by Jordan Barling

that you arrive with cigarettes and beer
not even a change of clothes
only a toothbrush in the cloth handbag
that you wear bandolier 
collect the Vietnamese take-away and empty the bins
chaining on the apartment balcony as I make calls
that you stay for days even though the best I can offer
is the fold out couch 
purchased for a beach house in 1986
each evening we bend the armrests back
this is what it must feel like to
realign the spine

Jordan Barling is a Melbourne-based writer. Her poetry is included in the upcoming issue of Overland.

by Jax Bulstrode 
​
peeling mandarins
on your bedroom floor
the whole room swaying
with laughter
and the evening breeze
a storm rolling in
and potatoes in the oven
she is telling me about the bird
on her arm
blackened and eyes open
staring back at me

how do we start again?
with the colours
okay, the purple skyline outside
the window
cool static glow from the tv

now, the scent
of the cool rain coming
and sound
​
my favourite part
her voice beside me
calling my name

Jax Bulstrode writes poems in Naarm/Melbourne. She is usually writing about rivers or fruit or being queer. Jax has been published in Anti-Heroin Chic Journal, F*EMS and is forthcoming in Southchild Lit, Just femme & dandy and Enby life. You can find them at @jaxbulstrode on Twitter. 

by SoulReserve 

paperbark mouth drinks
floodplain blood, orange
into veins that spill sun,
light pushes itself into albino
flowers, dense and misshapen.

I stand on your roots, spread
beneath wetlands, body 
quivers, shakes with tethered
new seasons that rub 
salt into fresh wounds.

I crisp into paper, skin
golden brown and peeling 
like an alphabet long-written 
and forgotten, now speckled 
yellow sun-bleached memories.
​
I shed leaves, susurrating
through a murmur of wind,
tunnels through kaleidoscopic
light that burns nocturnal 
eyes and laughs and laughs.

SoulReserve is a wistful poet. Her poetry explores love and its tumultuousness, the fantasy and zest in nature, and allegories that provoke thought and evoke tender feelings. Read her published works in – "Across Vast Horizons", "Poetry d’Amour – 2019 & 2020", "Letters To Our Home", “Recoil 12” and WAPI’s “Creatrix.”

by Lou Smith

knee deep in swamp

slick near swamp-edge

sludge under tread.

The blueberry ash, that grew as lanky 

as a cattleman, is what this

place was named after – Ash Island –

its petals like faeries’ frilly slips

under tiny pink / white dresses.

We hauled fish when it was safe 

–when islands hadn’t been 

cemented as land with slag–

when the slick didn’t fill their gills

with arsenic

Lou Smith is a poet based on Wurundjeri country in Melbourne. Her writing has been published in journals and anthologies including Soft Surface, Nine Muses Poetry, The Lifted Brow, and The Caribbean Writer. Her first collection of poetry riversalt was published by Flying Island Books in 2015. www.lousmith.net