts contiki across continents to suck the steam from this dream holiday, making me feel like I’ve done something wrong whenever I do something fun I chase occasions that transcend chronic illness and yet words strike at these hard-fought steps, flattening the topography of my health, pounding it to a plateau of predictability until I'm standing on an Arctic butte veiled in pure snow and can only feel the stinging cold of their scolding As my knees fall into the frozen blanket spread beneath, I make a ball of their slush and sling it to where it belongs so that nature’s song can be heard again, the seraph sound of snowfall mixed with the playful giggles of someone so used to red desert dust Dave Clark is a reliable human with unreliable health. He is a writer-poet with chronic fatigue syndrome, living in Mparntwe (Alice Springs). His writing speaks into grief, illness, justice and how we love and laugh together. Dave works as a counsellor, creating space for stories of significance. Instagram/X: @DaveClarkWriter by Angela Arnold
Such a thin band of despair, shaped with all the care of a parent snugging a child's scarf. The kiss of death a prolonged affair, kicking the habit of living with a lust and a zest and a violent longing for air – the circlet's neat grip making it a monstrous appetite. Feet still dreaming. A telling hollow there just a foot from where greenstuff would have been made complicit. The magic attraction dangled just-so inviting plain habit: lured home; beguiled to venture into another pale Grass Moon night. A dog's bark in the distance perhaps the last flippant comment on a life now left as hairy powder, forgotten bone. The final insult. Some mighty Human never even clucked in triumph. Angela Arnold (she/her) lives in Wales. She’s also an artist, a creative gardener and an environmental campaigner. Her poems have been published in print, anthologies and online, in the UK and elsewhere. Collection: In Between (Stairwell Books, 2023). Twitter: @AngelaArnold777 by John Bartlett
wattlebirds wait for darkness to loosen the dreams of children for days to taste of peace Dianella fibres like silk strong enough to resist the callous winds of winter river redgums along the banks of my childhood suffered dumb rage of axe and saw autumn dew drops from leaves’ length clear dear atonements of magpie song slice the crisp air into a day full of sky where is that untouched world its birds wide-winging cormorants their dottled dipping scratching the surface of mirrored creeks where John Bartlett is the author of eleven books of fiction, non-fiction and poetry. He was winner of the 2020 Ada Cambridge Poetry Prize, Highly Commended in the 2021 Mundaring Poetry Competition. His latest poetry collection is Excitations of Entanglement. |
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