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.