by Katelyn Goyen

I wrote my autobiography in red
eyeshadow, purple lipstick 
romancing my alter-ego
her split
               pink lips &
               silk slips
               imported french absinthe 
               scissors and bleach.
a cherubic imitation
intoxicating / innocence 
mirror 
                                           flipped 
familiar 
                                           monster 
                                           grinning back 
                                           shining, volatile 
                  doll 
                  parts (& wings)

scraping, pretty erotic 
rinse, anise clouds 
repeat, bile 
peroxide hangover.  

Katelyn Goyen is a Brisbane based writer. She previously co-edited the dearly departed literary zine The Tundish Review.

by Ian C Smith

Picture an island ringed by rocks cloaked in orange lichens and beyond these, under the waves, wrecked hopes of mariners.  A tall tanned man dressed like a swami in loincloth and headdress lived with his Japanese partner during parts of summers in a yurt on untamed land he had bought on this small island where his father was once the G.P.

Sometimes he paddled a kayak around the rocky coastline to the town for supplies, and at others, strode around a bay scoured by the Roaring Forties, carrying a six-foot staff like a character in a striking movie, to the small settlement where I stayed, where he sought assistance from people he knew with rusting 4WDs.

Few walking that beach I love, we eventually met, and I invited him to my shack for coffee.  He wore a mudpack on his brow for the fierce sun, bangles fashioned from gumnuts, and a backpack with Walkman and mobile phone.  Courteous, well-spoken, his intelligence impressed me, knowledge of music apparent.  An environmentalist, he busked with great success in Japan, I had heard, but he didn’t mention this.

After missing him for some years, both on the island at different times, I Googled, expectation low.  People referred to him by different names: his Anglo-Saxon birth name, and a couple of others that sounded Indian.  Not having read these, I guessed their spelling.  Island rumours rife, I heard he once worked on Hollywood movies.  This turned out to be factual.  He had even won an award for sound-editing a box-office hit.

His yurt trashed now, he has vowed never to return to the coloured coast of his boyhood.  I heard his daughter from an earlier relationship, who had toddled through sun-kissed days, the scent of petrichor, around the yurt, graduated from Sydney University, and am unsure if he is still with his partner who was attacked in the town library leading to his self-imposed exile.

In a cauldron of greed, cashed-up newcomers and prejudiced blowhards are now islanded in what seems a microcosm of our wider world, leaving me ill in spirit, remembering this slippage of loved things, his headdress bobbing above breakers and wrack, boldly trekking that wind-blasted bay beneath circling sea-eagles with his staff like a wise man from another world in my wishful retrospective haze that seems like a beloved old movie.

Ian C Smith’s work has been published in Amsterdam Quarterly, Antipodes, BBC Radio 4 Sounds, cordite, The Dalhousie Review, Poetry Salzburg Review, The Stony Thursday Book, & Two-Thirds North.  His seventh book is wonder sadness madness joy, Ginninderra (Port Adelaide).  He writes in the Gippsland Lakes area of Victoria, and on Flinders Island.

by Jocelyn Ulevicus

Two days into September,
I dragged my hand along the
eucalyptus, noticing how,
already, the light has changed
when between my legs I felt
pleasure for the first time since.

Jocelyn Ulevicus is an artist with work forthcoming or published in magazines such as No Contact, Bee House Journal, and Petigru Review. In her spare time, she hunts for truth and beauty. She fancies love notes, send her one: @beautystills

by Rita Mookerjee

My mom is a hoarder but not in the popular
sense with dolls and newspapers and putrid
bodies under fallen bookshelves who no one
thought of until the smell kicked in. She is just
too attached to the world. She cannot part
with greeting cards, pacifiers, pastel board 
games and wooden souvenirs whose origin 
stories tend to change when I ask about them. 

There is a drawer in a filing cabinet
where my mom keeps teeth and hair
in envelopes: my sisters canines, the rat 
tail my brother sported one summer. It 
was in fashion at the time. The envelopes
are labeled with only our names as if we
ourselves lie tucked behind manilla folders. 

I think of how the mambos tell people
to bury their hair in the ground so that no
one can take your tresses and ball them
into tufts for ill will. In this way, my
mom’s drawer is fierce protection. It sits
locked in a room within a room within
a room, the key hidden even I don’t know where. 

Rita Mookerjee is an Assistant Teaching Professor in the Women's and Gender Studies Program at Iowa State University. Her poetry is featured in Juked, Aaduna, New Orleans Review, Sinister Wisdom, and the Baltimore Review. She is the author of the chapbook Becoming the Bronze Idol (Bone & Ink Press, 2019). She is the Assistant Poetry Editor of Split Lip Magazine and a poetry staff reader for [PANK]. She is the Poetry Editor and Sex, Kink, and the Erotic Editor for Honey Literary.