by Steph Amir

Blue ink exploded
onto unidentified viscera,
or perhaps it’s four
co-dependent animals
huddled in a grisly lump,
with a jellyfish wobble yet
not jellyfish at all.

Steph Amir’s poems have been published in Australian Poetry Journal, Foam:e, Plumwood Mountain, Rabbit, StylusLit, TEXT, and others.  In 2021, she was a Writer’s Victoria Writeability Fellow and in 2022 was shortlisted for the Melbourne Lord Mayor’s Writing Awards for poetry.  She recently published her debut collection, “Pieces That Fit."

by Frank William Finney

Meat cutting class.
Lesson of the day:

How to cut a veal flank steak.

My classmates
took it all in stride:

the glassy eyes,
the hindlegs bound,

the sheet of blood
beneath the calf’s head,

flies on the walls,
and drunk in the air.

Blood on the blades
of the ceiling fan.

Outside the room,
the fields smelt green.

Horsetails swished
in the afternoon sun.

Frank William Finney is the author of The Folding of the Wings (Finishing Line Press, 2022). His poems have appeared in Flora Fiction, Freshwater Literary Journal, Metachrosis Literary, and other places. He lives and writes in Massachusetts.

by Polly Grant Butler 

inside an ad there is an ad 
and it is saying eat me

I tell myself even mary would have 
gagged on cock, after all was said and done

a laptop on a bed 
brings the devil into focus

it says the ring of fire is a 
burger and a 

breast 
the breast is the bottle and its 

absence is a presence
to fuck is to eat and 

abstaining is 
transcendent

sliding down my hands I want 
it fat and wet

like a morning shit like I’m 
doing it quick

the taste of butter
curdling in my spine

I sip the day like a cheap
charade 

book film or play
it’s all 

you. anyway.
how your milky taste 

belies the body
but this is a body, a stuffed 

buffet
fisting into fullness.

the news has a sponsor with 
a finger down its throat 

I bargain with delivery drivers
to see the world up close

I want you like 
I am a baby and you are the nipple

on the screen they say I’m loving it, 
the eternal sauce I’m loving it,

to be hungry is to be unspecific
and I refuse anything not vague 

mustard licked hands 
fluorescent screaming light

Polly Grant Butler lives in Adelaide, where she works for independent publishing house Wakefield Press. She writes poetry and short stories.