Emeritus Professor Elizabeth Webby, AM FAHA
9 February 1942 – 6 August 2023

Respected scholar, literary critic and author / editor of over 200 works, including books, articles, and reviews. The following is a very short selection of some of her many writings about nineteenth century women poets, poetry, and print culture, a field she defined through her work.
Elizabeth Webby, Early Australian Poetry: An Annotated Bibliography, Hale & Iremonger, 1982.
‘Born to Blush Unseen: Some Nineteenth Century Women Poets’ in A Bright and Fiery Troop: Australian Women Writers of the Nineteenth Century. Ed Debra Adelaide, Penguin, 1988.
‘Introduction’ The Penguin Book of Australian Ballads, eds Elizabeth Webby and Philip Butterrs, Penguin, 1993.
‘Writers, Printers, Readers: The Production of Australian Literature before 1855’ ALS 13.4 1988.
‘Foreword’ by Elizabeth Webby in Katie Hansord, Colonial Australian Women Poets: Political Voice and Feminist Traditions, Anthem Press, 2021.

Photograph: Rosalind Webby
 
 
For Elizabeth Webby

I could say that I first met Elizabeth Webby at an ASAL conference. And I was incredibly excited to, and to first see her, looking on in the audience, as I nervously presented my first ever paper on a little-known nineteenth-century woman poet, knowing that she was the almost only other person to have written or ever thought much about her. I think that she felt the same excitement, from the other side, that somebody was finally interested and pursuing that same obscure subject, the things less recognised, that she had also given her time to, because of the same recognition of a huge imbalance and a desire for justice – and had never forgotten despite many other priorities pressing, years ago. But it isn’t exactly true. I first met Elizabeth Webby in a more unusual place than that. I was there looking for something to make sense of everything (or maybe just anything) through. I was looking for other women’s poetry. I suppose at its heart I was looking for someone who thought, or was, a bit like me… somebody who expressed themselves and their queerness against the ways of the world in ways that I could understand and feel understood through.

The place I met Elizabeth in was a book called Early Australian Poetry: An Annotated Bibliography. One of several books that Elizabeth wrote, and this one she had published in 1982, the year before I was born. This is a more strange book though; unlike any other book I’d read. It incredibly contains all the titles, author names or their initials, dates, page numbers, and a frequently utterly hilarious brief descriptive note (something like: ‘on a recent bank robbery’ or ‘long, rambling love poem’ or ‘wishes he were in a less restrained society such as Italy’…) for the hundreds upon hundreds of poems that were published in newspapers in so-called ‘Australia’ before the year 1850. I knew I could find more women who were poets in there, if nowhere else, and so I went looking through it all very carefully. Of course, that was how I first found Eliza Hamilton Dunlop, the poet whom I was talking about at the ASAL conference where I met Elizabeth for the first time in person. It was how I first found most of the poets. But before that, I was already in awe of this incredible book full of the potential for answers, doorways into more questions. And in awe of its author. If that wasn’t incredible enough, she later told me she had wanted to go all the way up to the year 1900, in writing her amazing bibliography of newspaper poems – but she’d had a baby. We laughed. I’d also had a baby not too long ago. In fact, my new baby was at the conference with me, little Arlo. Once I’d found the numerous entries of poems in Early Australian Poetry: An Annotated Bibliography, I knew this was what I had been looking for: women poets who had been consistent contributors to newspaper poetry. Then I found the little book of some of some of Dunlop’s poems that Elizabeth had published, also in the early eighties. I learned a lot by opening and going through those doorways in Elizabeth Webby’s annotated bibliography. It undoubtedly changed me, to embark and pursue the questions I had about gender and poetry and the past and the contexts of production and reception so deeply like that, and to be allowed and even encouraged to, flowing with myself into writing instead of trying to fit the wrong ways in the world, and thinking of ways through it all. And Elizabeth’s encouragement was so unwavering, warm, certain, and loving. She was eventually an examiner of my PhD thesis, when it was completed. She was also tough, had high expectations, and expressed frustration, seeing me at an event on women’s writing after this, that I had not kept going, done more work. I didn’t know how I could explain to her, but everything then seemed to be going all wrong in my life… I was on my own, my mother had died, and I had fallen into a dark place of hopelessness about the world and all memory and meaning. Somehow, Elizabeth still believed in me even there, and encouraged and supported me to turn my thesis into a book. I still pinch myself now that I did it. She believed in me, even when I didn’t. And because she did, I somehow could. That was how it happened. This was a part of her magic. I remember that I cried the first time she signed an email she had written me, love. It really meant the world to me to have her support, and always will. I know she gave this same gift so generously to so many people. I am heartbroken that she has now left this world. We know being only one person, it can easily feel like things are too big and too impossible to change. I have felt this many times, but I have also felt in myself how her wisdom and curiosity and generosity and kindness really did affirm things, change things, make things possible, make a difference, and so I think, can ours.

Katie Hansord

Vale Alf Taylor

(18.11.1945 – 29.7.2023)

Last weekend brought sad news of the passing of Alf Taylor. Alf, a Yuat Nyoongar man, brought his unique perspective to bear on the fields of Aboriginal literature in particular and of Australian Literature more generally for nearly three decades. He produced a substantial opus which has impacted on many different audiences and will long continue to do so.

I first met Alf at the launch of Winds in 1994 at Dumbertang in Perth. I remember he was cracking jokes and put me at my ease. Later when I was compiling the material with Rosemary van den Berg and Angeline O’Neill for the anthology, Those Who Remain will Always Remember, I asked him if he would be interested in doing a piece about how he started writing. The work he produced for our anthology became the seed of his astonishing autobiography, God, the Devil and Me.

Taylor was a member of the Stolen Generations. He grew up in the 1950s and 1960s in the Benedictine Monastery at New Norcia in Western Australia. His writing opens a door for many readers onto this troubled period of history, giving us a heart-felt personal account of someone who lived through it. In an interview with me he said that in the mission the children were told that ‘our Aboriginal culture and Aboriginal language was a mortal sin.’ He recreates the world of childhood in his short fiction, poetry and memoir, bringing alive the resilience, intelligence and creativity of children – their care for each other, their love of Country, their ability to heal, the weight of memory, their penchant for playing tricks, and their strong bonds as young Aboriginal people. He also brings to it the piercing vision of the adult – the clear-sighted and uncompromising critique of empire and of the dysfunctional elements of the church. 

He describes life in New Norcia in God, The Devil and Me. The book is characterised by his very fluid sense of humour which became a tool of survival for him both as a child and an adult. In the interview he said: ‘without humour … I would have been dead’. He loved writing about ‘clowns’, joke-cracking characters who laugh above all at themselves and made other people laugh along too. Alf would always make people chuckle. His writing is infectious but thoughtful as well, and often pointed.

Taylor was a master stylist; he’s a deft satirist, sharp but generous, and a careful observer of people. His poetry and fiction bear evidence of the skilful use of Aboriginal English and the Nyoongar language. His writing gifts us a rare and precious glimpse of the living language of Aboriginal people. He was fortunate to benefit from the expertise of Magabala Press who were able, for example, to provide an editor such as the Nyoongar writer, Rosemary van den Berg who edited Long Time Now. This relationship nurtured his work and allowed it to flourish. 

Taylor was a master storyteller. Much of his work bears the trace of the spoken language(s) and the embodied encounter of storytelling. This included his skilful use of humour and irony which always kept me guessing as a reader. 

Alf will be remembered by his writing. A versatile and inventive writer, He wrote two books of poetry, Singer Songwriter (2000) and Winds (1994), a book of short stories, Long Time Now (2001), a memoir/autobiography, God, the Devil and Me (2021), and his selected poems and short stories, Cartwarra or what? (2022). His work also appears in the anthology Rimfire (2000).

Taylor and his work are a bright star that mesmerizes us, captures our attention and holds it. As a non-Aboriginal reader and teacher, I’ve seen him enthrall students across the world, in Australian classrooms and lecture theatres, and in Germany, France, Spain and China.

It has been a great privilege to read and teach Alf’s work; a privilege that students all over the world have shared and will continue to share. Many of my non-Aboriginal colleagues who read, teach and write on his work have talked to me about the sense of great good fortune they feel in coming upon his work and the responsibility it engenders in them. His passing makes the gift of his writing all the more precious and pressing.

Anne Brewster
UNSW

Funny Ethnics

by Shirley Le

ISBN: 9781922863737

Affirm Press

Reviewed by MEGAN CHEONG

My greatest flaw as a critic is my inability to maintain critical distance. I actively seek out books that I expect will resonate with me: a novel about a mother who writes poetry, a collection of essays exploring the nature of intergenerational trauma. Shirley Le’s debut novel, Funny Ethnics, is about Sylvia Nguyen – the only child of Vietnamese refugees – and the formative experiences that are supposed to culminate in her ‘coming of age’. Instead, Sylvia exhibits Sinbad levels of endurance as she sweats through multiple cycles of the same institutionally-inflicted suffering (tutoring centre, selective high school, law degree) until she is rendered ‘physically incapable of absorbing any more dry information’ (213). This reads like a criticism but is, for me, the most relatable aspect of Funny Ethnics, as well as the characteristic that gives the novel its curiously flat topography.

Other, arguably less profound but no less familiar details of Sylvia’s world: the ‘cork coasters of all shapes and sizes’ (1) deployed to protect the prized marble dining table where Sylvia strategically chooses to announce her decision to drop out of law and pursue writing ‘Just in case things became physical’ (1). The hilariously militaristic but actually dead-serious sentiment underlying her selective girls’ school motto, ‘Work. Conquers. All.’ (84). The catalogue of media clips showcasing Australia’s particular brand of early 2000s racism (John Marsden’s Lee, Chris Lilley’s Ricky Wong). The cringing parody of her dad, with his ‘beaming moon face’, (2) and her mum, first glimpsed praying to Buddha beneath a ‘hairspray-lacquered’ (2) perm. Funny Ethnics made me laugh so hard it induced a kind of out-of-body event in which I saw, with perfect horror, that I was laughing at the same Asian stereotypes that I’ve been laughing at, for the sake of everybody else’s comfort, my whole life. It is precisely Le’s ability to write in that uncomfortable sliver of an intersection between stereotype and reality that makes her novel so funny – I laughed because it was true, and to relieve myself from the discomfort of the fact that it was true.

Yet though Sylvia spends much of the novel criticising her ‘stupid brain’ (191), hers are not the kind of ‘self-hating jokes’ (147) for which she dismisses Fat Pizza’s Tahir Bilgiç. Beneath the fear that she cannot fulfill her parents’ dreams of entering into the sort of profession that would earn their community ‘a bit of respect’ (9), and beyond the realisation that she has no desire to be a lawyer/banker/doctor, is a bedrock of pride in Western-suburbs Vietnamese culture, and in her family. This pride lends the caricatures of extended family members and other noteworthy personalities in the Viet community the affectionate tone of family anecdotes and directs the pointy end of her observational satire at the encompassing society that denies her and her community respect in the first place. While some of the girls at Sydney Ladies’ College shriek when the ibises that inhabit the school grounds get too close, Sylvia knows from ‘a 7am Google sesh in the computer room’: that the ibises had been displaced from their natural marsh habitats due to urbanisation and river regulation. It didn’t make sense to paint them as pushy or ill-mannered animals when it was our fault they had to make a home in the city, sifting through human trash. (87)

Similarly, Funny Ethnics critiques Australian society for upholding an immigration system that relegates those asylum seekers who are permitted into the country to the literal fringes of the city, at the same time as looking down on the ‘bird-brained Asian’ (68) approach to migrating towards the centre. As one ABC listener whines midway through the book, ‘I drive past a selective school every morning and there are so many Asian students. How do we fix that?’ (57).

Rather than taking the well-trodden path of attempting to garner empathy for the Other by offering up a model of the model minority, Le gives us Sylvia, who consistently fails to flourish in the self-fulfilling machine of Australia’s allegedly meritocratic education system. Instead of expanding, Sylvia’s world contracts when she enters Sydney Ladies’ College. Within the hierarchy of the school, in which the ‘long-legged white girls’ are considered ‘rare and exotic beauties in a sea of ethnics’ (87), the Vietnamese Dux bemoans coming ‘second to a curry’ (82) on a Chemistry exam, and the Chinese and Hong Kong girls gossip about ‘how stuffed’ Vietnam must be ‘if Angelina Jolie had to adopt kids from there’ (172), Sylvia’s only closest friend is Tammy, ‘another Viet from out west’ (63). Sylvia’s days are truncated by the long commute to and from the city centre and continue to be curtailed by the ‘four trains’ she has to take to and from uni: ‘Yagoona to Lidcombe, Lidcombe to Strathfield, Strathfield to Epping, Epping to Macquarie Uni – and back’ (190). Her love interests are few and decidedly uninspiring, if not outright repellent, and over time, she even falls out of touch with Tammy, eventually listing Janine, ‘a Christian Leb chick from Blacktown’ (153) and her only friend at university, as her emergency contact on her first visit to the gynaecologist. I find myself bracing for the kind of prologue in which the protagonist ends up utterly alone and chronically depressed, when, very near the end of the novel, Sylvia attends a poetry slam at the Bankstown Arts Centre where she finally encounters a mirror of the self-respect that has, up until this point, made it so difficult for her to get on with her life.

I loved Funny Ethnics. Not, in the end, for the many ways in which it resonated with me but for the ways that it makes space for itself within the coming-of-age genre: for Le’s rejection of the narrative shapes readily available to her as a novelist, and of the cliché of the quietly brilliant Asian just waiting to be noticed. Sylvia’s story is less one of self-discovery, than it is a long and arduous journey towards understanding that it is a failure of Australian society that there isn’t somewhere for everyone to belong.

MEGAN CHEONG is a teacher, writer and critic living and working on the land of the Wurundjeri people. Her writing has been published in Sydney Review of Books, Kill Your Darlings and Meanjin. She is the recipient of a 2022 CA-SRB Emerging Critic Fellowship.

Acanthus

by Claire Potter

Giramondo

Reviewed by LESH KARAN
 
 
 
 
Acanthus is Claire Potter’s fourth collection of poetry. Potter writes in a language that weaves mythology with nature, fantasy with reality and then wraps it all up in tulle. If I had to write a one-word review, surreal feels apt, but I don’t, so I’ll start with another one: “acanthus”. This is to say that my first instinct is to look for a titular poem, because in my mind titular poems somehow tie up the work in a loose bow. There isn’t one. Instead, I find a note that follows the contents page, where I learn that acanthus is a plant. Here, I am also offered a sliver of ancient Greek history, of how the leaves became a motif: ‘Passing this votive basket entwined in foliage [on the grave], Callimachus decided to carve it in stone’. A Google search reveals that acanthus leaves are the leaves typically carved into Corinthian columns to symbolise rebirth, immortality and resurrection. This hints at both transmigration and transmutation – of transforming into another being in another time-place.

In her introductory note Potter also quotes Derrida: ‘everything will flower at the edge of a desolate tomb’, and writes that ‘it is on the overlapping edges of these two accounts that this writing might be said to begin.’ I take the words ‘overlapping edges’ to be the heart of the collection. What happens in overlapping edges? The blurb on the back cover tells me of other-worldly ‘literary spaces’ that the reader can fall through. However, it is the self-referential nature of the poem ‘Counterintuitive’ (p17) that further illuminates:

I could never avoid the truth I’d discovered when I first engaged with texts: the self-evident fact of there being no reader nor subject-matter – only images and feelings in a sort of eternity…
— Gerald Murnane

There is writing that escapes the head, rustles
            like stars of purple thistle,
moves like the tiniest bones of clavicle, tilts like
            a compass from the centre to radius to peregrine. This writing
        cannot be analysed or
understood by conventional means. Its solitude is written
     in a vine that veins a crumbling ledge, the foliage
            of a dream in amber, a map folded then refolded
into the shingles of a summer fan
…

The Gerald Murnane quote could stand in as the epigraph to the entire collection, and the poem itself, an addendum to the note. A handful of poems feel meta and/or performative in this way. For example, I see the first stanza of the poem ‘Errand’ (p38) as what Potter is doing with her poetry:

In and out of leaves the blue tits sew the garden
because to the mother bird in my mind I’ve tied
an infinite string     as she zig-     zags fervently     shirring
distance in a loose smocking of air

By which I mean Potter is the blue mother bird fervently shirring distance with an infinite (eternal) string to create a loose smocking air: the writing that escape the head.

Another poem I want to speak to is ‘The Art of Sideways’ (p 55), because I feel it could stand in as the loose bow that ties the work together. Here, things are ‘layered / and overlapping like shelves of ancient papyruses’. They are also askew: ‘rain can fall sideways’, ‘eyes look aslant’ and ‘there is an angle of forty-five degrees’. Direction (winter light is ‘a trajectory that points in all directions’) and time (a snake’s skin is ‘a simple clock / turning every so often leaving a scaled topography behind’) are messed with, too. Because in such worlds, time, beings and direction don’t play by reality’s rules. To various degrees, these are the themes that imbue the collection’s 45 poems.

Themes and self-referentiality aside, it is the imagery – alluded to at the tail end of the Gerald Murnane quote – that simply astounds me.

A swan sails her cygnets along a stretch of river
—momentarily they rouse in a ghostly armada

a flotilla of milk wings billowing across the grey water
the mother dips her head beneath a lid of duckweed

leaving a swivel of white teardrop behind

Newspapers describe the father as having flown straight into
a building and died without mentioning how or why

The thought takes me back to Greece, to a girl called Scylla who ended
a war by cutting a lock of hair from her father’s sleeping head

and passing it to Minos, his enemy. Scylla was shunned
then chased by her father until a deity changed her into a seabird

The swans preen layer by layer, a soft smoothing by the underside
of the beak, the ruffle and discard of superfluous feathers

The river plays like a silver hook in their glass eyes

…
(‘The Glass Eye’, p9)

Potter’s imagery is startling in its originality, and at times haunting, such as in ‘The Glass Eye’. But when it is sewn together with narratives and spheres of another time-place, such as Greek mythology, the poem erupts little sparks in my mind: How does the swan’s preening and discarding of feathers relate to cutting a lock of hair? Is the mother swan Scylla? And why is the river a silver hook? The answers don’t necessarily matter, but the questions, the doors that open into thinking and seeing and feeling, do.

Another favourite is ‘The Hidden Side to Love’ (p25). It feels personal – autobiographical – given the first-person voice, and is simultaneously magical, melding the domestic with the natural:

All summer, the bees worked
between the bells of laburnum

sockets of foxglove, blades of lavender
—they saw a task and rose to it

I busy myself with the washing
untwisting funnels of sock, boughs of jumper

rosettes of flannel

The images in this first part of the poem sets up the overlapping of the bees with the speaker: ‘the bells of laburnum / sockets of foxglove, blades of lavender’ mirror ‘funnels of sock, boughs of jumper / rosettes of flannel’. This is how the speaker and the bees are subsumed into one being; likewise, their seeing a task and rising to it without being asked. And in the second half of the poem –

I look down my dress and see spikes of burdock
thistles in plaits hanging to the ground

Crayons, soldiers, ropes of daisy
the couch, the doorknob, the stairs—

They all gather to me

Until I stand and rub my hind legs emphatically
until I disengage everything

to its proper place
and emerge like a queen

made anew from decades of trying

– I see the burdock thistles stuck to the speaker’s dress as the chores that gather to her. And her decades of trying as acts of love, where a worker bee can become a Queen bee. Such is the magic of such love, and its music (there is much beautiful slant rhyme in Potter’s poetry, too).

‘The Hidden Side to Love’, I discover, was published in Meanjin (Summer 2016 and online). The only difference I note is the lack of full stops in the collection’s version. This aspect of form is representative of the whole collection: there is, pointedly, no full stops at the end of lines (if a sentence ends there) or paragraphs (in the case of prose poems) – in fact, there’s minimal punctuation altogether; and when full stops appear, they do so rarely, only in the middle of a line, where a sentence has ended, but not always. Instead, Potter uses line breaks, cesura, dashes (sometime multiple in a row to create a solid line) and indented text. Also, many of the works are prose poems; if not, then the lines in several lineated poems echo prose in their line lengths. It’s all very contemporary and lends to the orphic atmosphere of blurring the edges: Where does one thought/idea/image begin and end?

The last poem I want to speak to is my absolute favourite: ‘Metamorphosis’ (p 19). It is a prose poem of two paragraphs and the speaker is a spider; no, the speaker is inside a spider, and we see the world through the speaker’s eyes looking through the spider’s eight eyes:

I wake inside a spider at the pivot of a web. It feels like a graduation from my previous state until the breeze starts up and my webbed skirt starts to give. I cling to the silk threads, tilting backwards and forwards as though pinned to a warbling rocking chair …

I peer out from my lacy steeple. My eight eyes dissect ‘IL ov eN ew Yo rk 20 07’ on a mossed-over mug—crossed-eyed, the sun rotates in a wheel of sixteen. I’m whispering a name—Rumpelstilzchen? … I will wrap my golden thread …

This poem gives me joy to no end. It is playful. I can see then webbed skirt and feel the warbling rocking chair, but what gives me the most child-like glee is the visual representation of ‘I love New York 2007’ dissected into eight pairs of letters, for the spiders eight eyes, and then sun rotating in a wheel of sixteen, for the cross-eyed-ness. And, of course, anything is possible here because we have the whisper of the name Rumpelstilzchen, he who turned silk into gold in the eponymous fairy tale.

To circle back to the beginning, the introductory note, blurb and self-referential nature of ‘Counterintuitive’ might feel as if Potter has gone to much length to explain the work, suggesting that the poetry is challenging; and it is, in that it asks you to disrupt the logical. Thus, as a reader, I see these elements as foundational: that ‘crumbling ledge’ from which to enter the work. I also see them as an invitation: to follow Alice down the rabbit hole, so your subconscious, your inner world, can meet Potters’ on the page. And with that invitation, I find I am free to fall in, to tumble through the labyrinthine worlds without the need to land on my feet – because there is much joy in letting go. And there is much joy to be had here, in Potter’s original, surreal and musical Acanthus.
 

लेश करण LESH KARAN is a Naarm/Melbourne-based poet and essayist. Recent publications include Admissions, a Red Room Poetry anthology, Best of Australian Poems 2022, Australian Poetry Journal, Cordite Poetry Review, Island, Mascara Literary Review and Rabbit, amongst others. She was shortlisted for the 2022 Judith Wright Poetry Prize, and is currently completing a Master of Creative Writing, Publishing and Editing at the University of Melbourne. Lesh is of Fiji Indian heritage.

Gayatri Nair is an Indian-Australian writer, poet and DJ based on the land of the Wangal people of the Eora nation in Sydney’s inner west. She is a member of Sweatshop: Western Sydney Literacy Movement, has qualifications in Law and Arts, and is working in human rights policy, research and advocacy. She is passionate about pride in cultural identity and using art to affect change. Gayatri has been published in Sweatshop Women Volumes 1 and 2, Red Room Poetry, Mascara Literary Review, The Guardian and Swampland Magazine.

Mystics

Last night you saved my life
There was a fire in the building
and I would have slept through it
But you woke me up and we survived

Earlier that day we had seen the impossible
The unbelievable
Whales breaching out past the rocks
An island which I later looked up, called ‘Rangoon’
‘How racist’ I said, the old term for Yangon
A place I once had a visa to but had never been

And we wouldn’t have seen the whales
But for a lone woman on the beach
who told us to look
No phones no cameras,
nothing to capture it
So I’m writing it down now

You said this is where we would consummate our love
And I said ‘yuck isn’t that like about marriage,’
and ownership of a woman through making an heir

But this morning I googled consummate love
it said it was ‘the complete form of love, representing an ideal relationship which people strive towards… it is the ideal kind of relationship’

I can’t stop laughing at the way
you carried the car keys above your head
swimming with one hand raised through the estuary to the beach
Twice people stopped to ask if you were ok

And I wonder if we can ever go back there?
Like an ending in a Satyajit Ray film
But I don’t think I have a visa to that country anymore.

Vyacheslav Konoval is a Ukrainian poet and resident of Kyiv. His poems have appeared in many magazines, including Anarchy Anthology Archive, International Poetry Anthology, Literary Waves Publishing, Sparks of Kaliopa, Reach of the Song 2022, Diogenes for Culture Journal, Scars of my heart from the war, Poetry for Ukraine, Norwich University research center, Impakter, The Lit, Allegro, Innisfree Poetry Journal, Fulcrum, Adirondack Center for Writing, Lothlorien Poetry Journal, Revista Literaria Taller Igitur, Tarot Poetry Journal, Tiny Seed Literature Journal, Best American Poetry Blog, Appalachian Journal Dark Horse. Vyacheslav’s poems were translated into Spanish, French, Scottish, and Polish languages.

Cold drops of rain

Descending from the roof
the melting handfuls of snow.

Moaning and humming
echoes outside the window
the wind plays with the lonely poplar,
bends thin branches.

In the darkness of the apartment
confusion creeps
how is the Bakhmut city
my frontline friend?

Year of Darkness

A snowflake pinches the cheek,
the frost bites jokingly,
the fog is sliding on the ice.

As thunder tears apart a rocket supply,
the heart in pain, strangulation of the throat,
oh, that black fog covered the country.

There are thousands, tens of thousands of them.
Maybe hundreds of thousands
of worldly souls that flew to heaven,
from the sooty piles of smoke from the huts of towns and villages.

God, why such a punishment?

Lesh Karan is a Naarm/Melbourne-based writer and poet. Her work has been published in Best of Australian Poems 2022, Australian Poetry Journal, Cordite Poetry Review, Island, Mascara Literary Review and Rabbit, amongst others. Lesh is currently completing a Master of Creative Writing, Publishing and Editing at the University of Melbourne. She’s of Fiji Indian heritage.

The Floor

She took off her earth-caked shoes
and put them on the floor. On the floor,
she stacked her old notebooks and red pens
drained of ink. She placed her sweat-drenched
leggings on the floor. On the floor, her heart
still racing, too. She piled the organic produce
from farmers’ markets on the floor, alongside
the key holes, acupuncture and Advil. A stone
statue of Lord Ganesha she placed on the floor.
On the floor, his wordlessness, too. The mango
tree from her childhood home, she gently lay
on the floor and saw an orange dove
flutter off. Friends she let go, the friend who
let her go, all on the floor. The ill-fitting careers
she stacked like witches hats in the furthest corner on the floor.
She took her mirror off the wall and set it
flat on the floor, looked at herself
from the ground up. The dream home
she dismantled and stacked on the floor,
next to all the how-to manuals she had bought.
The question she couldn’t answer, she tore
and scattered like seeds on the floor. When
the floor cracks, she putties it
with moonlight, Fleetwood Mac,
fresh Moleskines—
          and continues stacking.

Peter Ramm is a poet and teacher who writes on the Gundungurra lands of the NSW Southern Highlands. His debut poetry collection Waterlines is out now with Vagabond Press. In 2022 he won the prestigious Manchester Poetry Prize. His poems have also won the Harri Jones Memorial Award, The South Coast Writers Centre Poetry Award, The Red Room Poetry Object, and have been shortlisted in the Bridport, ACU, Blake, and the Newcastle Poetry Prizes. His work has appeared in Westerly, Cordite, Plumwood Mountain, The Rialto, Eureka Street, and more.

The Sedulity of Soldier Crabs

Red, red is the sun,
Heartlessly indifferent to time,
The wind knows, however,
The promise of early chill.
—Matsuo Bashō

It’s Boxing Day and the sun climbs a lattice work of cirrus clouds, dripping like treacle in the early afternoon. The sandflats are rinsed with the voices of a hundred children and the air teems with the smell of last week’s storm washing through the estuary after its journey down the Woodstock and Stoney Creeks. The inlet runs emerald green and blue in the deep places and three channel markers meander their way towards the point like a set of mis-thrown darts. 

        Whiting like razors
        In the water; each one cuts
        A new memory.

II.

This is Yuin country, and it remembers a time before its wealth was burnt in the lime pit at Dolphin Point and hauled by the Burrill Lake Timber company to Sydney; its cedar, iron bark and mahogany forests floated out to sea. A plaque on the Princess Highway recounts how the rock shelter on the lake’s edge makes children of the pyramids and the language the king used to claim the geology of the place—the basalt and siltstone forty million years in the making.

        Fourteen cormorants
        Take wing; time written cursive
        In pages of sea grass.

III

Now, my son’s fingers are little clumps of sand in mine and we run ankle deep across the bar—legs lurching like the loose brush strokes of an infant artist. The pools and pockets of water gleam like the scaled side of a great bream for hundreds of yards before us. He says I’m a sea monster; a shark, an octopus, a crab or whatever he wants me to play. All he knows is the next footfall, and more often, the fall of laughter and salt and the cast net of his father’s arms. 

        Onshore, paddle boards
        Consume the car park, staking
        Out their own claim.

IV

I grasp at his arm before he lands on the blue back of a lone soldier crab—an ancient of days, his bone-striped legs the first to walk this water. Sitting. Still. Sifting the sand against the budding toes of my boy. There’s music in the dactyls of his claws, in the iambs of his movement, in the breath of my toddler. Together, they share the notes of time, a semibreve on the boy’s lips—a pause, a new sonata strung in his mind. But he wants to squish it

        —Feel the crush of bone
        And shell in the webs of feet.
        There’s so much to learn.

V

The wind winds us up, it blows purple on our skin and black on the faces of a pair of pied oystercatchers, who pry the sand for the living, weighing the hour like Anubis, with beak and feather. Still, the crab remains. Long after we’ve passed. Out there—a relic of the tides, the small cadences of the cosmos marked in the milky way of its shell. We finish by skimming on the board, the boy riding it like a comet over the water, and I, collapsing Phaethon, at the reins. 

        Coolness in the shade
        Of the wind. Always, the end
        Begs quiet and time.

Stuart Barnes is the author of Like to the Lark (Upswell Publishing, 2023) and Glasshouses (UQP, 2016), which won the 2015 Arts Queensland Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize, was commended for the 2016 Anne Elder Award and shortlisted for the 2017 Mary Gilmore Award. His work has been widely anthologised and published, including in Admissions: Voices within Mental Health, The Anthology of Australian Prose Poetry, Best of Australian Poems 2022, The Moth and POETRY (Chicago). Recently he guest co-edited, with Claire Gaskin, Australian Poetry Journal 11.1 ‘local, attention’. His ’Sestina after B. Carlisle’ won the 2021/22 Gwen Harwood Poetry Prize. @StuartABarnes
 

Duplex 

                        (Eremophila ‘Blue Horizon’) 

I have always adored the desert,  
its transformative blues and solitude.      

            I transform the bluesy solitude    
             of winter—I polish small gold trumpets—  

gold-tinted blue-tongues polish off my trumpets—      
I raise my hands, lanceolate and blue. 

            Lancelot was raised by hands of blue;  
            I improvise—I play blue notes. Roll low

my soul cries. Playing blue notes, rolling low, 
I weave the earth and the atmospheres. 

            I grieve earth’s people, flatten their fears,  
             weather the emu, the stormy blues.

The emu untethers glorious blues.  
I have always adored the desert. 

Originally from a sunny island in Southeast Asia, Sher Ting is a Singaporean-Chinese currently residing in Australia. She is a 2021 Writeability Fellow with Writers Victoria and a Pushcart and Best of The Net nominee with work published/forthcoming in Pleiades, Colorado Review, OSU The Journal, The Pinch, Salamander, Chestnut Review, Rust+Moth and elsewhere. Her debut chapbook, Bodies of Separation, is forthcoming with Cathexis Northwest Press, and her second chapbook, The Long-Lasting Grief of Foxes, is forthcoming with CLASH! Books in 2023. She tweets at @sherttt and writes at sherting.carrd.co

Bak Kut Teh

肉: You peel the chilli, layer by layer, unearthing a clot of
seeds from its copper pith. The soup simmers on the stove,
frothing sunset gold over the blue-gas flames, drowned out by
radio talk of the day’s weather.

How’s your day at school?

The meat melts off the bones in the pressure cooker, pork fat
dripping from softened limbs like snow from black root on a
winter morning.

It’s fine.

You sift the remaining bone-stock with a colander, flushed
with thyme and aniseed. You tell me to scrape the flesh off the
bones with a knife and laugh when my fingers slip, wrangling
silver against each cord-like sinew.

Honey, there’s more than one way
to get to the heart of things,

You whisper as you pull out a larger knife and, taking the pig
trotter from my hands, whistle each hardened tendon – splitting
the ropes – off of the skeleton flower.

骨: Some nights, snow swathes the streets in silent, sleet-wet
pavements. You call me on the phone while you’re peeling an
orange, and like muscle memory, I say I’m busy, distracted.

Okay then listen to me.

You tell me about the lady who stops by the store every day,
never buys anything, just stares at the row of wooden horses.
You tell me how you walked the extra mile to get your
favourite diner coffee, chortling eggs and beans while watching
the busker ignite one-half of a weary skyline. This way, you
can tell your friends we still talk.

There’s more than one way
to get to the heart of things

茶: You tell me about driftwood, sangria, cherry blossoms and
tea, while splitting an orange down the middle, spooning the
seeds off its insides. I fall asleep, cord entwined around my
finger, having heard all about your day. You listen to the rise
and fall of my breath, dip a slice of orange into your cup of tea,

Long over-steeped, almost bitter to taste, still waiting to hear
mine.

Dean Mokrozhaevy moved to Australia in 2008 and grew up reading and writing in various suburbs of Sydney. They use their writing to work through their emotions and make something meaningful out of distress. Outside of their writing endeavours they also enjoy bushwalking, watching moon jellyfish in the Sydney harbour and sewing with their assistant Concrete the cat.

Foundation

Everything’s fixed up.
Everything but the pink stain in the kitchen grout.
I told you I wanted to keep it.

I don’t know what you were preparing for
But I think you’re done now.

I can’t tell what you’re feeling anymore.
Not from your face.
Your hands are still gentle
You still hold the back of my head when we sleep
You still let me sink into your body and cover us with the
blanket.

You say that the paint is peeling

But I like it

You say that you’re scared

But I’m here

You say that you love me and that you’ll always love me and that I’m the best thing that’s
ever happened to you

And I tell you that we still have decades to love
each other

You give a chuckle and change the subject
 
 
 
Note

When I wake up
You aren’t there.
The sunrise paints gold on the sheets
Not on your face.

I get out of the gold.
It’s not mine.
It’s yours.

The shower’s off.
The living room is empty.
There’s no one in the kitchen.

There’s a note on our shoe cabinet.
Your keys are the paperweight.

I love you.
I’m sorry.

Craig Santos Perez is an indigenous Pacific Islander poet from Guåhan (Guam). He is the author of five books of poetry and the co-editor of five anthologies. He teaches at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa.

Rings of Fire Sonnet During the Pandemic
(September 2020) 

We celebrate our daughter’s third birthday
during the hottest September in history.
My parents Facetime from California,
where fire is harvesting four million acres
of ash. “I visited grandma today,”
my mom says. “The orange sky scared her.”
Flames flood brazil’s wetlands
as europe’s largest refugee camp smolders,
granting the charred asylum.
“We might have to evacuate tomorrow,”
my mom says, but tonight we open gifts, sing
& blow out the candles together.
Smoke trembles, as if we all exhaled
the same combustible wish.

Echolocation Sonnet During the Pandemic
(September 2020)

                        for the orca, J35, and her child, J57

Today, you birthed another calf. I imagine
you both swimming a thousand nautical miles
until every wave becomes an ode, until the sea
is a wet nursery. How do you translate
“congratulations” in your dialect of whistles?
What is joy but our shared echolocation?
My second daughter was born three years ago,
premature, but now chubby & strong.
I cook salmon for our dinner and pray
that your pod has enough to eat.
We haven’t been to the beach in months
due to quarantine, but you remind us:
hope is our most buoyant
oceanic muscle.

Chris Armstrong’s poetry has appeared in numerous literary journals and anthologies, most recently The Suburban Review, K’in and Backstory as well as Griffith Review and regularly in Cordite. Armstrong was runner up in the Judith Wright Overland Poetry Prize for New and Emerging Writers in 2015 and received an ASA Emerging Writers Mentorship for her poetry manuscript The Watershed, which was published as a chapbook in 2017. Armstrong is currently involved as poet for The White Bluff Project (https://www.thewhitebluffproject.co/) a collaborative art, science and community project exploring ‘place’ with particular reference to the effects of climate and urbanisation on a coastal ecosystem. Armstrong was raised on the invaded lands of the Gumbaynggir people on the east coast of Australia but currently resides in lutriwita (Tasmania).

Manggaarla 

maana ngawaa muniimbugany muniim nyamigundi maarlala
ngawaa muniimbugany words live beyond our needy tongues to
affirm what is you call me to come see the classic smooth and
creamy shapes of stone wash’d in dreamy waves beneath the
white bluff where language too is a sedimentary thing lithified
into the first song within and where after and before daalgiya
ngaanyaw nguuralami giduurr wiigurr nyan muniim nyamigundi
maarlala ngawaabugany muniim maana muniimbugany ngawa
weigh it feel it roll it on that needy tongue feed it to your
children waagay fire yamaarr fish gaagal ocean language that
made me unmade you first manggaarla remaking what was you
juna junaa gayi wear lexis like necklaces of sophora tomentosa
ngayinggi yarrang listen niirum maanyung carrying the sound of
two whales breathing as they rise arc dive into the dark sea
ngayinggi yarrang beneath hooped pines beside cuttlefish
flotsam streaked with copper based blood jarlarrla gagalngay
how is the wind not called a living thing and a breath not thought
a word

Endnotes
Manggaarla is ‘first’ in Gumbaynggir language. Thank you to Gumbaynggir artist Tori Ann Donnelly, with assistance from Kal Morris, for the translations to Gumbaynggir in the poem Manggarla. The poem is part of a collaborative artwork with artists Tori Donnelly and Sarah Mufford for The White Bluff Project at Coffs Harbour Regional Art Gallery from 31 October 2021 to 15 January 2022. See https://www.thewhitebluffproject.co/. It is also available as an image of the final artwork. The poem also acknowledges influences from Gwen Harwood’s poem ‘The Littoral’.

Dave Drayton was an amateur banjo player, founding member of the Atterton Academy, and the author of E, UIO, A: a feghoot (Container), A pet per ably-faced kid (Stale Objects dePress), P(oe)Ms (Rabbit), Haiturograms (Stale Objects dePress) and Poetic Pentagons (Spacecraft Press).

centocartography, Campsie: that wild society

Adam Lindsay Gordon, ‘Hippodromania; or, whiffs from the pipe’; Adam Lindsay Gordon, ‘Ye Wearie Wayfarer, hys Ballad In Eight Fyttes’; Adam Lindsay Gordon, ‘Delilah’; Lord Byron ‘Don Juan, canto the fourteenth’; Lord Alfred Tennyson ‘Come Down, O Maid’; Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘Mighty Eagle’; William Cowper, ‘The Task: Book V – The Winter Morning Walk’; Thomas Moore, ‘Memorabilia of last week’; Robert Burns, ‘Song – Composed in Spring’; John Dryden, ‘Calm was the even and clear was the sky’; Robert Browning, ‘The House Of Clouds’; William Shakespeare, ‘Bridal Song’

Ranjit Hoskote is a poet, essayist and curator based in Bombay. His seven collections of poetry include Vanishing Acts: New & Selected Poems (Penguin, 2006), Central Time (Penguin/ Viking, 2014), Jonahwhale (Penguin/ Hamish Hamilton, 2018; published by Arc in the UK as The Atlas of Lost Beliefs, 2020, which received a Poetry Book Society Recommendation for Summer 2020) and, most recently, Hunchprose (Penguin/ Hamish Hamilton, 2021). His translation of a celebrated 14^th-century Kashmiri woman saint’s poetry has appeared as I, Lalla: The Poems of Lal Ded (Penguin Classics, 2011). He is the editor of Dom Moraes: Selected Poems (Penguin Modern Classics, 2012). Hoskote has been a Fellow of the International Writing Program (IWP), University of Iowa; writer-in-residence at Villa Waldberta, Munich, Theater der Welt, Essen-Mülheim, and the Polish Institute, Berlin; and researcher-in-residence at BAK/ basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht. His poems have been translated into German, Hindi, Bangla, Irish, Marathi, Swedish, Spanish, and Arabic. Hoskote curated India’s first-ever national pavilion at the Venice Biennale (2011) and was co-curator, with Okwui Enwezor and Hyunjin Kim, of the 7^th Gwangju Biennale (2008).

Departures
for Ravi Agarwal

What if the white mare dragged down by a flabby bridegroom
and underfed by her hungry syce

had the same name as the child ferrying bricks in her head pan
at the kiln?

What if the bat practising a dive behind the shuttered windows
of the Natural History section

could ask the elephant grazing in the parched scrubland
her name

which would not be one of the brightly painted names of the god
tucking his trunk in as his fans see him off at high tide

a departure viewed from the Towers of Silence by a tribe
of scrawny vultures contemplating their journey’s end?

What if you tried to prise a password out of the stuffed orangutan
the taxidermists have enthroned as a totem at the zoo?

In all these names you’d recognise the lost and forgotten seeds
that a sleepy child dropped on the mossy ghats

as the pilgrims from the stars newly arrived swept past
one full-moon night in vermilion and brocade

Who could have told them they would meet us again
stripped of our gaudy masks our carrying voices muted

as skeletons on display
in a distant planet’s Museum of Cautionary Tales?

Author of four books of poetry, Two Full Moons (Bombaykala Books), Words Not Spoken (Brown Critique), The Longest Pleasure (Finishing Line Press) and The Silk Of Hunger (AuthorsPress), Vinita is an award winning poet, editor, translator and curator. Joint recipient of the Rabindranath Tagore Literary Prize 2018 and winner of the Gayatri GaMarsh Memorial Award for Literary Excellence USA 2015. She is Poetry Editor with Usawa Literary Review. Her work has been widely published and anthologised. Her poem won a prize for the Moon Anthology on the Moon by TallGrass Writers Guild, Chicago 2017. More recently her poem won a special mention in the Hawker Prize for best South Asian poetry. She has contributed a monthly column on Asian Poets on the literary blog of the Hamline University, Saint Paul USA in 2016-17. In September 2020, she edited an anthology on climate change titled Open Your Eyes (pub. Hawakal). Most recently she co-edited the Yearbook of Indian Poetry in English 2020-21 (Hawakal). She judged the RLFPA poetry contest (International Prize) in 2016 and co judged the Asian Cha’s poetry contest on The Other Side in 2015. She was featured in a documentary on twenty women poets from Asia, produced in Taiwan. She has read at the FILEY Book Fair, Merida, Mexico, Kala Ghoda Arts Festival among others. She is on the Advisory Board of the Tagore Literary Prize. She has curated literary events for PEN Mumbai. Read more about her at www.vinitawords.com

Splendid Poison Frog

Was it a cold December Wednesday
when you left?
A frosty, flinty, pin-point moment
that seals most pull-outs.
Silent like a hushed Mayday signal
reverberating in the ripples of a pond.
What time exactly
did you hop over
to where nowhere exists?
Did the sun flicker
at your vanishing act?
The way yellow convulses on a color palette
when mixed with green
before turning blue.
Was it the hour of dusk,
your favorite hour,
when you looked your dashing, heart-throb best
skin, brilliant coral, eyes, kohl black.
A fungus with a long name
colonized your body.
A local phenomena, some said.
Like a cloud breaking-up
a balmy summer’s evening.
Did the next morning feel
like a fine after-showers morning?
*********
Estimated Extinction date: 2020
Cause: Chytrid Fungus (Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis)

Tim Loveday is a poet, a writer, and an editor. As the recipient of a 2020 Next Chapter Wheeler Centre Fellowship and a 2021 Varuna Residential Fellowship, his work aims to challenge toxic masculinity in Australia. His poetry/prose has appeared in Meanjin, Cordite, The Big Issue, Babyteeth, Meniscus, Text Journal, and The Big Smoke, among others. A Neurodivergent dog parent, he is the verse editor for XR’s Creative Hub. Tim currently resides in North Melbourne, the traditional land of the Wurundjeri people.

at the end of the rail

in the morning when the sun peels
back like a paper cut and the blue
metal is thunder under our feet
i see shadow-diamonds spread
across the train yard and i feel
as small as a bird and as wide
as a sail

//

last night i listened to your two way radio
i pulled the blanket up to my ears and shaped
myself into a satellite    its static jargon a dialogue
with god or grease or grit i heard the miracle of
boom boom boom
                                                      we were the
new age of romans with a thousand outposts
we were cowboys riding iron centipedes

//

before dawn i threw off my blankets
like old ghosts             sprang from my bed
like new smoke           heard your voice
in the walls                  as you swept
me up                          in your wings
took me           to your shoulders

atlas or he-man or rambo
on the rails       duke on the frontier
you smelt of oil aftershave radio waves
you whispered to me in the language
of future and the earth

fell away

//

i had barely seen the blue streets
how the stars grew hazy in the steam
how horizon bled the false border of morning

­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ we lived before the aftermath
i am a fault-line across your chest
liquid gold sprung from your veins
i fill the cavity where your heart should be
i am young country
boom boom boom

//

at the station the rails rattle
in the flyscreen and the man with
the corkboard halo is chequered
like a topographic map
­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ when he grins he shucks open
a territory calls you by
our last name
­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­  i hear
a town or a street or a mountain
or the origin of a valley

//

in the office you say
wives and work as if they
tighten bolts avenge crimes
on your holsters there are radios the size
of guns            you are blue men with
un-dreams as big as china
under your eyes

everyone is envious    

go ahead the man says into his radio
laying the rail with his words

//

at the terminal box you teach
me to splice the rails   my body
a limp flag made of flesh
­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­  i hang from the lever
asking for islands to swell
on my biceps

birds turn into reverse silhouettes

it’s excalibur you exclaim
stick your foot down like
sinking a spade

boom boom boom

//

when we walk the rails we tell history
this parallel never met by our shadow
i swim onto your shoulders as day
breaks egg-shells
­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­  i am the new
collar ironed by my mother
and the space above your
head is a frontier

//

from here the world is flat
borders white lines in the dirt
you can feel a train coming
in the shake of the earth

we are going to be giants you say
gripping my shins
­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­  i roll up my
sleeves and flex my arms
giving you horns

//

at the door meccano in full-scale
you swing me into the carriage

­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ the child who is flightless
climbs on the back of the
wind    held up a hurt bird

//

in the cabin men breathe planets
onto perspex    they hark like myna birds
rooted bitou bush hunched like cane toads
­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­  they claim to live at
these gears      they’ve got
tickets to show it

they’ve crossed this country
ten times over              sleepless
they’ve seen land where water
is foreign         where open cuts
are oasis

­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ i sit back and watch you
walk ahead on the rails

//

trees white-paper in the train’s blared
whiteness        shape themselves into
memories         call themselves footprints

­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ they’re roped to fence posts

this is morning            not mourning

my breath leaves my mouth
­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ like a greenhouse
boom boom boom      

//

up ahead on the rail you dance
with your arms of red light
and i wonder what it means
to write history with your
body
­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ your blood let
disfiguring the open
cut of morning

//

whatcha think of your dad one of the men
asks     his cadence forty packs of imported
cigarettes         in his fist is a gear that i know
lights up streets turns show houses into
nuclear families
­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ he’s a hero i say but
the word feels tiny      when i’ve seen maps
that lay across this country like a bandage

­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ you’re the beginning
­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ and the end of
­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ of the world

­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ you’re the answer
to everything

//

way off the plant blinks like
a child-killer    a christmas in morse code
­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ spaghetti pipes spewing
white venom
ethanol bruising the sky purple
everything       screams

the horizon quivers     the drivers pull the horn

birds rush to their nests in the clouds
fall through invisible floor boards
­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ burn up on re-entry

//

sometimes i wonder
if you ever stopped in those
towns where you once said
the waters ran like blood

­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ did you own a skeleton key

did you ever peel back
excalibur feel the weight
of the blade in your hands
alter the course of this
track

//

in my ears our heart
boom boom boom

my eyes mirror
the blood-shot sky
­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ the thrum of the engine
­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ rattles through my bones

­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ all my ancestors are ghosts
­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ all my ancestors cling
to the atmosphere

as you walk the rails
fade into morning        settle into history

men talk talk talk

we have learnt distance
in this country

we have learnt to never
look back

Sonnet Mondal writes from Kolkata and is the author of An Afternoon in My Mind (Copper Coin, 2021), Karmic Chanting (Copper Coin, 2018), Ink and Line (Dhauli Books, 2018), and five other books of poetry. He serves as the director of Chair Poetry Evenings-Kolkata’s International Poetry Festival and managing editor of Verseville.

If I Could 

If I were a travelling air
without any bony cage,
moral circuits and routes

blowing to the will of paddy fields
smelling the sexual union
of grass roots with wet soil

I would swoop and lift the infant souls
of dead harvested crops

fetching them to their seeds
and allow them to breathe me again.

Rachael Mead is a novelist and award-winning poet and short story writer, with her creative work appearing widely in Australia and internationally. She’s the author of the novel The Application of Pressure (Affirm Press 2020) and four collections of poetry including The Flaw in the Pattern (UWAP 2018). In 2019, she spent a month in the Taleggio Valley in Northern Italy on an eco-poetry residency awarded by Australian Poetry.

It takes a mountain to raise a cheese 
A golden shovel of Terrance Hayes’ ‘Lighthead’s Guide to the Galaxy’

You want answers, so immediately I’m in a panicked state.
What is a regenerative economy, anyway? I’m a writer. My time
is spent exploring on foot, trying to see things differently to others
like the way the piode is a jigsaw from below but from above is a roof.
That’s a bit simplistic. Trying to give you answers is making me careless,
the way I get back to the room, pull off my boots and sling my bra
not even looking to see where it falls. Some think nature is all about sex
but I’m leaning in another direction. I’m missing the moonlight.
All this walking has me in bed with the sun, weighing the valley’s life
and trying to piece it together with words. You want me to show my thinking
but resisting the seduction of witness and metaphor is not easy to overcome.
It’s as if you’ve offered the finest single malt whiskey but refused me the ice.
I’m trying to be critical and speculative but I’m just grinding out the syllables,
constructing poems from form, allusion and a well-thumbed catalogue of words.
I’m great at questions, seeing how problems connect, replicate themselves —
but critical speculation? I’m a dog yapping at unseen dangers. I can’t say
what should happen here, the possibilities clamouring so I can’t tell prank calls
from those with something important to say. The word on the street
is it’s better to ignore what you see. Go with what you perceive.
My bedroom window is black with possibility. This arrangement
feels impossible. What can I offer? I walk. I watch. I make poetry.
If only I was more original, walking around like a pregnant woman
confident in the form of her creation, her offspring welcome among us.
I’m not used to being so beyond my depth. As a wife
I can fake it, clean the house before guests arrive. (Don’t think about that.)
But here, all the surfaces are peeled away, lack of faith in myself
laid bare in these echoing lines. I scratch pen on pages to start fires.
The answers are needed, the world staring down its own destruction
and here I sit twiddling around with rhythm and the fall of a word.
Beyond my window, the darkness resolves into birdsong and branches.
Grass will grow. Cheese will be eaten. These futures are not empty yet.
But I’m not so deaf that I can’t hear this valley whimper.
It’s just that I’ve no particular claim to wisdom –
only the ability to watch, witness and fill with the pities
of someone gifted in seeing backwards. It’s a leash,
the tug of it jerking my head as I peer into the night’s
potential – ghostly, nebulous and keeping me from sleep.

Ojo Taiye is a young Nigerian poet who uses poetry as a handy tool to hide his frustration with society. He also makes use of collage and sample technique. He is the winner of many prestigious awards including the 2021 Hay Writer’s Circle Poetry Competition, 2021 Cathalbui Poetry Competition, Ireland.

All quiet on the fire front 

What is it that makes me see myself
more loving than the capitalist world?
Every time I watch the news my heart
goes out to the lonely orphan bear.

Look: there, as when a cone explodes
during a flare, another dog lay lifeless
on the charred ground, staring at a falling
pylon—the quieting chorus of ruin. Nothing

is blooming today & a man in my mother’s
village is breathing and asking— will the
water be gentle with me as it rises? I’m long
past hopeful and yes, beyond upset, I wish I

could say they’re just animals and my mother
is not sick. Still everything that is burning has
a name. Always something fragile and my father
looks up at me and sighs. We’ve lived in many

shelters. Even after the mud slide, a river slopes
along my heart to forget, for a second, the volume
of destruction. The thing about summer is: it doesn’t
come as joyful as it did once. If we are talking a-

bout a feverish planet, a thick pall of smoke still
hangs over my country’s green lungs. There is a
premonition before a ruin. Every herder I have
ever met said something about drought. More

drought. Or maybe to ruin the moment of camping,
a thousand heat-strokes & oh, there is famine too—

Monique Lyle is a DCA candidate with the writing centre at Western Sydney University. She is currently completing her first manuscript, The Park, which explores her experiences growing up in Sydney Housing Commission in the 90’s. Recently her work has appeared in Overland, Flash Cove, Otoliths, Plumwood Mountain and also Dance Research.

a shark

when
i
found am
out
in the garden half
dead
in the weeds
half
floating
in
a pond you
think
of pigeons
and flutter
bies in
over grown grass
field you
think of a
fly
landing on damp.

if a
little
girl is
all alone left
there
will be no
eat there will be
no
sucksuck
there
won’t be any water melon. there
only
will be
tiny hand tiny
arm
tiny
cock roach crawling. by time the
mary
there get
it
will be late too—
eve taken will
have
already
apple cleaned
pinstripe
suit even gorgeous
lips.

when you are
in
an
over grown field with a
bee
on your
knee
and stinging nettle. when
a
purple flutter
bye
lands on a
yellow
dandelion
flower another
bug will
be
there with it
when a
root pushes
into
wet
brown mud, a
small green leaf
lives under
water.
when a small
green
ball
attaches itself
to
underwater, a blue
fish
lands on a
shark
flattening itself
out onto it when a red
critter
scurries through the ocean.
i
her
saw
jagged in the
garden an
out
distance coming one
zig
zag
arm another
zig
zag
leg another
coming
close
in
swimming
zone
i
a shark and
you here
no

Lisa Nan Joo lives on Gadigal land and is an emerging writer of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. Her work has previously appeared in Kill Your Darlings, Strange Horizons, Meniscus, Seizure Online and Spineless Wonders.

Plastic Nation

In the end, it feels inevitable. The floating island of plastic is declared a new nation, and becomes the world’s foremost thalassocracy. Ambassadors of PVC and polyethylene squabble over the borders, and stake claims for distinct nation-states among the sea-drift. New language emerges from the percussion of waste: the voice of the sea, but woven into a tapestry of six-pack rings and fishing nets. It sounds like a wave trapped in a torn plastic bag. The new nation sends out armies: swift, many-limbed proxies that surround and submerge their landed enemies, until the old borders mean nothing. The nation buries itself in the skin of the ocean, stretching until it’s fit to burst, and then it purges itself on the shores of the new world, and buries itself here, too, leaving no survivors, implanting itself into the canopy, the humus, the bedrock, the fossil record. Accelerating towards the erasure of organic materiality. The earth is an endling. The last of its species, abandoned to deep time.

Lawdenmarc Decamora is a Best of the Net and Pushcart Prize-nominated writer with work published in 23 countries around the world. He is the author of three book-length poetry collections, Love, Air (Atmosphere Press, 2021), TUNNELS (Ukiyoto Publishing, 2021), and Handsome Hope which is forthcoming from Yorkshire Publishing in 2022. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in places like The Common, The Seattle Review, Columbia Review, North Dakota Quarterly, California Quarterly, Cordite Poetry Review, AAWW’s The Margins, and elsewhere. His poetry will be anthologized in The Best Asian Poetry 2021 and had recently appeared in the best-selling Meridian: The APWT Drunken Boat Anthology of New Writing. In the UK, Lawdenmarc’s poetry was long-listed for The Alpine Fellowship Writing Prize 2021 and shortlisted for Aesthetica Creative Writing Award 2021 (Aesthetica Magazine). He was an August 2021 alumnus of the Tupelo Press 30/30 Project of the US-based Tupelo Press, and is also a member of the Asia Pacific Writers & Translators (APWT). He lives in the Philippines where he teaches literature at the oldest existing Catholic university in Asia, the University of Santo Tomas (UST).

A Love Story

A kind of relationship developed between C and D.
The former was from a sacred temple, the latter
in an abandoned carnival park. One day a silvery
slope of tiny metal was found packed in an aluminum
foil paper. Glimmering in the glue of sunset
was curiosity. D thought it was chocolate;
C cherished it and both became friends. Soon,
lovers. There’s however a potential health risk
in chocolates, experts said. The two paid no attention
and their cadmium addiction soared 10, 000 feet
into the sky. They wrestled with toxicity, a sex
of pain and smoke parachuting. Earlier C saw D
hiding from tubes among books, hallucinating.
C’s worried face triply glowed. D handed the latter
a transcript underlining a note that read: “Cadmium
is thought to cause anxiety in monkeys.” Their eyes
paused, murmuring, But we are lovers made of chocolate.
Night entered. And for the last time, the two macaques
pleasured themselves in the chaos of ambulance
lights, right before the next laboratory experiment.

Jennifer Compton lives in Melbourne and is a poet and playwright who also writes prose. Her 11th book of poetry, the moment, taken was published by Recent Work Press in 2021.

An Abandonment

I had done everything I could do within reason
­  ­   ­  ­   for the ragged rows of broad beans,
their juices were often thick on my fingers

­  ­   ­  ­   from their first unfurling in mid winter
to the pinching out of the growing tips,
­  ­   ­  ­   their binding to a stake in late spring.

And then the harvest, soon the harvest done,
­  ­   ­  ­   and I had brushed through their ranks,
turned hands of leaves upside down,

­  ­   ­  ­   bent for a better view of their private quarters,
against the sun, the way it is when picking,
­  ­   ­  ­   nobody likes the low sun full in their eyes.

Their business at an end, I wrenched them from the earth,
­  ­   ­  ­   laid their lanky stems one upon another,
did not regret their wilting sigh, their quick dying breath.

­  ­   ­  ­   And clouds and clouds and clouds of ladybirds
crept out from the interstices, showed themselves, and flew.
­  ­   ­  ­   It was the very opposite of a plague,

because ladybirds do good work, no doubt about it,
­  ­   ­  ­   but it was very like that sort of thing.
And more and more and more, and then more, a wonder.

­  ­   ­  ­   They had kept themselves to themselves until
an acrid scent, or an orientation to the sun, or a sudden
­  ­   ­  ­   knowledge underfoot of sap not rising,

lifted them into an urgency of leaving.

Greg Page is a Koori Poet from the La Perouse community at Kamay (Botany Bay). He holds an M.A. in Creative Writing from UTS in Sydney and has been published in the Australian Poetry Journal and the Koori Mail. He lives on unceded Bidjigal land. Dox him at linktr.ee/boypage.

Barbed Wire

Earlier poems on barbed wire have proved unsatisfactory
Not that I know any, but if they were worthwhile I probably would
There’s no bigger symbol of the invasion
And the continent is still covered in the stuff

It might be offensive to talk about barbed wire
Perhaps not as plain rude as asking someone’s salary
A wealthy person’s salary that is
I’ll quite naturally admit my $16k annual jobseeker rate

Rust has a kind of beauty to it
Did they think through what happens to discarded industrial metal items?
‘We all have to go so we may as well go down the gurgler with microplastics’
Perhaps edible plastics might solve all our problems

There’s nothing hidden about the violence of barbed wire
That’s the thing I like most about it
It’s honest truth telling — a voice to Parliament
The ongoing mesh network communicating terror on the frontier

At the speed of light your sadnesses prove ineffective
Good intentions and Koalas are no match for intentional bulldozers
There’s a lot of uncertainty on the land these days
Good labour is so difficult to find even at $16k

Debbie Lim lives in Sydney. Her work has appeared in anthologies including regularly in the Best Australian Poems series (Black Inc.) and Contemporary Asian Australian Poets (Puncher & Wattmann). Recent work appears in Westerly, Island, Rabbit, Overland and the Willowherb Review (UK). Her chapbook is Beastly Eye (Vagabond Press) and she is working on a full-length collection. She was a Mascara Don Bank Poet-in-Residence in 2020–2021.
 
 
 
 
Captive
Hapalochlaena lunulata

You are the one who cupped death in the hand.
Watched it writhe in sunlight, tender-faced,

flashing its blue halos, more precise and smaller
than expected. A slow thrall of limbs rippling

away from itself. Everything might have ended
there: a far sea throbbing in your ear as your

own heart slackened, then subsided. Instead,
this sudden act of mercy as you tipped a palm down—

saw a life jettisoned to the shallows.

Anisha Pillarisetty is a radio producer and presenter at Radio Adelaide and a journalist at On the Record, living on unceded Kaurna Yerta. She is currently in her third year of university studying creative writing and journalism.

Remember to not talk gently when announcing the news, especially if you’re on radio

summers are long and the sky curdles                                                                   quick

a game:

splashes of cloud or congealing milk left in the bright                                          of the sink

skin circles back into itself
turning the colour of mud flaps on Dad’s old Maruti van                                     bogged after

                                         the                                         first                         shock of rain
radio says 2020 broke         records here

1. 1. the third warmest
2. 2. the fifth wettest
3. 3. the eighth sunniest
4. 4. the

radio also says there is                              a moon wobble

Zoom out to find the Indian Ocean on Google Maps and the searching

blue

is hurled against the window with the moon. The wind is torn between             remembering

the kind of rain that disturbs bird calls into                                                                 static
the kind of rain that is wanting

the Indian Ocean unspools
the tops of the gum trees like a tarp and it sounds like:

1. 1. dripping stripes on a gourd                                                   sold cheap by the roadside
2. 2. your fingers counting                                                                          the air
3. 3. ballooning curtains when my hands

were still                                                                                                         small
your freedom –                                                                                           is it mine?
bigger than the cling-clang
at your waist
your laughter is tomatoes in hessian                                                       sifted through
1. too soft
2. too green
3. the coins are hesitant to leave                                                                the cloth

summer                               circles

skin.

Anonymous is a POC health worker and poet living in one of the LGAs on unceded Gadigal country. They write on the Covid delta strain crisis.

Let it RIP, Australia

The dawn of a new decade came with a sting
that became an explosion,
a sniff of opportunity.
And the powerful lined up to strut and pose
they got through 2020 by sheer luck, rising,
as they silenced and crushed all opposition!
They spun a smorgasbord of false narratives
to keep the masses asleep.
They reminded us in other countries
women get shot.

December 2020 Israel vaccinates, Australia is silent.
If there’s a goal, it’s secret and hidden.
Inside the dark wooden cabinet of white men
is a vaccination vacuum.

Strut, pose, wait and watch the world. It’s not a race!
Smiling and lying, they squander the gains,
strutting, posing and rewarding the sycophants

Only 4% fully vaccinated when Bondi starts
as it spreads to Walgett, and Victoria,
New Zealand even. A catch-up game
No intention of defeating this plague.

Deliberate, calculated spread
because when it is everywhere
there is nothing to lose in opening the borders. Ha ha!
1200 cases today and we smile and boast
dissonant, cheerful one-liners.

The price is paid in the hospitals of Sydney
by the beaten and battered clinicians,
falling one by one to radio silence.
By patients who came in for gallstones
but never left because of COVID.

In small country towns where there is no hospital
and no prospect of evacuation because Dubbo is falling
in the dark corridors of the prisons
and the forgotten people in Wilcannia
starving and unvaccinated

Is this planned genocide?
While the experts muse about global equit
While Pfizer is fast-tracked to the Eastern suburbs
So they can be free sooner

Strutting. Posing. The strong will survive and the weak….
Well they were unvaccinated. Ha ha!

Let’s go full Great Barrington today, Haha, they laugh.
Live with COVID, haha!

The children are the sacrifice,
held up to the money god.

The ultimate sacrifice in cringing worship of the UK
Desperate doctors whisper about whole wards infected
Hospitals crumbling
Emergency beds prepared in concrete car parks
Hastening death with morphine and midazolam
to allow new admissions.

Live with COVID, they say, as they strut and pose.
We have thousands of ventilators. Haha!
It’s just the Untermensch that are dying
Westies and Muslims.

Not the important people of Mona Vale.
In the rich suburbs a lady browsing in a non-essential shop
was heard saying “That’s not us. It’s just the LGAs”.

The experts who built their careers trumpeting their commitment
to the vulnerable and disadvantaged
are silent, still grovelling for small favours like obedient dogs

Servants to the state with one foot
crushing the heads of the dying, so eager to help
masturbating at the fate of the poor
as the carnage flows
as the merchants of death conduct their deadly orchestra
with glee

The complicit media who fawned and enabled this symphony of sorrow
are starting to fidget and fuss
Some sense belatedly they are stakeholders too.
Their children will be sacrificed. Oh no.
A few speak out and finally ask the right questions
Too little too late.

A small group of besieged warriors
fought for what was right
but were silenced and destroyed
by the despots and their fawning colluders
by laws twisted to punish
those who dared to speak truth
North Korea style.
The righteous painted as bad guys.
Black is white
And white is black.
Some lost their jobs for speaking up.
While the posing pretenders climbed higher
on the bodies of the dead
and the mountains of their profit
shouting out their propaganda

We have to live with COVID!
Death is inevitable!