by Linda Albertson
Her smile reaches me before I hear her footsteps - I pull her on like a dressing gown, keep her smile in the pocket. Smiley-face yellow is her favourite colour. When she is sad, the skin on her face glows blonde like a full moon behind cloud. The imprint of her three-year-old body still lies warm on my mattress. The wonder is this – what I love about her I don’t recognise in myself. Linda Albertson lives and writes on Yuin Country. Her poems have been published in Ginninderra Press anthologies. Her chapbook, Overdue, was published in 2016. @sip_a_poem
0 Comments
by Ren Kato
I reside in this room of darkness Trepidations tap dance around me It feels like my soul is a carcass and my mind is the vulture Longing to listen to your music I can’t recall the day I started to decay I have even forgotten what country I’m in Perhaps it’s been too long since I’ve seen the sky Ren Kato is from Brisbane. He recently published his first poetry collection Reflected Fractures. Instagram: ren_kato_poetry by Rory Hawkins
It coughs, spits, flumes light in all directions. Audio cracks, the screen blooms hot white. Dial it all down and blink like mad till the retinal imprint fades. How do I stay in focus? Eyes and lense adjust to find an answer: open rum bottle in favoured hand, left forms a red ball of light. Billowing smoke, blushing sand—pink as lips, cheeks, fingers, and toes. You hold the flare like everything else: at arm’s length. Tiny crabs sprinkle at your feet, chasing tiny shadows. Rory Hawkins is a Meanjin/Brisbane-based writer. Find more of his prose in ScratchThat magazine issues 4 & 5, the upcoming issue of Inkblot and through his Instagram @rory_writes_sometimes by Leila Lois
’...the very springs, the very orchards here were calling for you.’ -Virgil's Eclogues, Part I Amaryllis lean to sun, burst stars of sparkling pink, crimson veins; blood upon marble. Naked ladies with glossy stems, bright and bare, sit aflame in the orangery, sweet, citrus jasmine scent of mock -orange on the wind. In a vat, I could squeeze petals for days, only to extract a tiny drop press it on my wrists and behind my ears or drip amaryllis oil into my eyes, dilate pupils like night stretches across sky, unfolds its dark shroud, my crimson gown. I could see you everywhere; sundial shadow, moving swing, a fallen book, broken spine on red tiles An underground spring bled up through stone, leaked into cold -room where we stored meat. By the wall, yew, dark lover, above where pets were archived in tiny plots: Tabby, Ginger, Lulu. Lilies all weighed down, turned away. Life is an empty urn without you. Leila Lois is a dancer and writer of Kurdish and Celtic heritage who has lived most of her life in Aotearoa, based now in Naarm/ Melbourne. In her poems, Leila explores a personal sense of origin that, like the ocean, binds several landscapes and times, coming back to the idea that a timeless, boundless love pervades. Her publishing history includes Southerly Journal, Djed Press, NoD Literary Journal, Next in Colour, Lite Lit One, Bent Street Journal and Delving into Dance. by Kye Lay
Blue bottles Washing up A shore assures The message inside To be thrown again Into the abyss Kye Lay is a meanjin based multi-media artist @klaypoetery + Kye Lay on youtube by Jordan Barling
that you arrive with cigarettes and beer not even a change of clothes only a toothbrush in the cloth handbag that you wear bandolier collect the Vietnamese take-away and empty the bins chaining on the apartment balcony as I make calls that you stay for days even though the best I can offer is the fold out couch purchased for a beach house in 1986 each evening we bend the armrests back this is what it must feel like to realign the spine Jordan Barling is a Melbourne-based writer. Her poetry is included in the upcoming issue of Overland. by Jax Bulstrode
peeling mandarins on your bedroom floor the whole room swaying with laughter and the evening breeze a storm rolling in and potatoes in the oven she is telling me about the bird on her arm blackened and eyes open staring back at me how do we start again? with the colours okay, the purple skyline outside the window cool static glow from the tv now, the scent of the cool rain coming and sound my favourite part her voice beside me calling my name Jax Bulstrode writes poems in Naarm/Melbourne. She is usually writing about rivers or fruit or being queer. Jax has been published in Anti-Heroin Chic Journal, F*EMS and is forthcoming in Southchild Lit, Just femme & dandy and Enby life. You can find them at @jaxbulstrode on Twitter. by SoulReserve
paperbark mouth drinks floodplain blood, orange into veins that spill sun, light pushes itself into albino flowers, dense and misshapen. I stand on your roots, spread beneath wetlands, body quivers, shakes with tethered new seasons that rub salt into fresh wounds. I crisp into paper, skin golden brown and peeling like an alphabet long-written and forgotten, now speckled yellow sun-bleached memories. I shed leaves, susurrating through a murmur of wind, tunnels through kaleidoscopic light that burns nocturnal eyes and laughs and laughs. SoulReserve is a wistful poet. Her poetry explores love and its tumultuousness, the fantasy and zest in nature, and allegories that provoke thought and evoke tender feelings. Read her published works in – "Across Vast Horizons", "Poetry d’Amour – 2019 & 2020", "Letters To Our Home", “Recoil 12” and WAPI’s “Creatrix.” by Lou Smith
knee deep in swamp slick near swamp-edge sludge under tread. The blueberry ash, that grew as lanky as a cattleman, is what this place was named after – Ash Island – its petals like faeries’ frilly slips under tiny pink / white dresses. We hauled fish when it was safe –when islands hadn’t been cemented as land with slag– when the slick didn’t fill their gills with arsenic Lou Smith is a poet based on Wurundjeri country in Melbourne. Her writing has been published in journals and anthologies including Soft Surface, Nine Muses Poetry, The Lifted Brow, and The Caribbean Writer. Her first collection of poetry riversalt was published by Flying Island Books in 2015. www.lousmith.net by Mike Russell
after Luke Howard's song "Dappled Light" Light is all around me, breathe it in and out. Touch it with a fingertip. Feel the grooves of light speckle your forehead. This is love and lust and power. Light is all around us and it listens. See if you can listen back to its pulse, its shimmering gold. I see colours eat me up but there is no pain. I am falling through the cosmos and flying through the sea. I am found in this open space and I am free. Mike Russell is a non-verbal communicating poet with autism and PTSD. He is the leader of Brotherhood of the Wordless, a talented group of likeminded individuals with similar conditions. Mike likes to write and slam his poetry across Meanjin, Australia. |
Blue BottleSeeking words with sizzle, poetry that wraps us in burning ribbons and won't let go. Send us your best! Archives
June 2022
|
Photo used under Creative Commons from John Donges