by Liam Wallace A boy drowned some years ago On a beach with a name that I forget. No one saw him enter the water So nothing can be said for his intention His purpose undetermined His face a blank canvas marked by Only a smattering of freckles A surfer noticed the boy Swept up by a rip, unable/unwilling to untangle Himself from the pull and tug Of increasingly harsh Ocean water. The surfer called out Before he paddled towards the boy, Thrusting his old waxen board underneath A succession of waves Unsure of whether he was more than A speck viewed from the shoreline The boy sunk further out and further down, Only hands flailing above unforgiving Blue. I do not know When the surfer returned to shore. Only that The boy did not. Liam Wallace (they/them) is a recent graduate from the University of Wollongong in environmental humanities, history and sustainable development. They love reading and are also a keen runner. Liam tutors primary school students and enjoys getting to share ideas about writing with them.
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by Nikita Kostaschuk
my housemate tells me I am a chore to live with, says I am always coming home in chaos, says the mess and jumble of it is too much for him. doesn't he know about the bumble of bees in my head? I swear he did. I swore he could hear them through the walls in his room when I am trying to sleep. all they do is dance their paths to the pollen stuck to everything I say. they only want to make honey. they wax lyrical, build hexagons in my head to contain it all. all the mess and jumble of the world is too much for me to contain alone. I thought he could taste the sweetness that leaks from my every word but he just leaves the world hollow. he doesn't understand that I am the swarm, the secateurs, the flower, that within me lies an eternal Spring. Nikita Kostaschuk (ink.eyta) is a spoken wordsmith hailing from meanjin/brisbane. a background in English Literature interplays in their work with their lived experience of autism, gender, trauma, humanity and brokenness. a facilitator of spoken spaces, ink.eyta organizes SpeakEasy Poetry Open Mic. by Audrey T. Carroll
We know nothing about gender & even less outside our species There are categories of hummingbirds we have named along a spectrum: male-like males female-like males male-like females female-like females & even this we only glean from an exterior, the observable: plumage brightness & bill length & tail length It is quite possibly impossible to know anything beyond this, anything about their gender roles gender expression without imposing foreign concepts Gender is a complex web, something known but unknown inside of us but beyond us named but individual performed expressed seen unseen cultural social the us to whom we speak in the dark Our own gender is a cosmos & we are children with plastic telescopes hoping to catch a glimpse of Venus or Mars or something in between & mostly what we see are a million stars we cannot name, a million stars we can barely even describe Audrey T. Carroll is the author of What Blooms in the Dark (ELJ Editions, 2024) and Parts of Speech: A Disabled Dictionary (Alien Buddha Press, 2023). She is a bi/queer and disabled/chronically ill writer. She can be found at http://AudreyTCarrollWrites.weebly.com and @AudreyTCarroll on Twitter/Instagram. by Rosalie Hendon
Your pale speckled body emerges You perch weightless on the arching leaves of the purple heart Mantis and I, taking the air companionably sharing the September morning on my porch. The air humid, the sun just brushing the railing. You fascinate me Your praying forearms bending backwards Your knobby head, almost feline The rise and fall of your low belly Delicate antenna, almost too thin to see You move slowly, feeling each foothold Forward and back, forward and back your body shifts As if you’re gathering momentum I sat with you, watched your slow motion your intentional grace for 30 minutes, until the phone rang and my computer beckoned– All those emails and meetings to attend to As the sun grew low, I came out to find you on the railing, three-quarters of a porch away. Is that how you spent six hours? If so, I wonder which of us had the more productive day? Rosalie Hendon (she/her) is an environmental planner living in Columbus, Ohio. Her work is published in Change Seven, Pollux, Willawaw, Write Launch, and Sad Girls Club, among others. Rosalie is inspired by ecology, relationships, and stories passed down through generations. by Peter Mitchell
For sale: old dairy farm, Collins Creek Road, Kyogle. Don & I inspect the ancient rooms & dairy. In the sunroom, Doug & Barb sit on an old leather lounge. Across from them, we sprawl on old club chairs. In Collins Creek Road, an old dairy farm is for sale. ‘He’s useless, y’know.’ Don looks my way. Across the room, we sprawl on old club chairs. Barb & Doug glance at each other, at me. Don shakes his head. ‘He can’t use a chain-saw’. The storm words ache my head. Again! Doug & Barb exchange looks, frown. Ach, ach, ach! A crow warns, flies away. The chain-saw’s teeth bite my shoulders. Barb’s eyes fire-green; Doug raises his eye-brows. Don smiles, his mouth a frozen grimace. Outside, we walk. The dry grass cracks like broken egg-shells. Living in Lismore on Widjabul/Wia-bul Country, Nation, Peter Mitchell (he/his), writes across all narrative forms. His writing appears in international & national print platforms. He's authored two poetry chapbooks, Conspiracy of Skin (Ginninderra Press, 2018) & The Scarlet Moment (Picaro Press, 2009). Conspiracy of Skin was Highly Commended in the 2019 Wesley Michel Wright Prize for Poetry. by Angela Arnold
would need...what? absolute tigertimes, real and total and burning? mock shots at midday, broad daylight stunning? a taste of blood in your porridge? a thousand thoughtsworth of silence in a standing wave that, simply, your heart can't, won't, argue away? what? salt on the tip of your soul? Angela Arnold (she/her) lives in North Wales, UK, and is also an artist and a creative gardener. Her poems have appeared in print magazines, anthologies and online, in the UK and elsewhere. Her collection In|Between looks at ‘inner landscapes’ and relationships (Stairwell Books, 2023). She enjoys her synaesthesia and language/s and is currently learning Welsh. by Nicola Frassetto An Infinity of Fungi White crescents at my fingertips; button mushrooms, sliced and falling from my knife. Firm and bald, like a baby’s scalp. In my hand, this knob of flesh, fruited from centuries of quiet libido. In teeming forest subways, close to the trunk, mycena rise like typewriter keys, the livid orange of earwax. Oyster mushrooms pout, shirred waists, skirts curling in the wind. Their cousins tilt upright like Elizabethan standing ruffs. But underneath fungi as delicate as toenails, conceived in the warm fester of someone else’s death, gods hide. They have escorted popes to their heavens, and against their million overlapping lives death is fleeting. But my hands know the knife. We are united in the purpose of consuming our way to eternity. The mushrooms cook grey and small, needing salt and a little parsley. in the sky/light
I grew up knowing that once as a gift someone had gentled the sky into their palms and tucked it into the ceiling of my bathroom as if it were the plush glow of a jellyfish. The bathroom was my grotto, and its blue walls curled into breakers taller than I was, meeting at the opening way above where light came like someone had taken the lid off a bottle of moon; but at the floor light sifted down to darker blue where the tiles were cool, and sighed, and sank, a shoal of sleeping clams. Scuttling things sorted the dust in far corners, busy making little houses for themselves, and high on a wall one leafy tentacle dangled from a pot - the spongy body waited beneath. Light turned on the circle of the skylight, and fell in currents to settle like sand on everything below, and there was nothing that was not alive. Yet with the doors closed, all was still. Nicola Frassetto (she/her) is a student at the Queensland University of Technology, writing from Turrbal and Jagera land. She is obsessed with words, myths and butter, and her work has previously been published in lip magazine, Glass and ScratchThat. Her home on Instagram is @secretbeestungjournal. by Beth Clapton
sand bucket at my side to extinguish sparks before dawn smoke grit stings my eyes and the last of the wine hisses on the guttering flame this time I will not drop to my knees fan the embers to tease one more blaze from the remains. I will not wrench weatherboards from the house or slats from the garden bench I must let it die come morning when a blackened bewildered foot kicks through heatless soot remember me bewitched by white hot and yellow tongues dancing through the blaze. Beth writes in fulfilment of a promise made to Mr. Cook at St Alphege Junior School in the 1970s. Beth’s poetry has won prizes in several Australian competitions and been published online and in print journals. Her love of words and trees can be found on Instagram @paperbarktales. Beth lives, works and dreams on Gadigal land. by John Robert Grogan
I’d like to think it ends curled up and dusty on lifetimes of memories, an old snake in a washbasin, behind the crusty half-used forgotten paint tins and the petrified hog- bristle brushes, overlooked like the mildewy terracotta herb pots, stacked and lonely as an unplanted seed and the redback in her corner -- who kills everything she touches — under the threatening smile of a bow-saw, beside the drunken lean of a mattock with a cracked handle, the snake in brumation, down the back shed. John Robert Grogan (aka: JR) (He/Him) is an Irish-Australian poet based in Sydney, Australia. Life in country Ireland and his global wanderings have cultivated a curiosity and love for the natural world, and the connectivity of all things. by Shaine Melrose
On the streets when I walk two shadows fall my androgynous soul sprouts ambivalence from the core gender bender for sure wherever I walk two shadows on the floor I hang out with junkies drag queens and dykes hookers and outcasts punks in the night. I never stay long, always on the run from searing pain, old scars, words jangled in the thrum. Looking for answers, lost in the wind searching for love, no one will give. On the streets when I walk, hey poofter, punk, you dyke! we’ll catch you, we’ll cut you, nail your soul to a wall... into a dark pool of blood my two shadows fall – but I rise and I swipe my light from their hands I yell I run and I roar. I am what I am Fuck you all. Shaine Melrose is a queer poet and gardener living with chronic illness, on Kaurna country. Recently her debut short manuscript, shooting words from my soul, won a place in FSP’s anthology ‘New Poets #23’. She has been shortlisted for the 2022 Judith Wright Poetry prize and published in APJ12.1, Saltbush Review, Bramble and Cordite. |
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December 2023
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