I Overshare

Elli Johnson

I overshare at a table set for the world
Don’t pity me or worry for my safety
I know who I am.
I stand witness to the joy and pain
at this bring and share feast.
My spatchcock heart
tenderised by design.

1

cherry tree

Lily Roberts

“we’re going to be pretty safe,”
I heard him say.
the tree had its arms up
like a person seized in worship
sweet bark skin loaded with blossom
and lorikeets, shrieking
that old cherry tree
hugging the shed around its bang-bang door
and its heavy brick stops
drops
corrupts
erupts
with the heat of a shining
petrol supernova
the peak luminosity of a faraway
star
patterns on the asphalt
the falling-apart of a child’s
cardboard box umbrella
hiding inside the sweet-smelling rain

the way the light curves towards next year,
or last—
I can’t remember
how it goes
anymore

2

Field Notes

Gisele Parnall

In some pocket of travelling
clothes, a rolled up
fiver paves the way
for homeward bound

I will remember the
way my feet burnt
on the steps down to
the sea and how you
fit snug in the placid
corners of the pool

the industrial planes
of France somehow took me
and my sack of memories
to Nevada, where poplars
stroke the edges of salt
water cooling tanks
and pasteurised milk
seeps from VATS into ploughed
fields where you sowed
my hair follicles into dolls
of niacin plasticine

but in the end, the lines
which ran from head to
tail were always too short,
as if you’d let your strands
fall from that bald patch
on purpose. The fields
never forgave that loss,
in their plush corkscrews of grass,
they’d remembered your form.

3

Big Bottles, Big Rivers

Polina Cosgrave

I’m going to drink from big bottles
and swim in big rivers.
I’m going to honour the ruins
and talk to the graves.
I’m coming home, mother,
will you make my bed?

I’ll walk down the main street,
wearing nothing but hope.
The boy who left me will stare at me in horror,
he has always had the talent
to recognise a ghost among the living.
The boy I left will turn away in disgust,
I have aged painfully, and he is still nineteen
and seeing me at every bottom of every bottle,
burying me on every bottom of every river.

I’ll sit with the memory
in the old pub,
I’ll write letters to an Irish man
on the napkins,
lined like
his mesmerising hands.
I’ll gulp down the need for him
settled as a lump in my throat,
for it only to return
the morning after
twice as strong.

I will wake up in the bed
my mother made for me
wishing he could finish my bottle
and jump into my river.

5

Counter meals

Stephanie Powell

Down the local, how beautiful the fellas
are on a Friday night, all strong and handsome
and straight backed and big handed with beer-
full mouths, rolling pool cues against skin in a
movement like slow leisure, like a day at the races,
like drinking before midday with the sun on your face.
More bankrupt with each pint-
fattened hour, sway like new shoots in soft soil.

In this outpost between main roads a throng
of footy boys slap each other’s backsides at
the bar and Peter’s propped up like a lean-to,
fingers in the foam of a soaked-
through beer mat. He sings like Sinatra,
knows the classics. Happiest only at
the epicentre of youth, churning and
a handful of old friends who haven’t moved away.

Outside, the road forks and a bus pulls in.
An earth digger is moon-bathing. Cordoned off,
cut dirt shines. Its driver is sunk at the
front bar, sucking teeth covered in froth.

The meat lives in the freezer beside the
chips and seafood special. A frozen farm
with no cockerel, contending with a
residue of bitterest almond mating foraged
earth on the rim of the plate –
food that can’t be eaten your hands.

This meal is survival and progress in the same dish,
Somewhere south of midnight, north of no centre at all.

6

Afterward

Marc Ellen Hamel

My father,
benign now,
comes to stand quietly at my elbow
as I work in my studio.
He always wears
that white 50/50 shirt with short sleeves,
dark slacks baggy on his flat ass.
His straight dark hair
Still only slightly flecked with gray.
He looks out the window
at the calm waters
slowly turns his head,
surveys my efforts
with a gentle interest,
no longer uncomfortable in the world.
Perhaps being a ghost suits him.

The wing-and-a-wheel song
I play it over and over
The strains take me
across the worlds he opened
with his stories, our travels
Washington, Canada, California,
and it brings a young me back
before I inflicted myself upon myself,
the way he showed me how.

I first heard it that July night
when my sister was waking
from her long bad dream.
She took me to sit on a pier
in Elliott Bay,
in the middle of the music,
in the middle of my life.
Her voracious beauty
beamed blithely next to me,
as the crowd watched a summer sun
drop behind the hills,
across the water.
Rain was probable, no one cared.
And I sat at last
in my hometown, fitting in,
no longer uncomfortable in the world.

7

in Her image

Chloe Bennett

in the black of the bath,
she scrubs and she scrubs me –
lady macbeth with a washcloth in hand.
she lathers the soap, and then she unsuds me.
i’m clay in the kiln of the hot of her hands.
rinse, repeat,
she claws at my hair –
but the likeness is there,
the likeness is there.
from my toes to my teeth
to the bone, bruised and bare,
no hope for repair –
the likeness is there.

9

Homebody

Josiane Smith

All those journeys

So many departures and destinations.
That bed I called home, simply because
we shared it, the stack of our two bodies
melting into that sticky heat,
singing lullabies and melodies as if
I was a little girl again but free.
Soft, orange lamp in our room
became both ritual and magic
to turn it on each evening,
each morning and let it
welcome our days.
But through it we grew
nostalgic for a time
yet to come:
from that one
lonely lamp
in that one
window in
that vast
and brutal
apartment
block. It
warmed
our hearts,
that lamp,
lining
our last
path
towards
home.

10

Elegy for an Unspoken Language

Natalie Susak

Aunt Leila, I could not speak to you,
only look at the fat grapes hanging.

When I first met you, you were drenched in sun.
Hands weathered and brown as loaves,

you served coffee and broke brown loaves
I loved. I could not speak,

only watch the words
that wilted from your mouth,

your mouth an opening magnolia,
those words stopped dead,

stopped dead like mine,
behind this wall of teeth, this inelegant tongue.

I search behind this inelegant tongue
& find something missing,
the language of my mother.

The language of my mother
is the ripe fig, the ripe cherry, the yellow sun.

You hand me two figs, two yellow roses,
& I am moored by the bays of my lips

each honeyed mouthful a silent prayer.
You say nothing, stroke my hair.

11

Alroight Dad

Lissa Anderson

Alroight Dad I’ll keep it short, just long enough to
frown and tease out a saft joke, not long enough to
play it down. I started this by climbing the beeches
when words expressed through cloth eared dancing,
were allowed sparingly, like tip tops on Sunday.
Now I stand over you, and even if you hear
through the morphine, there is always a nail
to ommer in the wall, or uz wanderers to recall…
those delicate years, when the shoes you polished,
were made from the glass works, and the coat you brushed
with bosted fingers, had hammers and nails in the pockets.
I watched with envy as the others fledged, how they shot off
like babby rockets, high above the Stour and over the bandstand.
It took me longer, the weight of my clothes held me down,
and it was a sturdy body with skilful hands
I drew upon to hold my own. I’m far away now,
on the ocean edge of this smoggy land, your clear sight
never too far behind, and on the tip of my tongue.
I sometimes catch a rocket hurling out the sky, the heavy metal
landing hard, inside the tiger’s enclosure, still smouldering
from the ride… Ar Dad, I wish I could thank you for that.

12

“Me Chama ‘Logan’, Como O Wolverine”

Pierce Logan

​The easiest way to learn is to language
a room
to connect a banister to a verb
to learn a language
the easiest way is to find a home in it.

I know our mouths both hold
water
but together I wish I could dig deeper
into youandme
like neapolitan ice cream
but for you there’s only a close relative:
it’s not the same.

I think back to Brazil and her glances
when I barely spoke
and then I overflowed, felt embarrassed I could talk so much
in a home I knew so little.

But still I was welcome
to overjoy and spill out
onto a rug we’d help the family clean together
(like tongue…scraping)
and sit in the closest thing
to a couch.

13

Palms

Terrell Worrell

We reached an uneasy truce come sunset
she knocked on the door white flag in her fist
stepping softly towards the bed where she slipped in beside me
her head on my shoulder, my hand on hers

later i held the wind in my palms
like i talk about
hand out the car
Head filled with white noise and flags
that sort of nonsense

14

Lego

Catarina Gutierrez

i’m taking apart my Lego.
it’s cluttering our space.
piece by piece, it’s falling
into a bag I’ll soon forget.
the place in a closet, in the bag in the back.
i’ll forget the time. the moment.
the gift of Lego.

the 3 large, black garbage bags full from
age 10. the stench of the attic erupts.
the balance beams and plaster
board to fall through another
dimension. the holes in my
memory.

i’ll fill it with a new toy.
another building block of life.
a new house i built, brick by
brick.
with my Grand Design and
colour palette.
a new space to fill with
things that will clutter my
mind and get thrown out
again until i can’t remember.
but do.

15

When my parents

Sapphire Allard

When my parents who have not spoken kindly
to each other since their divorce several
lifetimes ago
except a Christmas card one year and
a phone call at a time of one death or another,
each got tennis elbow at the same time,
both took up sea swimming,
hurt their backs
had an inability to buy houses,
I wondered
what is this do I need to prove anything with this information
or
can it be my own sweet knowledge
like the whispering of dreams between sleep and day,
you know,
how people come alive who are not,
and reconciliations are made that are realer than any reality.

16