by Sam Morley
The steering is slack until you crank the gurgling outboard motor. We push past the last buoy and I find myself standing. Over open water, air circles the blackness underneath. I pull my children closer. Cormorants dive, find nothing and rise as oily shadows up a wall. I cut the engine and we slide slowly on the skin of the lake – chiaroscuro in a graphite field. Water mounds, then wears away. The children scuttle and chiack. I feel something slick, a vague threat closing, a regret I can’t repair. On the expanding cross-hatch of lead I watch an accumulation of shapes contours of nothing that do not remain long enough to define themselves. Sam Morley is a Melbourne based poet and secondary school teacher. His work has been published by Cordite, Red Room Poetry, The Hunter Writer's Centre and shortlisted in the ACU Poetry Prize 2020.
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by Helen Loughlin
I’m dreaming of driving over the Forth Road Bridge with you, and Curly Wurly panting and laughing on the back seat. I see the snow over Fife and the long road ahead looking to Sutherland. Oh Sutherland, your cold recesses, your sad battles, your defeated Romans and the cold, deep innards of your lochs and your lands and reaching Scots Pines. Where I saw your Pictish symbol stones, the Migdale Hoard, and mighty Suilven rising from your still rock. Crossing the Firths along the East coast to get to you sustain me here. Now as I walk the streets of Camperdown and Newtown these hot, stolen streets and land shadowed by the Moreton Bay Figs buckling the pavements, negotiating the waves of the buttress roots only slightly defacing the paths and, in places, defining them, looking for a way onwards. I love these trees and their march along this East coast where the tale of the route begins over and over and seems never to end. Helen Loughlin is a poet living in Sydney. Her work has been published in journals including Southerly and Hermes and she's edited a number of magazines including Phoenix Review. She's currently working on her first collection, City of the Dead. by Tessa Milton
soft tissue wings flit the lightest of touches like butterflies her kisses linger-- too long after she’s gone Tessa Milton is a writer, poet and QUT Fine Arts graduate. ‘Flutters’ is her first poetry publication and hopes to see more of her poetry out in the world soon. Tessa’s poetry draws on the nostalgia of her rural childhood in contrast with her urban and worldly experiences into adulthood. by Svetlana Sterlin
autographed, antiquated town bustling, possessive pride pretensions sprawling protectively over no great art. garments of the past wrapped in youth haloed by the fringe of being monotonous. any attempt at ornamentation is frequently coupled with a cherub’s head. girls most of whom had a rather alien appearance were shouting defiance at their traditional enemies. life and occupation the vigour of youthful lungs glad goggle eyes. sleepers lie dreamlessly forever crooned to by the glamor of traffic. i can’t describe how i felt the teeniest drop to the naked eye i would go down to my grave unwept, unhonoured, and unsung.* *This is a found poem. Words from Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Anne of the Island. After years of relocation, Svetlana Sterlin was raised by her Russian parents in Brisbane, Australia, where she completed a BFA and contributes to Our Culture Magazine and ScreenRant. Her work appears in several publications, including Entropy Magazine, Santa Fe Writers Project, and AndAlso Books’ 2018 anthology, ‘Within/Without These Walls’. by Peter Mitchell
I was a silhouette in the backroom of The Pleasure Chest.* You blue-blurred past the glory hole. I recognised you. (For some years, I had drunk your image down.) I followed you; I kneeled by the hole in the wall. You were a profile on the other side, your navy-blue King Gee shorts fire-water to my need. Your glory-stick bloomed in my mouth like a flame-red rose. Your prisoner, I stumbled dim corridors to the cubicles at the back. Your fingers, made for piano keys, pressed my shoulders, the dusty floor my altar again. The thickness of your signature charmed my body. At dinner, you whispered You're eminently fuckable. *‘The Pleasure Chest’: The Pleasure Chest is a sex-on-premises venue in lower George Street, Sydney. Peter Mitchell is a queer writer living with the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) in regional New South Wales, The author of the poetry chapbooks, Conspiracy of Skin (Ginninderra Press, 2018) and The Scarlet Moment (Picaro Press, 2009), they write poetry, memoir, short fiction, essays and literary criticism. Conspiracy of Skin was awarded a Highly Commended in the 2019 Wesley Michel Wright Prize for Poetry. His website is at www.peter-mitchell.com.au. by Daragh Byrne
Gull packs, perched on surf. Over the headland, a half-moon smirks cold glow on half-clad sun worshippers — five p.m. blue sky perquisite of work from home orders. Salt-skinned, curt with the earth for no fixed fault; for a moment, scuppered in my berth. Nature seems uncertain, or abrupt until a single jacaranda blossom lightly lands on sand, softens all belief, stands sings me slow relief. Daragh Byrne is an Irish poet living in Sydney, Australia. He’s published in The Blue Nib, The Honest Ulsterman, Backstory and others. His poems were recognised as Highly Commended in the Westival Poetry Competition 2020 and the W.B. Yeats Poetry Prize for Australia 2019. He runs the Sydney Poetry Lounge. by Simon Kindt
when Ma lost her third in the red year that scorched and burning year we couldn't afford the box or the priest so daddy wrapped the small splinter of the body folded stones into the cloth and cast it to the river and how Ma’s body wept for weeks those hours she stood at the sink pressing out the milk swollen with an ache beyond all metaphor how she'd wake sudden in the night at the sound of a child crying from across the way and there against the window silhouetted in the lamplight I watched her weeping stains spreading on her blouse light washing through the air hands pressing out the milk the letting down of grief Simon Kindt is a writer, musician, teacher and performance artist who lives and works in Meanjin. His work is interested in myth and art-as-ritual. by Courtney Thomson
I don’t know how to be. In the room, with a bed too great for my body. Rest my arm around my waist to feign company, until it numbs. Press two fingers against the vein to feel a pulse. Whisper goodnight aloud to hear the word. Slide fingers into my lone hand’s embrace; I need to find solace in a world of four walls and bleached sheets. I swing in this restless trapeze waiting for sleep to catch me but I’m tangled in memory’s net. My mother said, I need to let the past go but I can’t control where my mind parks; I am only a passenger. Courtney Thomson is a QUT Creative and Professional Writing graduate. She has special interest in poetry and personal essay. Her work has appeared in Voiceworks, Concrescence and Woolf Pack. by Linda Kohler Cyan I call toss on bedding intimacy with fire. Meet me on the cool axis where our seaweed bods glint civil enough to grant a little taking of warmth in nights. Let’s speak of azure and deep indigo, being wrapped in water or sky, being buoyant. Meet me in seafoam green where kindles of emeralds crest the sands of unions. Meet me in throes of cyan, in waves, let the sun imprint itself on our subtractions. Let’s talk of immersion, submersion. Let’s ally lightness and depth and tangle. The Snail after the artwork of the same name by Henri Matisse Us in spiral tearing strips off each other: we’re one in many pieces; eyes locked, slinging palettes, skimming razors. When our spiraling ends we cling to windows-- joined-- gluing each other where we are torn. We nibble each other’s shells to be strong, we behold, retreat, and tender, we emerge tearing again. Chitons
What if I could babysit? Clean your radulae, I’d say after I’d fed them seaweed, then I’d bed their rocks in tight, fuss over their girdles. In the shallows my toes are duly armoured: mother-chiton-me treads light. I wonder if I could know each chiton by shell, by name, by the way they curl up in their layers, cradle their particular furrows. I could be classed chiton. I could be mother of all chitons by what’s rutted under my feet. Linda Kohler lives and writes in South Australia, on Kaurna land. She's worked mainly as an arts teacher and currently assists with her own children's flourish. Her poetry appears in Pink Cover Zine and elsewhere. by Angela Peita
1. Leave this realm as you know it. Watch the world rise around you in a wall of distress sounds. Listen to the loop of news reports, the tick of statistics climbing the chart, the whispers of prophecies to come. Watch as your world becomes a distant memory, and is replaced with this new dimension you do not know how to navigate. 2. Begin your incubation process. Make your world small. Hide in your dark bedroom, doom scroll through social media, let the panic set in. Become insular. Make the inside of your head the walls of the world. Relive the dreams you had growing up where you are yelling for help but your voicebox won’t make a sound. Listen to the echo of your thoughts bounce off your one sided conversation. 3. Accept your new supernatural state. Celebrate the work you don’t have to do, the awkward social settings you get to avoid. Lean into to the feeling of existing outside the limits, of breaking out of the structures you felt trapped in. Settle into the quiet. 4. Emerge as your new ghost self. Attempt to hide your surprise when the world begins to return to the way you remember it. Discover you have lost the knowledge to be human. Notice how the sun is too bright, the cars are too loud, the conversation is never easy. Worry that the transformation is complete. 5. Try to unlearn this departure. Put on your favourite lipstick, pretend to care about the return of routine, practice saying your name into the mirror. Ignore the shifting degrees that mean the before will never quite line up with the after, ignore that you now think in before and after, wonder how it is possible to exist in both. 6. Even though you are back now, understand that the leaving was permanent. That you have gone through a doorway that you can’t return to, that you can only move forward. See how your world is now a reflection, an image on a still lake, a backwards carbon copy covering the surface of where you’ve been. Angela Peita is a spoken word artist, youth worker, workshop facilitator and live art producer. She is co-founder and co-director of Ruckus Slam, the hugely popular Brisbane slam and arts company. |
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February 2021
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Photo used under Creative Commons from John Donges