by ​Elspeth Findlay 

Mornings I’d wiggle out of mother’s grasp ungroomed,
                                    With the elements, she’s made a pact,
red tangle top, barefoot, clothes immaterial,
                                    She calls them out, they heed her back,
I wore my magic mantle out into the sunlit stream,
                                    With fire’s force and  water’s flow,
a little witch, constantly on call to officiate
                                    with land’s spirit and air’s blow
at births, deaths and marriages
                                    as above, so below,
in childhood, all my days were holy days.
 
 
I attended the delivery of slippery little parcels of puppies
                                    As the droplets of water are sprinkled           
watched bitches lick them open and opened others if allowed.
                                    a new heart,
I cheered on lumpy sacksful of foal as they slooshed out
                                    filled with love and faith,
mares sweating, their sides heaving in great contractile waves.
                                    touched by grace
I watched egg toothed chicks burst their brittle shelter
                                    blessed and embraced
Supervised the first flippered staggerings of baby turtles.
 
 
Deaths required respectful burials, feathers and fur smoothed
                                    your life we honor,
a few ritual words about the deceased, a wreath laid
                                    your memory we cherish
grass flowers or mimosa, I confess to close examinations,
                                    today as we say goodbye
the perfection of pinions, the gorgeous greens of budgies
                                    there is gratitude for your life
the padded paws of cats, the insides of those attacked,
                                    your departure we accept.
I closed the empty eyes of those I’d known.
 
 
At ‘marriages’ I’d arrive uninvited, fascinated
                                    for better for worse
by the end to end, inflight sex of dragonflies,
                                    ‘til death us do part
hovering as wagtail pairs wove nests of grass and hair
                                    for richer for poorer
respectfully present at the winding binding of snakes,
                                    to have and to hold
enchanted by the elegant bridal dance of brolgas.
                                    to love and to cherish
Breathlessly, I blessed them all. 

Dwelling in community in the Northern Rivers of NSW, Elspeth Findlay’s poetry and prose burrows into live-wild and loving cultures, inciting radical metamorphosis needed in these incendiary times. Published in the Northerly, Coastlines, Emergent Literary Journal, Poetry for the Planet anthology, it also tours with the Bimblebox 153 Birds exhibition. Her Fiction ‘The Diviner’ is in Jacaranda and won the National Campus Writing Prize. Her first poetry collection was launched by Dangerously Poetic Press in October 2024.

by Christian Ward

I mistook some sea monkeys 
for my house keys and ended
with a revolt in my pocket.
 
I mistook a barn owl for my wallet 
and received ossified pellets 
in exchange for credit card points.
 
I mistook a glasswing butterfly
for my glasses and an overwhelming 
desire for nectar lifted me off the ground.
 
I mistook the ocean for my oyster card 
and a tidal wave knocked on my bedroom 
window, asking for its pearls back. 
 
Among other things, I mistook marriage 
for a funeral pyre, love for a ticking pomegranate, 
grief for a pelt of rain, and a cuttlefish for poetry.
 
I once mistook dreaming for an uncaught trout 
and an entire river rushed through me when I woke. 

Christian Ward is a UK-based poet, with recent work in Southword, Ragaire, Okay Donkey, and Roi Faineant. Longlisted for the 2023 National Poetry Competition (UK), he won a number of competitions in 2024, including the Maria Edgeworth, Pen to Print, London Independent Story Prize and the Shahidah Janjua Poetry Competition. 

by Reilly Loughlin

I brew a pot of jasmine tea, the same kind my mother drinks. How we disembowel each other.
A group of crows is a murder and so is a houseful of women. My mother likes small spaces; I
am claustrophobic. I ask my grandmother what she had for dinner and she replies, grief, always
grief. My sister stares at her own frozen face onscreen: Narcissus perpetua; caught between
obsession and disgust. I live with my mouth stuffed full of bees. I’m always look how much
hurt I can swallow, or, look how much pain I can cause. I wear my mother’s shadow. This very
room is pregnant. Women tripping over women, the spectacle of daughter and daughter folded
like origami until no one knows who is who. I drink my wine. Someone else drinks her jasmine
​tea. I tie up my hair. I shed my wants like snakeskin and do my best not to forget my lines.

Reilly Loughlin was raised in the Northern Rivers in NSW, and recently completed her Bachelor of Writing at UQ. You can find her in UQ’s Exordium issue 11, arguing the merits of fanfiction, or in Jacaranda Journal edition 11.2. She enjoys wooden floorboards, pelicans, and hosting dinners for her friends.

by Mark O'Flynn 
for Kate Fagan

Against the empty storm clouds
those white cockatoos
like rents in canvas
drift through the air left by fire.
The clean sheets of their wings
vivid as charcoal on snow.
Acoustic cries fill the ashen void 
between scorched tree and leaden sky.

They strip the blackened bark
like metal at a car wreck
fossick with primitive impatience
on the verge of food.
What language do they croak?
what devious vernacular
of proclamation and waste?
Arranged phonetically with blundering

morphemes like hacksaws grumbling 
through the air’s dirty paragraph.
You lean from your window 
oppressed by rain
as one stone age cockatoo
in the face of desolation shrieks 
relentless greeting across the heavy sky
hello   hello   hello.

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 Undercoat (Liquid Amber Press, 2022). 

by Leni Shilton

White smoke in the trees lifts slowly,
it weaves through the empty frames.
They hang from the branches
like mirrors.

She hung them there
looking for herself,
her mother –
for all the mothers.
For the women who were once here
she listens in the stillness for their voices.

The smoke winds sleep-like
from her campfire,
drifting this side to that.

She puts the billy to boil
and the crack of flames
is the only sound
in the wide yawn of quiet.

A honeyeater alights on a frame
its call startled and loud,
the whole forest alert
watching for the smoke.

The frames rock in the breeze.
Unblinking eyes
capturing the forest, the birds
the distance.

She paints late into the day
forgetting herself
until the sun drops,
the cold comes in.

As the light lowers,
she walks about
reaches into trees
collecting frames.
They clatter into her bag,
into darkness
like eyes closing.

She empties the billy onto dry leaves,
breathes in eucalyptus.

She packs away her paintings
her paints,
the perfect blend of green, of grey.
She tips water on the campfire
steps back from the blast of steam.

The last of the coals scattered,
she heaves bags on her shoulder
trudges up the creek bed,
feet slipping in the dry sand.

Behind her,
the forest is itself again
No frames to look through,
no fire or smoke
just itself for a thousand miles,
stretching and shaking in the breeze.

Leni Shilton is a poet and verse novelist. Her book Walking with camels won the 2020 NT Chief Ministers Book Award. Leni’s poetry work appears in journals and anthologies, and she judged the 2020 Stella Prize. After many years in Mparntwe | Alice Springs, she now lives on Dja Dja Wurrung country.

by Allison Camp

Ode to the corpse

“The Dermestid Beetle, sometimes referred to as a carpet or skin beetle, belongs to the family Dermesidate. This beetle species feeds on dry-moist animal material, ensuring that decaying and dead flesh is recycled. Invariably these beetles will show up at a carcass to aid in decomposition…” -Skull Taxidermy

My dear,  
cold     dead     damp
rotting at roadside, 
a generous splay.
Your sweet stench

lures me. Intoxicating
cadaverine and putrescine, 
pungent perfume which I fancy 
ambergris envies.

My probing mouth lovingly caresses 
each metacarpal, vertebral arch.
No pulp evades my insatiable maw.

My wormy form burrows under your fur
in gluttonous consumption.
A grotesque Hungry Caterpillar. 

Your crevices are scraped
clean in my wake,
elegant bones gleam white. 

Now, you are gone my decomposing darling.
I will hide -- secret, sealed,
corporeal melt, dream of decay.
The circularity is not lost on me.

Jumbled soup congeals,
my form recombines,
your muscle now mine. 
Spotted elytra and wings unfurl.

I fly to find you again.

Roadkill

more like
            murder via high-speed
            habitat intrusion
more like
            killer road
more like
            vehicular slaughter
more like
            we kill anything
            that gets in our way
more like
            paved graveyard
more like
            corpse corridor
more like
            a gruesome museum
            of local wildlife –
            mangled specimens only.

Allison Camp (she/her) is a Washington State native now living and working in North Carolina. She is a scientist by training and has a deep affinity for biology and the fascinating details that abound in nature. Connect with her on Substack: https://allisoncamp.substack.com/ or Instagram: @eclectic.curiosity. 

by Paris Rosemont 

Your little yuzu sapling should have tipped me off to your love
of zest.  You tended to it  with the  care and patience  of a zen
master cultivating inner peace. I have begun craving the tart tang
 
of tangerine tickling my tastebuds, imagining you on my tongue as 
I dip into the pink flesh of a grapefruit wedge—sweet, bitter and
sourish—bright as a sharp slap prickling pungent as smelling salts.
 
My lips pucker as I suck the rind bare as my cunt—a slow kiss laced
with a lick of vinegar. Love flays me—I tingle. My senses awaken to
you;  the blood  orange  dribbling acidic  into each tiger stripe of my
 
wounds. I become an ouroboros, consuming my own marrow,
marinating in your secretions.  I am raw—my translucent flesh
transformed by the lime of your love. 

Paris Rosemont is the author of Banana Girl (WestWords, 2023), shortlisted for the Association for the Study of Australian Literature’s 2024 Mary Gilmore Award for a first volume of poetry. Her second collection, Barefoot Poetess, is due for release in early 2025. Paris may be found at www.parisrosemont.com. 

by Kate Compston 

The other world is here,
        just under our fingertips.
            --Charles Wright

Child in the garden mines                
the winter soil for worms
to tempt a cocksure robin.
The pulsing of a worm, of earth
within the worm, shocks her
at core. No-one has told her all
the world’s a dance. 
 
Woman in the darkness plays
her lover’s octaves of vertebrae,
rehearses notes and space
between the notes,  teases
sonatas out from bone, skin,
woken whisperings of blood:
a music played by heart.
 
Mother in the dawnlight soothes            
her baby:  sorrows for her own
crass roughnesses, is awed
by contours of her child’s
unblemished landscape.
Under the fontanelle, a dragon huffs
a lifetime’s threats.
 
Mourner in the hospice strokes
her father’s watercolour hands;
wants to paint in oils to bring back
colour, vibrancy. Under tissue-skin,
the merest flicker — as though
he stops to bless her. Then   
the slipping past.

Kate worked as a counsellor in the NHS, then voluntarily in a hospice setting. She lives by the Atlantic in Cornwall, has been involved with XR, and is trying to learn BSL. (She dislikes abbreviations …) She feels writing itself is enough to quicken the blood — publication an affirming bonus.

by Glen Hunting 

This place’s wounds
are sacred ranges,

sagging houses, 
scarified sedans.

But body art can’t disrupt
the eruption of buffel.

Only the blossoms
move with the seasons:

spectra in rubble
waiting beside the rails.

Standing room only
for refugees after rain.

Glen Hunting is a writer from Perth, Western Australia (Boorloo, Whadjuk Noongar boodja), now living in Mparntwe (Alice Springs) on Arrernte country. His poetry has been published in Plumwood Mountain Journal, Meniscus, Portside Review, London Grip New Poetry, Burrow, and elsewhere. He was the recipient of a 2024 Varuna/Arts NT residential fellowship.

by Zoe Odessa

My heart is too big for my body / So you take a piece and hold it under your tongue / Hair
between fingers, criss-crossing / (weaving I love you I love you I love you) / into the back of
your head / Peals of laughter, choking sobs, stony silences / Head to toe on your bed /
breathing in time / You’d kill for me / I’d kill for you / Halving clementines and sharing gum /
He doesn’t deserve you / You stick your fingers down my throat / To clear out the dust /
Hold my hair back as I retch / Then kneel as if in prayer / So I may hold back yours / And yes
there are moments / Stretches / Of silence / Of wondering / Where have you gone / But you
spring back / as ever / And our hearts meld as one again and / Forever 

Zoe Odessa (she/her) is a 23-year-old poet and writer who wishes to be utterly consumed by words. Currently based in Cairns, Australia, on Yirrganydji land, she is at the tail end of her USYD B.A in English Literature. She loves difficult women and challenging feminist literature. She has previously had poetry published in Sour Cherry Mag. You can find her on her instagram @zoe_odessa_