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.

by Lucy Norton 

patrilineal

dreamt you were a poem 
i kept writing you
if i am alive it means
parts of you are still

dreamt you were an ocean
i kept being afraid of you
if i am alive it means
i am here to reunite
ghosts of lineage past

what would it mean for them 
to taste freedom? 
shackles look different
but i know yours because
they became mine
we both had pain to run from
you just got away first 

i am choosing to run towards
instead
create a new legacy
one you might’ve wanted
to inherit
to give to us

you were second last 
of your brothers 
to die
but the first 
to put up a fight

dreamt you were a story
i’ll keep writing you

her waters 

our rivers call me by names
i haven’t heard before
arms extending across
mouth and state and sea
gentle pull at my seams
gotta unravel to hear ‘em

ocean is loudest when 
i’m coastal can’t go 
anywhere without 
hearing her song

mama says when you 
become water you will sail 
sometimes i’m done fighting
to float feels like birthright 
i am a willing participant 
this is a devotion i belong to

Lucy Norton is a storyteller of Koori & Quechua heritage living on Gadigal land. Her work explores lived experience, and aims to navigate the complexities of relationality and memory. They're a recipient of the Varuna First Nations Fellowship 2023, Red Room Emerging Poet's Residency 2024 and their work has been published in kindling & sage, Sunder Journal and Right Now Magazine.

by Damien Becker

Jesus, late

of Mater Hospital South Brisbane
entrance, was carved with a chainsaw, 
hewn from the safety of bark casting

by steel cutter teeth, further detailed 
with a chisel, gouge and bent, then
sanded back to prayer. 

We love complaints! reads the poster 
on the wall behind the messiah
as opportunities to learn. 

Car lights exiting the underworld 
parking on their way to West End 
flash through the stained glass

of the empty chapel behind the vending machine
and those spirits are moving through 
and over me, my bald head the Sacré-Cœur

Montmartre disco ball on a Saturday night. 
I wander the pews, rest to hang myself 
over in service to oxygenation, in-patient

mirror of His attendant curve. We 
share air in the dry silence, neither 
with anything to say, His cheeks stained 

with rose wax, mine paled with deficiency, 
flow sapped. A revelation: I consider 
anointing my forehead with Coke Zero 

in supplication, but I am shy with 
total strangers and anyhow, my Father 
is calling me from Melbourne to talk footy. 
​
Damien Becker is a disabled writer and community development worker from Murwillumbah NSW on Bundjalung Country. An award-winning spoken word artist, his poetry has been published by Australian Poetry Journal, Verity La, Bramble Journal, and Sunder Journal, among others. He lives with cystic fibrosis and is a double-lung transplant recipient.

by Peter Viggers

That worm in the ear
those worms of the soil
 
elvis wiggling
down in the deep
 
radiant colours
like Joseph’s coat
 
sunk five fathoms
to a sunless hole
 
feeding on whalebones
back-biting each other
 
no shore for the leaving
no star to be seen
 
ten thousand mouths
a shimmer of song
 
a whale call vibrating
in the depths of my ear
 
collapsing the space
between them and us
 
a body of water
a body of bone
 
the distance of difference
the strangely same
 
wearing their gold
a jitterbug jive
 
the brilliance of pink
the glamour of glow.
 
Elvis having a whale
in heaven below.

Note: ​the fourth species’ shimmery pink and gold scales earned it the name P. elvisi, a tribute to the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll.

Peter Viggers gained an MA in Poetry (2016) from the University of Manchester; poems
shortlisted for the Bridport Competition, the Anthony Cronin International Poetry Award and
Brian Dempsey Memorial Poetry Award; and published, amongst others, in Orbis, SMOKE,
Ink Sweat and Tears, Best New British and Irish Poets Anthology (2021).

by Lisa Zerkle

​Once I watched a snake encircle
the post of a picnic shelter,
spiraling towards a wren’s nest tucked under
the eave, not dissuaded by the shrieking
pair of swooping decoys or their frenetic
flailing as it breached their haven
atop the post, plenty of time
to consider how it would allow
each egg into its mouth, how each would shatter
into tasty slurry of slime and shell,
those brood-warm ovals cradled
in beak-woven straw, how—no rush--
it would swallow all but
only one by one.

Lisa Zerkle’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Quartet, Heavy Feather Review, The Collagist, Nimrod, storySouth, among others. She was the creator and curator of 4X4CLT, a public art and poetry series for Charlotte Lit. In January 2023, she was awarded an MFA in Poetry from Warren Wilson College. She lives with her husband and a 100 pound slobbery bulldog named Ozzie. Follow her on Instagram @hag_lore