by Alisha Brown

There is no room in a heron’s beak
for blame, 
just
the slow, tender gulp of a fish 
down the gullet

See how he stands,
still as an icicle,
dripping little droplets that 
break 
the rippling pool
of his body’s dim mirage on the lake

When the swans come,
they bow their heads

Drawn, like all things,
to hunger and violence

Knowing, like all things,
that beauty breathes heaviest
in the brief, lean space
between lifefulness
and after

The heron 
seems to float above himself 
for a moment, eyes 
locked on the marsh, 
backward legs and feather-tufted chest
strung tight toward his unseen target, and when he
darts
his executioner’s strike,
spiring the perch
cleanly and plainly,
he carries the flickering wet body,
the silver-wet body
to the bank
where he drops it, lets it rest awhile,
emptying its share of the unknowable into the sun
before it is swallowed

Alisha Brown is a poet and traveler born on Kamilaroi land in Australia. She won the 2022 Joyce Parkes Women’s Writing Prize and placed second in the Judith Rodriguez Open Section of the 2021 Woorilla Poetry Prize. You can find her work in Westerly, Griffith Review, and the Australian Poetry Anthology, among others.

by Caroline Reid

how did we live before grief became a cruise ship pressing on our necks.
before the white assassin who proclaimed love skimmed smooth black
stones over our pink lake. these are the colours of my house. from my boat i
spy footprints in the mud. big toe missing on the right foot. trout ate toe.
destiny ate trout. so it goes. how did we ever live before women gobbled
their own feet. i have other questions too. are we seen. are we valued. are
​we felt.  look. i’m not saying grief is easy. imagine. all your earthly life
you’re a poet. then you keel over. life is a double-parked dream. but don’t
worry. it’s not contagious. when we’re afraid to cry we tiptoe drunk over
aeons of silvery scars. hungry as cabin boys we sniff out honey in the hull.
steal thunder. sail into blame. until we remember it’s connections between
things that save us. now that i’m drowning in seawater i will cut you a
mother moon from this old skiff. how did we ever even begin to live before
tough-talking secrets slipped unnoticed from the shore. joyfully jumped
ship. into the heaving body of poetry.

​Caroline Reid (she/her) found her feet as a writer in theatre and has since developed a diverse writing and performance practice. Her debut collection SIARAD is published in print and audio by Spineless Wonders (ES-Press). Storytelling, dark humour and a whiff of rage are at the heart of all her art.

by Andrew Millar
CW: body horror, gore, and cannibalism

I want to taste the drying blood around his mouth,
Flecked and pooled in mauvish patches on his lips
With slivers shorn off spindly supraspinatus
Draped on white incisors; dripping velvet curtains.
 
I want to feel his eyes on me when we eat,
As though he ate with mouth and gaze entwined,
Through greedy gulps of blood and sybaritic glances;
Prostrate at the altar of flesh.
 
If he asked I’d press my lips to crimson, streaked
And stretched from pointed chin to pearly navel;
I’d taste the roughish ferric glide of tongue on tongue,
Our fingers interlocked and webbed like sinew.
 
When my teeth tore through his pectoralis
I felt myself inside him, not he inside me;
He moaned and cried and kissed me hard--
He begged to eat more, eat more; bones and all.
 
In another life our bodies lie enwound,
Edenic on the Holy Plains of Flesh,
In a world that’s ours; where I am his--
Darling, I want you inside me forever.

Andrew Millar is an emerging writer based in Brisbane/Meanjin, studying literature and philosophy. He writes poetry, fiction, and non-fiction essays. Some of his poems and non-fiction can be found in Jacaranda Journal and Exordium. His never-ending project is a quest for a poetics of embodiment that feels authentic to lived experience.

by Clare Roche

the inky dog circles close
 
I breathe out midnight
blue, soundless mist descends
 
I stagger, pulled by violet undertows
that sweep me to my knees
 
I taste the wind, watch the restless fish
that dart and twist through my chest
 
I dream of eggshells and snow
-soft feathers brushing against fine bone
 
cages that trap, close and dark
I am undone
 
until one day, a sliver, an opening,
swell of light
 
and I exhale a riot of colour.

​Clare Roche (she/her) lives and loves on Gadigal land in Sydney's inner west. Her poetry has been published in online journals in the UK, the US, Germany, and Australia. Her commercial fiction manuscript 'The Garden' was shortlisted for the Harper Collins Banjo Prize (2022).  

by Carl Griffin

Other power countries built skyscrapers
and dipped their shoulders in outer space

but we drilled to the mantle of the earth
beyond the depth of an ocean trench.

To understand himself, a man must mine
his own heart. To understand the immense

complexities of his lifespan, he must dig down 
through layers of the organ he did not know existed.

First, the crust. Get beyond that, you reach
a whole new perspective. How hard we tried

with a drill pipe and rig, and torque 
and two decades, through fossils,

through scepticism and rock crystals.
Every year you age, the earth becomes hotter,

you can’t even dream of the heat to come,
the burns, the suffocation, the awareness

that survival is the highest privilege. 
Our eyebrows raised so high they came clean off,

the drill bits frazzled by the centimetre.
Until a man could fall for four minutes and not land.
 
Guard your heart or hell will surge up
until the pressing must be reeled back

to keep dark seven miles that barely cut the crust
with a metal hole cover and a dozen rusting bolts.

I was the last worker out of the drill room
but we will reassemble. We will understand.

​Carl Griffin is from South Wales. His first poetry collection, Throat of Hawthorn, was published by Indigo Dreams Publishing in 2019. In 2020, his book-length poem, Arrival at Elsewhere, written for charity with the help of one hundred poets, was published by Against the Grain.