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.

by Grant Shimmin

It’s a dance of steps so delicate
and tentative it barely seems to move
Mine marking the softening of the frost
on the bridge’s age-worn timbers
and the danger of putting my partner to flight
The heron’s marking mine and the movement
of morsels unaware in the still shallows
Its glance up freezes my icy shuffle
long enough for it to thrust two shallow stabs
that shatter the glassy surface unsuccessfully,
but only briefly, as it slows, waiting
on the fishes’ forgetfulness,
cocked front leg and rapier bill poised in parallel.
Grateful for the forward slide the reset allows,
I’m doubly so to be in place for a replay
rapid in its sharp brutality
then slowed slightly for the two-gulp swallow
now imperfectly captured on my phone
It seems this dance is over
and in my head I bow deeply in gratitude
If my partner is grateful for my caution there’s no evidence
Just a sweep, wide-winged, imperious
across the stilling surface of the pool

Grant Shimmin is a South African-born poet long resident in New Zealand. He counts humanity, nature, and their relationship as poetic passions. He has work published/forthcoming at Roi Faineant, Does it Have Pockets?, The Hooghly Review, underscore_magazine, Amethyst Review, Dreich and elsewhere.