by Rusty Free

I am driving. You are sitting on the quad bike behind me. The grass reaches up underneath
the wheels to tickle our ankles. On the way you remind me to slow down and we both duck
under the wire. You tell him that someone will get hurt if it stays there. I forget why
we were in the top left paddock. Coming back I am going fast. The wind is blowing my hair
back into your face. I must slow but not enough to stop what’s coming.
We forget to duck.
I feel the resistance and it reminds me of when the fish first latched onto the end of my line.
That pluck and tug. I look back, and your hands are clutching your throat. There are tears
pooled in your eyes. The bruise comes later. A long, purple line wrapped around your throat
​like the ribbon in my hair. 

Rusty Free is a Brisbane-based writer who writes in her dreams and snacks during the day. She's currently in hibernation with her two cats.

by Alison J Barton

I had no chance to talk about him
    share anecdotes strange
        I said

he gave us everything

we remembered the beach
the shoreline
surfing small waves
the dog died: loss of him again

how the cemetery
was so still
it never rained
she didn’t cry then
she’s had more time somehow

she gave me what I needed
rivalry gone
possible to forget
dread
just be

by the plastic apricot bed
hard sheets white
holding hands
dense with the bodily paternal

maybe we could
start again
brave
with nothing to forgive 

Alison J Barton is a Melbourne-based poet and writer. She attended writing school in the 2000s but her best expression came from introspection and learning its relation to the external world. Themes of feminism and psychoanalysis are central to Alison’s work. She has been published in various journals and magazines. 

Ian's Elegy
by Jerri Hines

You flew skyward with Fantasia--
 Music! that’s how you knew love
 
exonerated, Johnson shrugs
ten Winters
since your head hit fist
before cell floor or ‘pillow’.
I won’t know
 
people take so much
air inside to die, sit up
fall against pillows
muscles released leave
only their mother’s face
resting small.
I saw you do this
 
struck by a honeymoon souvenir--
Seminyak-carved goanna
jewelled twice, each opal iris-full
witness through dewed buffalo
blades: Mum’s grazed frown
I found her in the garden
crouched by purple Cosmos
eye pearling for her marriage
I found you
pacing pavers at the bedroom door
 
people want so much
to hold on
to let go
to be held
 
captivated by our boredom
capturing what was left on camcorder
after DVOs, roaring lightless down backroads
monoxide hose
laceless sneakers, electro-shock:
laughter – two sisters locked
out half the day we swam in the desert
motel pool
bearded men watching from the pub
while you were gone to stake claim on opal
mines deep
 
cars pass so infrequently
you lay us down on red dirt roads to demonstrate
the law is superfluous
echidnas shuffle by
our ants eye view
 
twenty-two Autumns
back watching Men in Black you laughed
manic as the cockroach peeled
off its cadaver
I laughed
forever trying to connect
I know now
the smell of weed
 
how high were you
wind ballooning your Mambo shirt
atop Machu Pichu before hep-C
shrank you, turned you yellow
before that, skipping
school in Gosford with the Milats?
Had you already been forgotten
waiting for Pop in the carpark of the greyhound track?
 
here is my Fantasia:
you lived
we grew
conversed as adults
exposed our trauma
shush by shush:
paperbark roots leached of tannins
salt washed to silk
an old woman’s hair
a swimmer
supine, bleached
warm on sugared sand.

Jerri is a writer and social worker based on the Mid North Coast of New South Wales. Her poems have been published in Scum Mag and Concrescence. She thinks she was stung by a blue bottle once, when she was eight.

by Rebecca Cheers

Femme Moderne
 
You crack her door
just after dawn.
Your brother holds his breath
pressed close enough to see
for you to feel his heart
twitch.

She takes slow breaths.
On the windowsill
her make-up sprawls
into a skyline.

Gold and lacquer rise
from the inner-city dust
of the window.
By the low dome
of rouge, pencils fan
to bridge the buildings.
Lipstick pigments cased
in bronze run liquid
in the heat, so that later
colour will feather out
in deltas from her lips.
Lids-on, they are skyscraping
light tripping down
their ziggurats.
The mirror-lid’s
angle a monument
burn of its reflection.

You saw her reapply
her lipstick once, downstairs
in the bar, saw its curve
waned sharp
and grained with skin.
But now you see a staircase
in a windowless tower
mirror-infinite.

Stratigraphy

At number seven, Wilmot St
the hostel’s been bought out.
Polo-shirted men paint doorways
postcard ocean blue,
blue fingerprints collecting
on the elevator’s buttons.

The too-clean hostel hidden
behind federation warehouse brick,
Wilmot St’s sign
bolted to stucco
on the gutted Plaza Theatre,
where Betsy’s used to be.
Its foyer, its gold chandelier
hangs over the McDonald’s.

The floral filigree balcony
lined with criss-crossed ziptie spikes
to keep away pigeons.

Wilmot St is paved
with rain-slick graphite slate
and just beneath, the café
flash-frozen in volcano ash.
Skeletons bend over the bar
against the stove, old even then
out of windowsills
to bellow at policemen.
​
Old stucco
over new road, floorboards,
newsprint packed tight
over shards of broken plates,
thick brown glass, bones.
the frames of folded army cots.

Rebecca Cheers is a writer, poet and playwright from Brisbane. She edited Woolf Pack, a zine publishing femme and non-binary artists, from 2014-2019. Her work has been featured in Voiceworks, Yarn Storytelling and Anywhere Theatre Festival, and was recently anthologised in 'The Conspirator'. She is a Masters candidate at QUT. 

by Michael Witts

water like glass placed over white sand
 
scores of hermit crabs move at your feet
in borrowed shells    soon outgrown
smaller crabs grateful of the hand me down
the way of ideas
 
on the shore   shells flattened and uninhabitable
slowly disintegrating    replenishing this beach
you wander for hours
looking at dross    the dregs
and detritus the sea spits out
avoid the lumps of congealed oil
volatile under your prodding stick
avoid the gaze of mutton bird carcasses
bloated on the high tide mark
avoid their anguished beaks
 
in the haze the beach becomes a concept
you struggle to make sense of how
water and sky intersect    and where
the distance like some unknown future
tapering to an unseen point
sun disorders your senses
that smell of sex and ozone
the way you wish this time would extend
like the best of intimacies
 
footprints in the sand
steps like a crazy dance
to your ambiguous future

Michael Witts has been writing poetry for more than forty years. He has three volumes of poetry published namely Sirens, South and Dumb Music. He was a founding editor of DODO magazine. All his work may be accessed through michaelwitts.com

by Emma Simington

“I’m. Coming down there”
 
A pillow shaped rabbit
chews fanning grasses. A
wild peacock, dull, fantailed
plucks dumbwood 'sects.
 
“Please please please stay alive”
 
Plumed lettuces, subtle airweeds.
A lengthy, staunch hare
chews exploded stars;
silty, decaying leaves.
 
“On the way”
 
Roman willow sprigs
as bookmarks, unpressed:
narrowly fanning, genial
(of genes).
 
“Please stay alive”
 
My cosmic sister.
Toddler-chalk drawn into
loam. Her eyes in-lit, perpetual,
coin tossed, and waning.
 
“This is me telling you (who has fallen
 
Reverential, pickled light,
necks usurping, no limbs
left. We morph into pepper vines.
Our life cycle
 
asleep), that I’m going to borrow ur
 
requires an underwater room.
a dancing woman coated in sun,
fighting without knuckles
clocking faces with seashells:
 
headphones to listen to my audiobook.”
 
blood-letting, chin resting in the crook.

Poetry burst from Emma Simington during childhood. She writes to love and to cope.

by Tamara Holmes
For Alex

eroded shore splattered with bulbous
belled cyan mounds tentacles rest
on transparent companions forever
medusa anchored in grain

my left side was sunburned
for weeks after Woorim
long-weekend cabin deserted
after a night left
a lens on the table

greyed ocean like bathwater
turned cold after a night
huddled in your kitchen with drained
bottles of wine

I swear they were still
alive when we found
them crushed like your midnight
confession to find yourself
beached but I still searched
for a way to return them to the sea 

Tamara Holmes is a Brisbane based writer and poet. Her work can be found in Westerly and Art Almanac, among others.