by Benjamin Dodds

No one sees
me draw it from
my pocket, hide
it in a hand, raise and place
the secret weight inside my
mouth to tongue its imperfect
sphere. No one knows
I taste whispered grit
and dust from yesterday’s
island all over the lopsided marble
found and freed from white
holiday sand. No one hears
it roll and clack against the backs
of my teeth though I dare them
as I sip unlimited premium
cocktails and bend
cruise talk around it.
No one is here
on the salt-greased
deck when I spit
its glass globe from
my lips to rest between
ridges of hollowed palm    
                                      then     
pitch it
from the steady giant
a day from nearest land
-scrap. No one sees
the parabola that can’t be
ungraphed as it pierces
night time Pacific
unheard.
              Lidless
                     cats-eye
                        stares off
                          at what?
                            as it falls
                              for how long?

Benjamin Dodds is a Sydney-based poet. His work has appeared in journals, anthologies and newspapers, and been broadcast on ABC RN. He is a poetry reader for Overland. Benjamin is the author of Airplane Baby Banana Blanket (Recent Work Press, 2020) and Regulator (Puncher & Wattmann Poetry, 2014).

by Jane Frank

Going Fishing

When I first saw your spaceship far off, heading for home …
                                                                Helen Dunmore

Today you are going fishing--
you wear a bucket hat
your practical hands preparing hooks and lures
lines and bait
in feathery courtyard shade
seal dog at your feet 

             I remember our first meeting
             light through blinds striping my face
             your reassuring message 
             transmitted in monochrome
             through dark salt waves

You will sit on the old wooden pier today 
or on rocks around the point
out of sight 
silver haze past the horizon
moving in your eyes
the liquid almost-silence a fuel you inhale
oblivious to time

             six months later you lay in a cave of flowers--
             ventura purple lisianthus
             and sunflowers — the midwives 
             remarking that you felt no pain
             no need to break the calm 
             early morning hours with crying

You’ll throw the catch back--
the summer whiting or yellow brim— 
laugh at the thought of the fish 
you caught swimming into a second life
just as you’ve swum 
back home to me 

Crossover

​Lunarness 
            pulling to me on calm thermals.
A land of crescents:

            dogs and waves and salt-
            striped creeks. 
The wind is loud but it’s quiet inside my head 

now the hard words are leaving,
the last ones 
            rattling like clinkers in a glass jar.

I want to learn 
a new language of crossover,
            the way these bodies write on the sea, 

letting the elements 
            bear them 
in balance with the brightly coloured kites 

dipping gently in the sky, 
the music
            of low tide where there is no one to disappoint,

only small reliable waves –
three even rows of them – 

            the island a washed-up rag 
on the horizon, 
            the crabs dancing near my feet.

Jane Frank’s latest chapbook is WIDE RIVER (Calanthe Press, 2020). Her poems have appeared most recently in Antipodes, Burrow, Other Terrain, Backstory, Takahe, Not Very Quiet, The Bengaluru Review, Meridian (APWT/Drunken Boat, 2020) and Grieve vol 8 (Hunter Writers Centre, 2020). Her unpublished manuscript Wolf Moon was shortlisted for the Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize in 2020 and she was joint winner of the Queensland Poetry Festival Philip Bacon Ekphrasis Award in 2019. Jane teaches in creative writing at Griffith University. Read more of her work at https://www.facebook.com/JaneFrankPoet/ and https://janefrankpoetry.wordpress.com/

by Melanie Hobbs

​grey houses huddle together in winding loops
scant bottlebrush trees wave feebly in the light breeze
providing no relief from the glare of the February sun 
on the too-white pavement. 
 
inside the place a dusty Christmas tree looms over the body. 
male. seventies. full head of hair. 
his blue checked shirt unbuttoned, no doubt by the ambos
now consoling his wife,
exposing a blood-spattered hairy chest and throat. 
no wound though. 
 
most likely some sort of aneurysm. 
poison also a possibility. 

Melanie Hobbs is a writer of Malaysian-Indian descent. She lives in Perth, Western Australia, with her husband, two-year-old daughter and dog, along with another baby on the way. Melanie worked as a high school English teacher for ten years and is currently a full-time parent.

by Ivy Mullins

i see you at the top 
of the pink hotel 
and you are 
almost mine again 
i can almost see my tiny hands 
slip around the base 
of your neck;

it is almost winter, 
but in the summer 
we both took turns drowning
in the reservoir 
you were always the better swimmer 
there were no surprises that you 
resurfaced, 
all bright-eyed and broad-shouldered. 

there were no surprises when 
i sunk to the bottom 
my hair tangled among the sea bed 

i used to think that things 
happened for a reason 
now i know they don’t 
because you are at the top 
of the pink hotel 
and i am only almost. 

Ivy Mullins is a Brisbane-based journalist who started writing poetry as a distraction from her cripplingly monotonous law degree. Her work has been previously published in Concrescence, The Tundish Review, Junkee, PASTEL Magazine, Veronica Lit Mag, and Ibis Zine.

by Sam Morley

The steering is slack until you crank
the gurgling outboard motor.
 
We push past the last buoy
and I find myself standing.
 
Over open water, air circles
the blackness underneath.
 
I pull my children closer.
Cormorants dive, find nothing
 
and rise as oily shadows up a wall.
I cut the engine and we slide
 
slowly on the skin of the lake –
chiaroscuro in a graphite field.
 
Water mounds, then wears away.
The children scuttle and chiack.
 
I feel something slick, a vague
threat closing, a regret I can’t repair.
 
On the expanding cross-hatch of lead
I watch an accumulation of shapes
 
contours of nothing that do not remain
long enough to define themselves. 

Sam Morley is a Melbourne based poet and secondary school teacher. His work has been published by Cordite, Red Room Poetry, The Hunter Writer's Centre and shortlisted in the ACU Poetry Prize 2020.