CONTRIBUTORS

Sam Morley

Sam Morley has been published in various journals and has been shortlisted in the Montreal International Poetry Prize. He is the 2022 recipient of the Tina Kane Emergent Writer Award at the Mildura Writer’s Festival. His collections include Earshot (Puncher and Wattmann) and You Do You, out now through Upswell.

90s tribute remix

Blue Light Discos don’t really have blue lights nor many hometown cops dressed as cops. Not here in the brick veneer of winter in a Masonic Lodge where the hall is choofing with Lynx Voodoo and Impulse Free Spirit. On …

Posted in 110: POP | Tagged

Joey

Feet tips no more than rosebuds, skin as thin as membrane. Inside this newborn ringtail pulses bitumen warm from summer’s hell. Gumnut eyes blind black ears folded there is no mother now as threadbare noose of tail lets go. What …

Posted in 106: OPEN | Tagged

Bull Terrier

Accustomed to a gaze of surly pre-conception, she was fighting centuries of straight-up entrapment caged in the anvil of a nose hard as a horse pulled to a cantering stop. The boughs here knock down on river stones and her …

Posted in 105: NO THEME 11 | Tagged

Mail Order

And the old men’s hair style is the same – parted partway from the temple curling silver grey blonde wave slick with Brylcreem. And the cancer skin of these men flushes pink in the Filipina bars old and flaming, shirts …

Posted in 100: BROWNFACE | Tagged

Pteropus

far from the beach and its many mouths the body of a dead bat skin strung in a cartography of veins even at dusk flies fuzz its eyes terrier teeth crescent claws fur pelt pulled winter close the evening draws …

Posted in 92: NO THEME VIII | Tagged

Cicada Song

the thin atrium of your body dry as crepe paper wings flat on your torso a leadlight map of nations eyes sequined solar panels reflecting silence husk of you in my palm how the sea warns you its long-rumpled muscle …

Posted in 86: NO THEME VII | Tagged

Humpback (Pacific)

I make my boys stand in the wind and look at the ocean unhinging itself over and over. I tell them that among the waves craving themselves there is a mass of blue permanence, that below the surface tension of …

Posted in 82: LAND | Tagged