by Jas Saunders
Sometimes when I’m anxious I’ll write poems on the plateaus of my palms, blue waves of ink flowing within their gradients and ridges When I want to hide those feelings from the rest of the world like a hermit crab tucked inside itself, I’ll share an empty fist, displaying new and delicate fingernails like bleached white seashells washed ashore learning to grow in real time with the rest of me. Published in UWA’s Pelican and Peafowl magazines, as well as Perth’s youth magazine Pulch, Jas Saunders is an Honours (Creative Writing) student at UWA, with an undergrad in English Lit and Public Health. Her writing focuses on liminal spaces, nostalgia, or memory, with representation her younger self would have desired.
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by Yuan Changming
for Qi Hong Taking a walk around the neighborhood at sunset Leaves rustle as if they are crows flapping by In the twilight sky, the moon looms- What if it vanished into an unknown space as the clouds exchange their feelings in a hurry? Seeing a passer-by come my way, I derail my body & thoughts alike What if the planet really comes to a pause during the pandemic? What if social distancing becomes the order of the day forever? What if the season, in other words, lasts between rain and snow? Seeing two teenagers approach, I jump aside and hop on the curb like a lousy dancer as they run along What if the doors of my homeland remain closed until I am too old or too weak to move, to see and kiss my first and last love? What if my family cannot afford to immigrate to Mars from this burning or frozen planet? What if another huge meteorite hits earth hard enough? What if what I know is neither true nor false? Yuan Changming hails with Allen Yuan from poetrypacific.blogspot.ca. Credits include 12 Pushcart nominations & chapbooks (most recently LIMERENCE) besides appearances in Best of the Best Canadian Poetry (2008-17), Poetry Daily & BestNewPoemsOnline, among 1929 others. Yuan both served on the jury and was nominated for Canada's National Magazine (poetry category). by Sienna Taggart
paperbag bush, prickly poppies, creosote ironwood blue phacelia bitter root —the desert’s offspring sewn together, rustling whispering their brisk secrets up the mountain. I taste them on my tongue when rain beckons and calls feel them on my palm, their gummy milky sap drying on my fingertips I walk climbing higher to the Yucca with her sugary waxed cream flowers sheathed in sharp points, roots swelling with sudsy pulp; I stand before her threadlike neck concealed behind a bladed fan cup my hands as wind pulls velvet tears from her cheeks. Sienna Taggart (she/her) is a Creative Writing and English student. Her work has appeared in Dundee University Review of the Arts and The Ekphrastic Review. Sienna lives in El Paso, Texas, with her family and spirited pup, Ronin. She can be found on Instagram @siennaraine_ by Tom Brami
When in poverty, your altitude becomes familiar, and you realize the difference between being short and being short of thrift. You fly and think of falling into the spiral of earth without obligation of forming belief, like a peach prone to bruising. We are all air bound, arranged in failure and moving. Observe her husband below. Right now, he’s changing by walking the feet to an invisible line. He is a kind of glass she held to the sun, an emergent quality present in ways or degrees. In the future, you will recognize your face as a groper probing a fisherman’s hand. You’re a boy crawling into a crevice to sleep. Anemones stain the sea; birds are lost in migrating sand. You use them as half buried pillows. Outside you, a ship is casting a frost that freezes the ocean. The snow is calm and reddish, prone to bruising. Wreathing clouds are suspended on a sphere. Tom Brami is an Australian writer and filmmaker working on a PhD in Madison, Wisconsin. His poetry can be found in Of/with, otoliths, Futures Trading, Southerly, and Foam:e. by Emily Bartlett
We navigate familiar rocks as if scattered by a hatted chef with careless, exquisite precision. Driftwood charred and bloated, washed up, and our silence is sliced open by the cries of seabirds. And other pieces of whole float stiff; crab shell, cicada wing, twig, cast adrift, sucked into cavernous spaces, spat into currents laced with torpid, yellowing foam. How long to roam before our final resting place? You really have to wonder. Never before has this ocean made me afraid, except on such days, when churning water blurs; seclusion hoped for but not promised beyond the waves. Emily ‘Emmy’ Bartlett (nee Walsh) is an Australian writer, artist and Pleiadian starseed living between Sydney and Coffs Harbour, NSW. She runs a creative agency and is writing her debut novel, Ozora. Emily is the assistant editor of Plumwood Mountain Journal and loves etymology, singing and the feeling of being underwater. by Julian Palacios
tonight i taste like warm, wet nothing. like an excess of self pushed into the crevasses, and loneliness. it tastes like lemon and looks like a boy pretending to be the girl of your dreams staring out the window, elbow deep in bubbles, and calling upon some primal part of herself that waits to do something stupid and make one glorious, defining mistake. apron on, children running amok a fervent heartbeat on hardwood floors; the idea born no sooner than it is dying. waiting for you to come home so that she can begin again. her animation, your imagination, me holding my breath, mouthing the words i want her to say but trying to be quiet. Julian (he/they) is a writer, cat dad, psychology student and aspiring vampire. He writes poems and gets his hands dirty with good-old fashioned glue-stick and paint making mixed-media collage - all about gender and sexuality, love, obsession and dreams. You can find his work on Instagram @patroclus.incarnate. by Scott-Patrick Mitchell Two Black Cats Night does not know where her shore ends and their fur begins. In the dark, one cat could easily stand in for the other. Street light pours invented sun into pavement. Bushes brim with wing and insect purr. One cat calls to the other as if a bird is caught in its throat: affectionate shorthand. A nest of rubbing. Kerb crests the edge of street as if a dune. Shard of broken taillight, a sea rose. The other cat answers with a long stretch: night envies feline’s starless arch, how it will never dissolve into day. A walker-by can feel the touch of four green moons watching them. The cold regards everything. Movement bells as if Christmas, coming early. They make a playground out of dark, chase each other until the sun colours the world in. Ecologies & Eulogies
Elsewhere, other ecologies are collapsing. A koala clings to the top of a burnt blue-gum, searching for leaf and kin, her paws pink, blistering. In the artery of the Murray- Darling, cod and carp bloat as the current chokes for oxygen. Across two hot days, flying foxes amass grave. In an outcrop, a black-flanked rock wallaby gathers her offspring near: wind whimpers scent of surveyor. Serenade for end days: my mother’s fever rambles from her throat. She tells me how every wrinkle across her body is a lineage, endangered or extinct. How, as a child, she wanted to make the world into an Ark. But the only wood she could craft was a coffin she called a home. Afloat on elegy, she struggles for breath. Elsewhere, other eulogies are being carved into earth and bone. Scott-Patrick Mitchell (SPM) is a non-binary poet who lives as a guest on Whadjuk Noongar Land. In 2019, they won MPU’s Martin Downey Urban Realist Poetry Award. SPM was recently shortlisted for the 2020 and 2021 Red Room Poetry Fellowship. SPM’s debut collection, Clean, will be released early 2022. by Dani Netherclift
Everything collapses. The moon hangs low a bottom-heavy boat gravid with ballast slipping snail trails, lighting the way for more night, this cycle of terrible sorrows an accumulation of griefs, imagine a susurration, dead leaves gathered, faded things like the left scales of butterflies at the ends of their lives almost colourless, all joy leached out, and today, today blew in so many wrongs that might never be righted, and the mild-faced moon will not care, will never dim the silver shine of the spill – those bodies, drifting, their eyes wide, mouths like funnels, and no matter how you call and call, they will not hear, cannot look your way. Dani Netherclift lives surrounded by mountains in the Victoria high country. She was the 2020 winner of the AAWP/The Slow Canoe Creative Nonfiction Prize, and has recent work in Plumwood Mountain Journal, Rabbit, Stilts, Mascara and Meniscus. by Stephanie Powell
From the sea of the backyard you emerge and look as though you’re in need of watering. We are beneath the sky, a Filipino-swatch blue, a light paste of trout-shaped clouds. The air is dry and the bush-figs are dropping. In a different version of this afternoon, I’d pick you up as though you were the child and ask, what are gardens to old men? You would say something like, something to be tender to, something to work on. Then get back to work. It would be the answer I am expecting, though I’m not convinced that it belongs to you. With the price of petrol, semi-retirement- there is more time spent walking in circles with the hose, making space for paving stones. The city muted, on upturned glass-roots at the end of the street. Breakfast is coffee, newspaper ink, two slices of toast. Magpies warbling like heavy smokers in the trees. You grow things to the taste of bees, with your gentle, gentleman hands. What a proud man- to have seen him off to work in the morning, igniting the sensor lights in the driveway at the end of the day. A few games of online solitaire played before bed. Unwinding in the already unwind -ed night. There you go again chasing the birds off the new grass seed. Your new ways of working- hands waving, madcap under the Jacarandas. Stephanie Powell grew up in Melbourne, Australia. She has spent the last few years living in London (with some short stints in Canada and Kenya). She writes and takes photos. Her collection Bone was published by Halas Press in July 2021. Her work has also appeared in Ambit Magazine, Ink, Sweat and Tears, The Dawntreader, Dream Catcher, Spelt Magazine and Sunday Mornings at the River. by Jackson Machado-Nunes
sits hugged by a rope in the waters of Mo’orea French Polynesia within the pitchless hum of the ocean she is the largest coral i adopted a blushing savannah brown a colour you surely would have worn. we all have different ways of keeping you alive some of us still mourn you some light a candle for you around your birthday and Christmas and the anniversary of your death some of us probably avoid thinking of you altogether attempting to move on in a way as swiftly as it seemed you left. i never cried i never attended your funeral over zoom but my views on death after all are a little alt-left but what i did know was that coral gives our planet half of our oxygen so i bought Earth a coral named it after you i felt it only fitting as on many occasions we were forced to steal extra breaths because our language together was laughter. Jackson is a Meanjin based non-binary poet with a passion for Mother Earth, and a mission to see queer representation become commonplace in Australia. They’re currently studying a BFA at QUT, where they were a co-chairperson of the QUT Literary Salon. Find their work on Instagram @deku.eku |
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April 2022
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Photo used under Creative Commons from John Donges