by Rebecca Jessen

do you remember feeling
like this before
buoyed by the illicit
afterhours swim

we float in gelatinous blue
under summer stars
where dense air suspends
our breath
 
chokehold of the dark
without your glasses
the night sky a blur
on your back
 
you let me describe
the way the light flares out
and extinguishes us
into nothing

Rebecca Jessen (she/her) is a timeless boi. a linen daddy. a comet trail. a groin anomaly. a body that is a bridge. a moonstruck adolescent. an incomplete list poem. 

Jessen’s poetry collection Ask Me About the Future (UQP, 2020) was shortlisted for the 2021 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Poetry, the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry and Commended for the Anne Elder Award.

by C. J. Vallis 

Smiling fox hangs from the cot rail,
draw his tail down and lullaby
sings guten abend, gute nacht
for giving
a whirly gurney, an electropop infusion
of ultrasound, drip drip chemical cocktail
pumps blink warning lights
some party
 
your spinal tap seeps time, you are
seventeen seventy cytotoxic and
dah dee dah dah dee dah
go to sleep
 
days be long you under stand with stand
Summer left her breath her ward bed
her substance absorbed with paper towel
in patient out anyway how long is day
memory? chance or strategy?
 
these cards stacked 52 thick and counting
turning and matching days (not diamonds)
in grown toe nails and wigs
the smell of glands, metal
 
can sir sleep?
doctor nurse bitte
patterns to sense, recall wild ear
fire drum bird words
what colour to hold?
be hold, lulled by
fox paw, your claw marks
in velvet liver.

C. J. Vallis is a writer and educator on Wangal land. She won the 2019 UTS Writing Anthology prize. Her flash fiction was runner-up in the Byron Writers 2019 competition, and she has been longlisted for the Joanne Burns and Microflix Writing Awards. She's hoping to publish a novel soon. 

by Scott-Patrick Mitchell

Seaweed bleeds a Hadal ache,
             opaque harrowed cape,
and you tremble in The Shallows. 
             A black wave. A gallows reef.
Yonder? Sonder: Eldritch Ocean Abyss.
             Deep waters, darker altars. 
Tender shadow tendril  
             monster yourself real. 
In the furrow, new harps for scientific art. 
             They strum, slither for your soles  
as waves draw them in,
             towing adrenal line. 

Scott-Patrick Mitchell was the recipient of the 2022 Red Room Poetry Fellowship and the 2023 XYZ Prize for Innovation in Spoken Word. Their debut poetry collection Clean (Upswell Publishing, 2022) was shortlisted for The Prime Minister’s Literary Awards, The WA Premier’s Book Awards and The Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards.

by Gabriella Garofalo

Blue jazz, not red, they’re coming
After her as she’s acting coy, 
Voices made sharp when raiding
Trees, or unforgiving waters hissing
Against her first roots, a desire for words-
Shout them out, shout names, stares,
Freeze the fear all over light, stop falling voices,
Steer clear of a weird green 
Among the trees lining streets,
But don’t look if they ask you
Is the rain hiding in your pockets, 
If only snow lies in them- 
Just leave those silly old questions
To desire, will they give up, or will the grass disperse?
No, when God shouts your name 
Young hours of light shall fade away,
And you won't bite your scattering light
When dawn breathes hard, clashing days-
Hold your voice, don’t let her hide
If only among the trees lies silence,
While from new shapes wrath is arising,
And yes, her gaze turns into grass,
Too bad it can’t wound life, nor your sky,
Only two girls shifting each other
For a bit of light, or grass-
By the way, why don't they shout?
Simple as that, look, they’re playing, 
So no voice can rise-
But what about the people over there?
Sadly, they are all gone by now.

Born in Italy some decades ago, Gabriella Garofalo fell in love with the English language at six, started writing poems (in Italian) at six and is the author of these books “Lo sguardo di Orfeo”; “L’inverno di vetro”; “Di altre stelle polari”; “Casa di erba”; “Blue Branches”; “ A Blue Soul”, “After The Blue Rush”.

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.