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.

by Andrew Millar
CW: body horror, gore, and cannibalism

I want to taste the drying blood around his mouth,
Flecked and pooled in mauvish patches on his lips
With slivers shorn off spindly supraspinatus
Draped on white incisors; dripping velvet curtains.
 
I want to feel his eyes on me when we eat,
As though he ate with mouth and gaze entwined,
Through greedy gulps of blood and sybaritic glances;
Prostrate at the altar of flesh.
 
If he asked I’d press my lips to crimson, streaked
And stretched from pointed chin to pearly navel;
I’d taste the roughish ferric glide of tongue on tongue,
Our fingers interlocked and webbed like sinew.
 
When my teeth tore through his pectoralis
I felt myself inside him, not he inside me;
He moaned and cried and kissed me hard--
He begged to eat more, eat more; bones and all.
 
In another life our bodies lie enwound,
Edenic on the Holy Plains of Flesh,
In a world that’s ours; where I am his--
Darling, I want you inside me forever.

Andrew Millar is an emerging writer based in Brisbane/Meanjin, studying literature and philosophy. He writes poetry, fiction, and non-fiction essays. Some of his poems and non-fiction can be found in Jacaranda Journal and Exordium. His never-ending project is a quest for a poetics of embodiment that feels authentic to lived experience.

by Clare Roche

the inky dog circles close
 
I breathe out midnight
blue, soundless mist descends
 
I stagger, pulled by violet undertows
that sweep me to my knees
 
I taste the wind, watch the restless fish
that dart and twist through my chest
 
I dream of eggshells and snow
-soft feathers brushing against fine bone
 
cages that trap, close and dark
I am undone
 
until one day, a sliver, an opening,
swell of light
 
and I exhale a riot of colour.

​Clare Roche (she/her) lives and loves on Gadigal land in Sydney's inner west. Her poetry has been published in online journals in the UK, the US, Germany, and Australia. Her commercial fiction manuscript 'The Garden' was shortlisted for the Harper Collins Banjo Prize (2022).  

by Carl Griffin

Other power countries built skyscrapers
and dipped their shoulders in outer space

but we drilled to the mantle of the earth
beyond the depth of an ocean trench.

To understand himself, a man must mine
his own heart. To understand the immense

complexities of his lifespan, he must dig down 
through layers of the organ he did not know existed.

First, the crust. Get beyond that, you reach
a whole new perspective. How hard we tried

with a drill pipe and rig, and torque 
and two decades, through fossils,

through scepticism and rock crystals.
Every year you age, the earth becomes hotter,

you can’t even dream of the heat to come,
the burns, the suffocation, the awareness

that survival is the highest privilege. 
Our eyebrows raised so high they came clean off,

the drill bits frazzled by the centimetre.
Until a man could fall for four minutes and not land.
 
Guard your heart or hell will surge up
until the pressing must be reeled back

to keep dark seven miles that barely cut the crust
with a metal hole cover and a dozen rusting bolts.

I was the last worker out of the drill room
but we will reassemble. We will understand.

​Carl Griffin is from South Wales. His first poetry collection, Throat of Hawthorn, was published by Indigo Dreams Publishing in 2019. In 2020, his book-length poem, Arrival at Elsewhere, written for charity with the help of one hundred poets, was published by Against the Grain.

by Mark O’Flynn

It’s Australia for God’s sake.
Here are the swimming cozies,
the varieties of sauce,
but where is the mythical snow?
Out there on the mulga
chilling the champers
for the opal miners, that’s where.
The way they talk the deserts
should be full of it. Occurs only
once in a pinkish moon, if then.
Weighs the branches down to breaking point.
Do we really see ourselves as a skiing nation?
A land of snowmen in white
bowling cricket balls of hail.
Ski-jump girls like upside down helicopters.
The slippery images slide
like loose gravel, an old cardigan
with holes in the elbows, a tipsy
uncle with a carrot for a nose,
like panthers left behind
by American soldiers
to run wild after the war.
All good means of describing snow,
its aftermath, its myth,
its place in the national interest
how like everyone else
we aspire to be.

Mark O’Flynn’s novel The Last Days of Ava Langdon (UQP) was short listed for the Miles Franklin Award, 2017, the Prime Minister’s Literary Award as well as winning the Voss Literary Award, 2017. His most recent collection of poetry is Einstein’s Brain (Puncher & Wattmann, 2022). 

by Laurie Donaldson

Dragonfly

That long day the dragonfly died,
its wings now almost transparent,
but still seeming to change hue.

Gossamer, I thought, not sure
if the hopeful summers to come
would ever be the same.

A thin movement of air lifts
its slender frame, its marking
you can’t define, iridescence lost.

The dreaded call comes faintly,
that it was time to go, to move
on from this favoured spot.

I cup its floating impression,
unsure if it has weight at all,
and try to blow the insect back

to life, into the air,
to snub this terrible interruption,
before I climb into the stuffy car

and fold my newly formed wings
into myself, hoping that drab
will become colour, will be my future.

Scorpion grass

High summer, sun
wheedles, heat pulses,
and forget-me-not tinsel
waves below black-headed gulls
pulling at sky threads.

All feels slackened, motes on
careless random air,
mouse ear foliage on display,
impossible blue with yellow dot target,
inviting me to you.

Such metallic growth with machine
age sheen, self-loving to earth,
buds cloistered
with promise,
grace note brittle.

Don’t forget me, I say
as you turn leaves
towards autumn. And I fold
myself into frayed pages,

to flatten my old spurned love,
so that one day I’ll find you again
a flash of lost colour
unexpectedly slipping from a book
I had meant to read again.

Laurie Donaldson (he/him) is a member of the Greenock Writers’ Club and the Federation of Writers (Scotland). He reads at open mics, and has had poems in Dreich, Cold Moon Journal and the Primo Poetica Collection, and in anthologies, and he reviews new poetry for the Glasgow Review of Books.

by Grant Shimmin

It’s a dance of steps so delicate
and tentative it barely seems to move
Mine marking the softening of the frost
on the bridge’s age-worn timbers
and the danger of putting my partner to flight
The heron’s marking mine and the movement
of morsels unaware in the still shallows
Its glance up freezes my icy shuffle
long enough for it to thrust two shallow stabs
that shatter the glassy surface unsuccessfully,
but only briefly, as it slows, waiting
on the fishes’ forgetfulness,
cocked front leg and rapier bill poised in parallel.
Grateful for the forward slide the reset allows,
I’m doubly so to be in place for a replay
rapid in its sharp brutality
then slowed slightly for the two-gulp swallow
now imperfectly captured on my phone
It seems this dance is over
and in my head I bow deeply in gratitude
If my partner is grateful for my caution there’s no evidence
Just a sweep, wide-winged, imperious
across the stilling surface of the pool

Grant Shimmin is a South African-born poet long resident in New Zealand. He counts humanity, nature, and their relationship as poetic passions. He has work published/forthcoming at Roi Faineant, Does it Have Pockets?, The Hooghly Review, underscore_magazine, Amethyst Review, Dreich and elsewhere.