- 114: NO THEME 13with J Toledo & C Tse 113: INVISIBLE WALLSwith A Walker & D Disney 112: TREATwith T Dearborn 111: BABYwith S Deo & L Ferney 110: POP!with Z Frost & B Jessen 109: NO THEME 12with C Maling & N Rhook 108: DEDICATIONwith L Patterson & L Garcia-Dolnik 107: LIMINALwith B Li 106: OPENwith C Lowe & J Langdon 105: NO THEME 11with E Grills & E Stewart 104: KINwith E Shiosaki 103: AMBLEwith E Gomez and S Gory 102: GAMEwith R Green and J Maxwell 101: NO THEME 10with J Kinsella and J Leanne 100: BROWNFACE with W S Dunn 99: SINGAPOREwith J Ip and A Pang 97 & 98: PROPAGANDAwith M Breeze and S Groth 96: NO THEME IXwith M Gill and J Thayil 95: EARTHwith M Takolander 94: BAYTwith Z Hashem Beck 93: PEACHwith L Van, G Mouratidis, L Toong 92: NO THEME VIIIwith C Gaskin 91: MONSTERwith N Curnow 90: AFRICAN DIASPORAwith S Umar 89: DOMESTICwith N Harkin 88: TRANSQUEERwith S Barnes and Q Eades 87: DIFFICULTwith O Schwartz & H Isemonger 86: NO THEME VIIwith L Gorton 85: PHILIPPINESwith Mookie L and S Lua 84: SUBURBIAwith L Brown and N O'Reilly 83: MATHEMATICSwith F Hile 82: LANDwith J Stuart and J Gibian 81: NEW CARIBBEANwith V Lucien 80: NO THEME VIwith J Beveridge 57.1: EKPHRASTICwith C Atherton and P Hetherington 57: CONFESSIONwith K Glastonbury 56: EXPLODE with D Disney 55.1: DALIT / INDIGENOUSwith M Chakraborty and K MacCarter 55: FUTURE MACHINES with Bella Li 54: NO THEME V with F Wright and O Sakr 53.0: THE END with P Brown 52.0: TOIL with C Jenkins 51.1: UMAMI with L Davies and Lifted Brow 51.0: TRANSTASMAN with B Cassidy 50.0: NO THEME IV with J Tranter 49.1: A BRITISH / IRISH with M Hall and S Seita 49.0: OBSOLETE with T Ryan 48.1: CANADA with K MacCarter and S Rhodes 48.0: CONSTRAINT with C Wakeling 47.0: COLLABORATION with L Armand and H Lambert 46.1: MELBOURNE with M Farrell 46.0: NO THEME III with F Plunkett 45.0: SILENCE with J Owen 44.0: GONDWANALAND with D Motion 43.1: PUMPKIN with K MacCarter 43.0: MASQUE with A Vickery 42.0: NO THEME II with G Ryan 41.1: RATBAGGERY with D Hose 41.0: TRANSPACIFIC with J Rowe and M Nardone 40.1: INDONESIA with K MacCarter 40.0: INTERLOCUTOR with L Hart 39.1: GIBBERBIRD with S Gory 39.0: JACKPOT! with S Wagan Watson 38.0: SYDNEY with A Lorange 37.1: NEBRASKA with S Whalen 37.0: NO THEME! with A Wearne 36.0: ELECTRONICA with J Jones
CONTRIBUTORS
Stuart Barnes
Stuart Barnes is the author of Like to the Lark (Upswell Publishing, 2023), which won the 2023 Wesley Michel Wright Prize in Poetry, 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. Stuart, Nigel Featherstone, Melinda Smith and CJ Bowerbird are members of Hell Herons, a spoken-work/music collective whose first record is due in 2024.
http://www.stuartabarnes.com
http://www.stuartabarnes.com
Lauras
i.m. Laura Branigan If I had been born to wear the stronger color, I would have been given an offshoot of the root of Phyllis Laurena Branigan, mother of my mother, who doesn’t remember Laura Branigan (moonlight on water forever …
Cranes
I made one thousand for you whose T cells were done for, dashed———or so we, pea pod, thought. Bun of milk wore my mouth, tea of green. Un -dyed squares bore up, souled. The autumns spun, the seashore shared blue …
Moon’s Étude
Pink balloon? Clewed wool? Unsmooth supper plate? Sinker of cliché in cumulous seas. I loose jewelleries, unlike Saturn, a gold-fattened linger -er. ‘Monsieur Aloof!’ Again, you finger -point. ‘Murderer!’ Oof. ‘When you’re full, you’re full of yourself!’ you blaze. I …
Duplex
(Neomarica gracilis, Walking iris, Apostle plant) Rhythm’s afoot. My fingers step to earth. They put down roots. They stamp and stamp their whorls. Worms lay down routes: a red stampede: air whirls. The sun, another plantigrade, treads heat. The sun, …
TRANSQUEER Editorial
When we put out the call for TRANSQUEER we asked poets ‘to explore trans identities not as positions to defend but as modes of becoming and thus ways of being human’ (Joy Ladin, Trans Studies Quarterly, 2016: 640) and ‘to believe that the world is QUEER, or that oneself is, or both, [and that this] is a window of doubt through which all creative possibility comes into being’ (Mark Doty, The Art of Description: World into Word).
Submission to Cordite 88: TRANSQUEER
TRANSQUEER is a call for you to say something that maybe you haven’t been able to say before. It asks you to find poetry in / between lines, binaries and stultifying categorisations; from the life of flesh, from inside the bleating, many-chambered heart of gender and sexuality.
Double Acrostic
‘Leg magic!’ I’d chant, swinging higher behind the badminton centre, flaunting Mum’s earrings and Razzamatazz—nylon whoosh—and my barely hairy legs, ever-unat -tended tenant of that gravelly South Hobart park where purple plums also burst philo -sophically; Sophocles chronicled doom in …
Winners for the Val Vallis Award for an Unpublished Poem 2017
Run by Queensland Poetry Festival, and named in honour of a distinguished Queensland poet, the Arts Queensland Val Vallis Award for an Unpublished Poem is committed to encouraging poets throughout Australia. 2017 Selection panel: Stuart Barnes and Michell Cahill.
Posted in GUNCOTTON
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Tagged Bronwyn Lovell, Jeff Guess, Laurie Keim, Michelle Cahill, Stuart Barnes
The Pardoner
with thanks to Dustin Brookshire On the wall a small plate of sunshine altered position bit by bit. He’d’ve had me pick from Gothic headstones. While he washed I turned the deco doorknob with military precision. Briefs, wallet, keys. Though …
Killing Bill or whatever the hell his name is (‘Battle Without Honor or Humanity’)
with a line from Yeats No one expected the second coming out: a burst rubber, a premature BOOM! ‘PEP,’ you echoed. ‘I’ll drive you to Bolsover first thing in the morning.’ His speechlessness a stun grenade, ignored calls blast mines. …
Tenons
“You’ll feel quite at home.” Here at the earth’s end at the end of my bed. At the end of the day. At the end, words won’t be an issue. Time will end an end to grey? on a slope …
Cinquecento
The house received all ornaments to grace it, The walls were of discolour’d jasper-stone, One window shut, the other open stood, The time is come, I must depart My last thread, I shall perish on the shore; Ring out your …
Reflections
On May 31, 2011, as headliner of Sydney’s VIVID LIVE, The Cure played one of two ‘Reflections’ Shows – its first three LPs (Three Imaginary Boys, Seventeen Seconds, Faith) in their entirety, as well as a fourteen track encore; ‘The …
‘King’ James Malley: Genesis
WHETHER we listen with aloof amusement to the dreamlike mumbo jumbo of some red-eyed witch doctor of the Congo, or read with cultivated rapture thin translations from the sonnets of the mystic Lao-tse; now and again crack the hard nutshell …
‘King’ James Malley: Revelation
The modern hero, the modern individual who dares to heed the call and seek the mansion of that presence with whom it is our whole destiny to be atoned, cannot, indeed must not, wait for his community to cast of …
‘King’ James Malley: Prayer of Manasses
The figure of the tyrant-monster is known to the mythologies, folk traditions, legends, and even nightmares, of the world; and his characteristics are everywhere essentially the same. He had not been down that way under The Hill for ages and …
Janice ‘Pearl’ Malley: The 27 Club
ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE ––– my name was Salmon, like the fish; first name, Susie. I was fourteen when I was raped and bled for diffidence, bad grammar, sadder cliché. Or was it Dylan Thomas Aquinas, il …
Aurelia Schober Malley: So I Was
‘Dearest Mummy’, loving and reproachful, a tightened mouth in a face puckered up and quivered like a pale jelly. Your barnacled umbilicus, the lovers’ fat, paralyzing red placenta, that bald, wild knuckle white moon unloosing bats and owls, dragging seas …
Doppelganger
I lack, unlike the others, a menagerie of identities (multiple hes who co- exist within the same body: the sack of clotted blood and glowing flesh and gangly bones that one calls home); there simply are two mes: Pieta, marble …
In the Gods
in the gods left eardrums a whisper, the caterers want to know where to put the profiteroles – its over forty degrees & they wont fit in the bar fridge? but I’m distracted by the scent of Christmas ivy It’s …
A Day
In the gods
