by Dave Clark

I go on a trip overseas
and get these messages saying
that I seem to be doing a lot
more than usual
 
I am making the most
of packed-away moments
and several people are still surprised
and subtly criticise when they see me enjoy life
 
Micro-aggressive texts
contiki across continents
to suck the steam
from this dream holiday,
 
making me feel
like I’ve done something wrong
whenever I do
something fun
 
I chase occasions that transcend
chronic illness
and yet words strike
at these hard-fought steps,
 
flattening the topography
of my health, pounding it
to a plateau
of predictability
 
until I'm standing on an Arctic butte
veiled in pure snow
and can only feel the stinging cold
of their scolding
 
As my knees fall into the frozen
blanket spread beneath,
I make a ball of their slush
and sling it to where it belongs
 
so that nature’s song can be heard again,
the seraph sound of snowfall
mixed with the playful giggles
of someone so used to red desert dust

Dave Clark is a reliable human with unreliable health.
He is a writer-poet with chronic fatigue syndrome, living in Mparntwe (Alice Springs).
His writing speaks into grief, illness, justice and how we love and laugh together.
Dave works as a counsellor, creating space for stories of significance.
Instagram/X: @DaveClarkWriter

by Angela Arnold

Such a thin band of despair,
shaped with all the care of a parent
snugging a child's scarf. The kiss
of death a prolonged affair,
kicking the habit of living
with a lust and a zest and a violent
longing for air –
the circlet's neat grip
making it a monstrous appetite.
Feet still dreaming.
A telling hollow there
just a foot from where greenstuff
would have been made complicit.
The magic attraction
dangled just-so inviting plain
habit: lured home; beguiled
to venture into another
pale Grass Moon night.
A dog's bark in the distance perhaps
the last flippant comment
on a life now left as hairy powder,
forgotten bone. The final insult.
Some mighty Human
never even clucked in triumph.

​Angela Arnold (she/her) lives in Wales. She’s also an artist, a creative gardener and an environmental campaigner. Her poems have been published in print, anthologies and online, in the UK and elsewhere. Collection: In Between (Stairwell Books, 2023). Twitter: @AngelaArnold777

by John Bartlett 

wattlebirds wait for darkness
to loosen the dreams of children
for days to taste of peace

Dianella fibres like silk
strong enough to resist
the callous winds of winter

river redgums along the banks
of my childhood suffered
dumb rage of axe and saw

autumn dew drops from leaves’ length  clear
dear atonements  of magpie song 
slice the crisp air into a day full of sky

where is that untouched world
its birds wide-winging
cormorants their dottled dipping 
scratching the surface
of mirrored creeks               where

 John Bartlett is the author of eleven books of fiction, non-fiction and poetry. He was winner of the 2020 Ada Cambridge Poetry Prize, Highly Commended in the 2021 Mundaring Poetry Competition. His latest poetry collection is Excitations of Entanglement.

by Tony Norris

I was born         foaming
          at the crux of  
where salt   meets   water
two things your diet needs
but cannot have together
and I the deity of every motivation on earth
       cannot be divined
without being dissected
    not even in my birth
 
but I was born    longing
before you
spent my life
being chased
being made un
til I became
pearl-like which is to say
girl-like which is to say
weary eyed from being
lapped at but rarely swallowed
 and all this time
I knew I was ancient
but forgot I was also  hallowed
 
it is true, what the Greeks think
there is terror in the beautiful
there is beauty in the terrible
 
when you first saw me I saw you
tremble
 
     I was  cradled in a clam shell
 
naked
arm on breast
hand on _____
 
this became my symbol
not for pleasure, not for modesty
but to be born     knowing
what it is like
to hold
            and to be held

Tony (he/him) is a Meanjin/Brisbane-based performance poet. He has been a state finalist for the National Slam Championship and has hosted Rainbow Open Mic Nights with Gold Coast Libraries. Tony started out at Ruckus Youth and Voices of Colour and has been a featured poet at numerous creative events across Brisbane. 

by Izzy Roberts-Orr 

If you spend enough time with the trees
you begin to feel endless.

There are some here I'd wager
almost three times your lifetime
triple your wingspan
more than ten times your height.

Your handspan – a trick of the eye – 
the same branches bolstering sky.

The trees bow and remember.
They'll fall, humbled by termites
hiding homes for the busy lives
of spitting possums and the
parenthetical bodies of galahs.

The trees know they'll fall
but continue standing all the same
through downpour and drought
blazing heat and smokestacked,
encroaching flame.

Izzy Roberts-Orr is a poet, writer, broadcaster and arts worker based on Dja Dja Wurrung Country. Izzy is Creative Producer for Red Room Poetry and a 2020-2022 recipient of the Australia Council Marten Bequest Scholarship for Poetry. Her debut collection, Raw Salt (Vagabond, 2024) was the recipient of a Wheeler Centre Hot Desk Fellowship, and longlisted for the Colorado Prize for Poetry.

by Madeleine Dale

I break the surface of anger 
unexpectedly, like a diver 

prising the bay into halves,
a knife through muscle 

and shell. The oyster reefs
were licking the tide clean,

honeycombed on their racks,
varnishing their little hurts

without philosophy. Helpless
as swell, I have painted 

indifference over injury,
and it has turned 

so heavy. My body lolls
in the estuary, where silt 

meets salt. Broken shuck
catches my skin. I carry

the pearl-weight of love
                       out to sea.

Madeleine Dale grew up on Tamborine Mountain and now lives in Brisbane. She holds first-class honours and a Masters degree in creative writing from the University of Queensland, where she is currently completing a PhD. Her first chapbook, On Fire with Dangerous Cargo, was published by Queensland Poetry in 2023. Her first full length collection, Portraits of Drowning, won the 2023 Thomas Shapcott Prize and is forthcoming from UQP.

by Rae White

​bloated catfish surge 
at the cusp of river’s 
oil-licked lips.
the bent elbows and legs 
of rocks have grey foam 
and bottle tops 
in their crooks. 

at my side, your fist 
is clenched 
like balled-up lunch wrap. 

‘what a mess’ lingers 
at the edge of my teeth 
before I swallow it down 
with my throat’s impatient bile. 

a waning moon flickers 
behind wind-ruffled blue gums. 
another storm 
is on the way.

Rae White (they/them) is a non-binary transgender poet, writer and zine maker. They're the award-winning author of poetry collections Milk Teeth (UQP 2018) and Exactly As I Am (UQP 2022), and the Bitsy game stand up. Rae is the founding editor of #EnbyLife, a journal for non-binary creatives.

by Genevieve Osborne

Coast Dawn

​​A slow light fingers into cracks and angles
Spills over cliffs and pools;

Pinks the streaming manes of skittish mares
And combs the fur of foxes loping to their lairs;

Works into a weighty nest of sticks
To hone the eagle’s beak;

Glints the scales of mullet rising in a wave
And pokes the rosy bones of fruit bats fallen in a cave;

Sidles through a valley to a farm
And flames the windows of the sleeping house;

Bloods the veiny ears of pigs blinking in their pens
Then primes the udders of the waiting cows;

Wakes the rooster         shatters in his crow
And showers in shards and prisms on his hens.

Garfish

Is it the way a shaft of winter light leans  
into the kitchen       
that lets these distant pictures play now       sharp and clear?
Hands lift a parcel        test its weight        fold back 
white paper        garfish       
I watch my mother line them up on the old marble topped table  
slim silver bodies        each with a slender sword
watch her sprinkle on the flour        rub it gently 
on the cleaned slippery skin        and place them side by side 
in the hot oil in the pan        with their tails curved 
up one side and their snouts pointing over the edge of the other       
watch her turn them deftly        and lift them out
onto a plate lined with kitchen paper        a row of pale       
golden fish with skin just crisp 
moist white flesh to drizzle with lemon and separate
carefully from the almost invisible bones. 

Genevieve Osborne is a Sydney writer.  Her poems have appeared in various journals including Southerly, Meanjin, Island, Red Room Poetry's The Disappearing and The Emma Press Anthology of the Sea (UK).  She was joint winner of the Henry Lawson Prize for Poetry and runner-up in the Gwen Harwood Poetry Prize.  Genevieve spends a fair amount of time thinking about food and cooking.  Her favourite place to be when growing up was in the kitchen, watching her mother cook.  She says her mother was the best cook she has ever known.

by Alisha Brown

There is no room in a heron’s beak
for blame, 
just
the slow, tender gulp of a fish 
down the gullet

See how he stands,
still as an icicle,
dripping little droplets that 
break 
the rippling pool
of his body’s dim mirage on the lake

When the swans come,
they bow their heads

Drawn, like all things,
to hunger and violence

Knowing, like all things,
that beauty breathes heaviest
in the brief, lean space
between lifefulness
and after

The heron 
seems to float above himself 
for a moment, eyes 
locked on the marsh, 
backward legs and feather-tufted chest
strung tight toward his unseen target, and when he
darts
his executioner’s strike,
spiring the perch
cleanly and plainly,
he carries the flickering wet body,
the silver-wet body
to the bank
where he drops it, lets it rest awhile,
emptying its share of the unknowable into the sun
before it is swallowed

Alisha Brown is a poet and traveler born on Kamilaroi land in Australia. She won the 2022 Joyce Parkes Women’s Writing Prize and placed second in the Judith Rodriguez Open Section of the 2021 Woorilla Poetry Prize. You can find her work in Westerly, Griffith Review, and the Australian Poetry Anthology, among others.

by Caroline Reid

how did we live before grief became a cruise ship pressing on our necks.
before the white assassin who proclaimed love skimmed smooth black
stones over our pink lake. these are the colours of my house. from my boat i
spy footprints in the mud. big toe missing on the right foot. trout ate toe.
destiny ate trout. so it goes. how did we ever live before women gobbled
their own feet. i have other questions too. are we seen. are we valued. are
​we felt.  look. i’m not saying grief is easy. imagine. all your earthly life
you’re a poet. then you keel over. life is a double-parked dream. but don’t
worry. it’s not contagious. when we’re afraid to cry we tiptoe drunk over
aeons of silvery scars. hungry as cabin boys we sniff out honey in the hull.
steal thunder. sail into blame. until we remember it’s connections between
things that save us. now that i’m drowning in seawater i will cut you a
mother moon from this old skiff. how did we ever even begin to live before
tough-talking secrets slipped unnoticed from the shore. joyfully jumped
ship. into the heaving body of poetry.

​Caroline Reid (she/her) found her feet as a writer in theatre and has since developed a diverse writing and performance practice. Her debut collection SIARAD is published in print and audio by Spineless Wonders (ES-Press). Storytelling, dark humour and a whiff of rage are at the heart of all her art.