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

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 …

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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 …

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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 …

Posted in 106: OPEN | Tagged

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, …

Posted in 103: AMBLE | Tagged

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).

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Submission to Cordite 88: TRANSQUEER

TransqueerTRANSQUEER 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.

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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 …

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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.

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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 …

Posted in 78: CONFESSION | Tagged

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. …

Posted in 77: EXPLODE | Tagged

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 …

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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 …

Posted in 61: NO THEME III | Tagged

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 …

Posted in 49: SYDNEY | Tagged

‘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 …

Posted in 42: CHILDREN OF MALLEY II | Tagged

‘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 …

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‘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 …

Posted in 42: CHILDREN OF MALLEY II | Tagged

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 …

Posted in 42: CHILDREN OF MALLEY II | Tagged

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 …

Posted in 42: CHILDREN OF MALLEY II | Tagged

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 …

Posted in 40: CREATIVE COMMONS | Tagged

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 …

Posted in 38: POST-EPIC | Tagged

A Day

In the gods

Posted in 37: EPIC | Tagged