by Jack Greer

Cauliflower tastes like a cave;
a mouth like dry sex
and the taste of soil like the taste
of bad books on sex,
and falling and
polishing your knee
cricket-ball red;
wriggling, ring-teethed albinism
which nibbles
on your weak, desperate body;
how the flashlight,
just beyond reach,
shines a collage of long paper shreds;
the fitting of joints and bones
in under-sized stone holsters
like the wrongness of a crooked
Rubik’s cube;
waiting and hoping
and listening to the tinkling ballet of drips;
cherishing the last human notes:
keep the change,
want a sip,
watch your head,
we’ll come get you,
don’t worry,
I’ll be back;
like a Sunday afternoon spent
caving with acquaintances.

Jack Greer (he/him) is a recent graduate of the University of Queensland where he completed his Bachelor of Arts majoring in Creative Writing and English Literature. He is interested in creating other worlds within the ones we already inhabit.

by Nicole Jacobsen

His living room is a vivarium
full of filtered sunshine

gasping through storm clouds,
releasing rain that trembles

puddles on cement, warping sky.
Water circles clutch glass

like suctioned starfish, we kiss
as he passes. I scratch poetry

between blue lines, deliberating 
the nucleus of a syllable.

Menthol breeze ripples 
my arms and small hairs, raising 

bubble wrap skin. Synaesthesia insists 
his footsteps are pine.

I’m fine here, while he works, watching peace 
lilies animate on the table, 

my body creaking
like a new home beginning to settle. 

Nicole Jacobsen is a Brisbane artist, writer, poet, and aspiring editor who regularly finds herself re-befuddled by the difference between who and whom. Her background in Psychology emerges through character studies, obsessive bouts of self-reflection, and recurrent themes of mental health in her work.

by Natalie Bühler 
After the tradition of burning an effigy at the end of carnival to mark the beginning of spring in Central Switzerland.

In afternoon dark, we gather
around the crackling head,
his papier-mâché crown glinting

in the flames. Teasing us, 
he delays his broadcast 
of spring’s arrival, so the jesters 

put inflated pig bladders to rest, 
hold hands and dance 
tightening rings around the pyre.

Carved smiles on turnip masks 
hide uncles, aunts, my brother 
who’s old enough to join them.

Fire melts confetti-stained snow
into wet socks; my hands 
in silent rosary prayer 

with the pink plastic beads
on my princess dress, pulled over
ski jacket and thermals, catching

tiny yarn loops on sequin edges.
This is the last dress
my grandma will sew for me.

Already, her finger joints are swollen,
but I haven’t faded into a stranger
yet. This morning, she was on her float,

carnival queen of adopted home,
adopted myth, adopted accent.
Her consort is Lothar, who still knows 

exactly how to call her 
chérie. They stand there,
waiting for spring to explode

out of the king’s head. 

Natalie Bühler is an emerging writer and arts administrator living on unceded Gadigal land in Sydney. She works at the Sydney-based organisation Red Room Poetry and incorporates her native Swiss German, which does not have a standardised written form, into her English writing.

by Ashley Chew

before i know it i am spinning,
arms akimbo,
dying a dizzy-dim death
under neon-pink lights.
i am wearing my grief coat tonight -
i share it with a dark stranger.
she finds shelter in it.
the night breathes different without you.
i still feel blindly for your face.
a single glittery disco ball spins from the middle of the ceiling,
like an uneven moon,
spilling stardust all over us,
our grief coats,
grief smiles,
over me,
on my wobbly heels,
holding me up,
full weight of a human body,
gingerly,
lightly.
my mouth is spangled with your stars.

​Ashley Chew lives on the sunny island city of Singapore. She holds a Master of Arts degree in English Literature and clearly could not keep away from books for long for she is at present an associate librarian at the National Library Board of Singapore. Ashley’s bursting email inbox is always open to you if your subject header is in all caps and contains at least 5 exclamation marks, no less: ashleycwq@gmail.com. 

by Dee Allen

There have been times--
Musical, foot-stomping, joyous times--
At strobe-lit spaces
Goths and Rivetheads
Were known to congregate
When I was welcomed
And felt accepted
As one of their own.
 
And at other times
At such spaces--
Times I wish
Were erased from my memory--
When I passed through
The dancing, undulating, spiked & pierced
Lot unnoticed,
Double-black--
Black garments moving,
Covering Black skin,
Except for the face--
And a superpower
I never counted on having
Kicked in around the decorative, mostly
Pale elitist ones
Uniformed in the shade of midnight:
 
Invisibility.
​
African-Italian performance poet based in Oakland, California U.S.A. Active on creative writing & Spoken Word since the early 1990s. Author of 7 books--Boneyard, Unwritten Law, Stormwater, Skeletal Black, Elohi Unitsi and his 2 newest, Rusty Gallows and Plans--and 66 anthology appearances. Currently seeking a new publisher.

by Maree Reedman 

My backyard is blanketed 
in lavender flowers, little trumpets, 
heralding memories of university days,
exam time, the year ending, and 
my mother,

who liked purple and blue,
how she cut down the majestic
jacaranda on her footpath
because it was close to the power lines.

There’s a family of frogmouths
in the paperbarks at work.
My niece and nephew
are getting their licences,
Dad’s going on another cruise.

My mother died in the dead 
of winter, she wouldn’t wait 
for the frangipani to sprout green leaves 
at the end 
of its old fingers.

Maree Reedman lives in Brisbane with one husband, two cockatiels, and five ukuleles. Her poetry has been published in the United States and Australia in Chiron Review, Naugatuck River Review, Unbroken, Stickman Review, Grieve, Hecate, StylusLit, and has won Ipswich Poetry Feast awards, including a mentorship with Carmen Leigh Keates. 

by Emily MacGriff

I saw water music
whomping women
women wearing leaves
and their hair breathing 
in baritone stretches of precipitate
I shook the waves –
rubber and rudder 
pointed in from the surf
wanting to call back in
stomp, brush, slap
scoop, smack
gulp, spray, gasp 
wanting an answer 
swish, smash, sing
sway, say something, just
arms 
                                           leaf
            head 
                           leaves
                                                   breast 
                                     bottom
                                                          belly 
                                                  leaves
the strings of music in the empty 
bits of me, my history and feet 
be silent, it’s all
the engine drop,
                            rain, 
                           my own chest’s cascade
it’s all
the chimes I cry,
and cloud. 

Emily’s work pulls largely from her experience working aboard expedition ships as a marine biologist/wilderness guide in the polar regions, South Pacific and British Isles. She is mostly retired from shipbound work and focused on navigating life as a woman, artist and mother.  She’s based in Detroit and received an MFAW from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2022.

by B. J. Buckley

Moon
splintered bone,
each cloud
a torn and dirty winding sheet,
a shroud for stars.
This
is what the world is:
killing
to stay alive: wasp
and caterpillar,
fox and vole,
the aging lynx in one last leap
to the back of a panicked
deer, clawing
for its neck, for red,
for warm, the beautiful simplicity
of blood
beyond which nothing
has any meaning,
bear chewing through flesh
and sinew to free itself
from a trap.
There’s always a knife
at the throat
of love,
some desperate hunger,
wolf
devouring its heart to save
its heart.
​
B. J. Buckley is a Montana poet and writer who has worked in Arts-in-Schools and Communities programs throughout the West and Midwest for more than four decades. Her recent work appears in Grub Street, Hole in the Head Review, About Place Journal, Dogwood, and Calyx.

by Willow Kang
for Ishita Pandey

On Coney Island listen, 
to the unquiet of the night
rabbits turning nocturnal & wintery,
China dolls hopping off their prairies 
Yet the carnival rides never stop rolling,
nor the restless tides,
pulled by a moonlit chariot
Tonight is fit for space station escapades,
stay watchful. May caffeinated owls
concoct for you an insomniac’s poison
in the silk worm’s nest
What shenanigans loom around the alleyways,
giggles atop the street lamps, 
skyscrapers like monuments to fireflies
Scurry between midnight parties on High Street
& peek into the shimmering rooflights, on this
night filled with cratered, puzzling belongings

Willow is a writer from Singapore. After school, you can find her reading thick history textbooks, aimlessly writing poems, and solving frustrating math problems, in a futile attempt to conquer boredom. Just make sure that her coffee bowl stays full.

by Jas Saunders

​Sometimes when I’m anxious
I’ll write poems on the plateaus
of my palms, blue waves
of ink flowing within their gradients and ridges
When I want to hide those feelings
from the rest of the world like a hermit crab
tucked inside itself, I’ll share
an empty fist, displaying new
and delicate fingernails like bleached white
seashells washed ashore
learning to grow in real time
with the rest of me.

Published in UWA’s Pelican and Peafowl magazines, as well as Perth’s youth magazine Pulch, Jas Saunders is an Honours (Creative Writing) student at UWA, with an undergrad in English Lit and Public Health. Her writing focuses on liminal spaces, nostalgia, or memory, with representation her younger self would have desired.