by Liam Wallace

A boy drowned some years ago
On a beach with a name that I forget.
 
No one saw him enter the water
So nothing can be said for his intention
His purpose undetermined
His face a blank canvas marked by
Only a smattering of freckles
 
A surfer noticed the boy
Swept up by a rip, unable/unwilling to untangle
Himself from the pull and tug
Of increasingly harsh
Ocean water.
 
The surfer called out
Before he paddled towards the boy,
Thrusting his old waxen board underneath
A succession of waves
Unsure of whether he was more than
A speck viewed from the shoreline
 
The boy sunk further out and further down,
Only hands flailing above unforgiving
Blue.
I do not know
When the surfer returned to shore. Only that
The boy did not.

​Liam Wallace (they/them) is a recent graduate from the University of Wollongong in environmental humanities, history and sustainable development. They love reading and are also a keen runner. Liam tutors primary school students and enjoys getting to share ideas about writing with them.

by Nikita Kostaschuk

my housemate tells me
I am a chore
to live with, says I am always
coming home in chaos,
says the mess and jumble
of it is too much for him.

doesn't he know about the bumble
of bees in my head?
I swear he did.

I swore he could hear them
through the walls
in his room when I am trying to sleep.
all they do is dance
their paths to the pollen stuck
to everything I say.

they only want to make honey.
they wax
lyrical, build hexagons
in my head to contain it all.
all the mess and jumble of the world
is too much for me
to contain alone.

I thought he could taste the sweetness
that leaks
from my every word
but he just leaves the world hollow.

he doesn't understand
that I am the swarm,
the secateurs, the flower,
that within me lies
an eternal Spring.

Nikita Kostaschuk (ink.eyta) is a spoken wordsmith hailing from meanjin/brisbane. a background in English Literature interplays in their work with their lived experience of autism, gender, trauma, humanity and brokenness. a facilitator of spoken spaces, ink.eyta organizes SpeakEasy Poetry Open Mic. 

by Audrey T. Carroll

We know nothing about gender
& even less outside our species
 
There are categories of hummingbirds
we have named along a spectrum:
 
male-like males           female-like males        male-like females        female-like females
 
& even this we only glean
from an exterior, the observable:
 
plumage brightness                 &                     bill length                   &                     tail length
 
It is quite possibly impossible to know
anything beyond this, anything about their
 
gender roles                 gender expression
 
without imposing foreign concepts
 
 
Gender is a complex web, something
 
             known but unknown              
 
                          inside of us but beyond us
 
                                               named but individual              
 
                                                                          performed                               
 
                                                                                       expressed
 
                                                                                                    seen                                        
                                                                                                                unseen
 
                                                                                                                                cultural                                   
                                                                                                                                               social
 
                                                  the us to whom we speak in the dark
 
Our own gender is a cosmos
& we are children with plastic telescopes
hoping to catch a glimpse of Venus or Mars
or something in between & mostly what we see
are a million stars we cannot name,
a million stars we can barely even describe

Audrey T. Carroll is the author of What Blooms in the Dark (ELJ Editions, 2024) and Parts of Speech: A Disabled Dictionary (Alien Buddha Press, 2023). She is a bi/queer and disabled/chronically ill writer. She can be found at http://AudreyTCarrollWrites.weebly.com and @AudreyTCarroll on Twitter/Instagram.