thalia’s Enduring Shorthand Poetics

Posted on December 3, 2025 by Ella Skilbeck-Porter

thalia

This essay on the poet thalia was adapted from a talk presented at the symposium Enduring Experimental Poets held at East Melbourne Library on 22 October 2025, alongside papers on Javant Biarujia (by Brendan Casey) and Catherine Vidler (by aj carruthers). The symposium was programmed by Victoria Perin and presented by un Projects together with the Melbourne School of Literature.

thalia is one of Australia’s foremost visual poets, with an expanded poetry practice spanning from 1972 to the present day, working across writing, drawing, painting, rhinestones, embroidery, and, occasionally, sculptural glass beads affixed to garden walls and fences as graffiti. thalia’s enduring body of work is summarised in her major publication A Loose Thread, published by Collective Effort Press in 2015, which collects over 180 of her visual poems. She herself is a foundational part of Collective Effort: the renowned and enduring Naarm-based poetry collective that includes notables such as π.o., artist, sculpture and poet Sandy Caldow, Dadaist Jas H. Duke and poet and editor Jeljte, among others. thalia is a poet of the people; as well as having her poetry exhibited and published globally (for example, at the 1990 International Exhibition of Concrete Poetry held in Moscow) she often presents folders of her poetry at provincial towns and folk festivals around Australia with her partner, folk musician Alan Musgrove, whom she has collaborated with on an album of poetry, songs and music, Interplay1. thalia was a founding member of the Australian Poets Union and a co-founder and editor of the worker’s poetry journal 925, a little mag which ran from 1978 to 1983.

A singular and iconoclastic poet, thalia has developed an original, striking symbolic visual language through a practice of visual poetry constructed with the abbreviated writing system of Pitman shorthand, which relies on phonetic orthography — a practice known as phonography (Greek for sound writing). thalia has also called the method “soundhand writing”2, no doubt after Pitman’s first treatise on shorthand, Stenographic Sound-Hand (1837)3 that was initially learnt and deployed by scribes and reporters. Post-1914 (WWI), women were employed and took over men’s work and a predominately female workforce of secretaries and typists ensued.

In both form and theme, thalia’s visual poetics poses a counter-position to the Western supremacy of the written word, and to dominant entwined power structures of imperialism and colonialism. Hers is a fiercely feminist, leftist poetics that is embodied by the form of visual poetry that merges processes of reading and seeing, challenging hierarchies, binaries, and ideas of composition (both in text and visual art). While Pitman shorthand is designed to be written on lined paper, thalia composes her poems on blank sheets, enlarging the symbols and removing Pitman’s horizontal line used to demarcate vowel sounds. thalia’s words come towards you, as much as they flow from left to right. They remember — but more or less abolish — linear reading, as can be seen in the dynamic circular form of “passionately forward”.

Resistance
thalia, ‘Resistance’, 2016, acrylic on canvas, 30 x 40 cm

Born in Greece in 1952, thalia emigrated with her family to Melbourne in 1954, aged two. She grew up in Fitzroy, alongside her brother π.o., and left school at the age of 14 to help her mother, who was chronically unwell, in her shop in Fitzroy. At the age of 20, thalia learnt shorthand, taking intensive classes for the duration of a year. When thalia was learning and working with Pitman’s, she saw pictures and thought, ‘This is poetry.’4

She writes that in making use of Pitman’s, she achieves several things:

1) Honours countless generations who have had to write in code
2) Dispenses with the dominant written language, and thus creates a new written word, one which is/was primarily 
a women's domain
3) Transforms a worker's tool into art.5

These three aims have remained pivotal to her practice.

Rather than using Pitman’s as a code for writing texts, thalia creates new images from the notation and provides readers with a key of the shorthand notation. Decipherment is incorporated into the reading frame, moving between codes and languages. In thalia’s poetics, the hand-drawn image and words merge and become one, presenting a sonic, textual and visual fusion. Sometimes mimetic, where the image and the word express the same subject, there is also often disjunct or a puzzle between the visual and the verbal. The picture-poem presents new interpretations of the word and world, and a doubling that recalls an optical illusion, where the eye zooms in and out, as can be seen in ‘Your Tool Language’.

Your Tool Language
thalia, ‘Your Tool Language’, 1986, pen on paper, 210mm x 297 mm

If we are to read the poem following the notation, we read, “your tool language, language, language, language”, while the eye moves between the images we are presented with: a pen nib, a clit, a face. Language is presented as limitless and at our disposal, and there is a reversal too, away from a patriarchal language, where the pen is a phallic symbol.

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Time Does Not Heal All Wounds: On Writing Poetry as Document

Posted on December 3, 2025 by Chimmy Meer

Chimmy Meer

1.

All her life my grandmother, Teresita Meer, taught at the University of Santo Tomas. She was the second eldest daughter among 13 siblings, and her family resided in a compound, once a big house, in Navotas City. Already deteriorated by the time I was born in 1994. My father would tell stories of how my grandmother’s father, Lolo Anghel, was a fierce activist imprisoned during Martial Law. Somehow, it was my grandmother’s teaching position that saved us all from poverty, though barely. But I didn’t want to see it that way as a rebellious teenager, didn’t want to accept that she was our breadwinner for a time, and so I had fights with my grandmother as a teenager, fights that I could only laugh about with regrets now. My grandmother was a single mother. I had often suspected her of missing her other half. My grandfather, Jose Meer or Lolo Joey, lived in America for most of my father’s childhood and ours, separate from us until we were grownups. Everyone around me said he was a controlling and manipulative person, a womanizer. He was old when I met him, but I became all too familiar with having strong and wounded fathers. My grandparents both passed away from cancer, only a few months apart, one right beside me, another one in America.

It is easy and difficult to relate my past to my grandmother’s. I once wrote these lines about her: “She used to be so bitter toward me, my grandmother / But I became her favorite one summer / When she finally saw I could become a woman.” I remember our last date vividly, how she sat across me in the restaurant, smiling and talking politely about work and her check-ups. It was like she was a different woman, suddenly graceful and poised. She was already in pain and would only eat small portions of meat. My grandmother was known for her bursts of anger. I once drove her mad for something trivial; she threw a fit and was brutal with words. She must have understood how I felt when, one day, as an adult, I fought with my father, her son, and broke down. Like my grandmother, I carried for years a quiet rage inside me, not realizing that the past reached out to me, and that my ancestors’ wounds have become my own.

I grew up in Tondo, Manila, where my mother hailed from, surrounded by extended relatives from my mother’s side. In a small apartment, my father played chess in silence and smoked behind a table profusely. His life looked like a chess game to me, a tactic to survive and provide us with the best life. He was toughened up by Lolo Anghel enough for my grandmother to become slightly scared of him. I did not have a terrible childhood that I remember, except one night when my father broke my Barbie doll house, smashing it alongside other furniture. When he did it, it had nothing and everything to do with me. It was the night I first gritted my teeth, what would result in a bad case of bruxism and constant dreams about falling teeth over the years. The rest of the night unfolded like a bad scene from a soap opera until my grandparents from my mother’s side would finally come and take away my mother, and with her, my younger sister.

My older sister and I were left in the care of my father and grandmother. The doll house was kept in the shadows for a long time until our family got back together. One day I opened the doll house and found a nest of baby rats inside, small and skinless newborns wrapped in dirt and hair. Even after we cleaned it, I asked my mother to give my beloved doll house away for good.


2.

Nowadays, I often think about when a work starts and ends – like really starts and ends. It is possible to trace the beginnings of a poem to childhood, not because you wrote the poem from childhood, but because the work could be happening inside you even before you named your pain, before you wounded a page using black ink. A work began from childhood could end in your thirties, a few years after you moved out from home, thinking marriage or writing could save you. You could have been returning to visit your grandmother, just before she passed away, just before you knew she would go. The words, though inexact, could finally spill out, as you try to make sense of the crushing, somewhat oppressive temporality of lives. You might realize that perhaps the work did not begin with your childhood but your grandmother’s childhood, from earlier events seemingly outside of you. Such was the work I have been doing in my manuscript, Love is a River from Hell. I want to highlight movement in this work, to move as I have been moved, to let the river of words constitute memory, even if it is a hellish undertaking. Because the pain of my ancestors is my pain. In these poems, I write about the wounds we inherit from our mothers and fathers, and how all of it carries us ever forward, and forces us into our present body.

Growing up, I studied at the school where my grandmother had taught, a close commute to where we lived. I try to recall a mythic conception of my writing life. The beginning resembles a story we already know: a girl, having known shame, becomes the high school outcast. She would treat the church as her sanctuary, its dark and quiet hallways, its refracted light and saintly gestures, but it was only a physical sanctuary, a place where she can hide. In her body she carried wounds of silence, intangible wounds she couldn’t show to anyone. She wrote by herself in school and in the long summers without school, but she did not readily write about all the things inside her. She would write diary entries, half poems, unsent letters, and factual notes with no understanding of what the writing meant to her, no desire to make poetry into a project. When she attended her first writers’ workshop at 14 years old, it bruised her heart. Her poems were never any good but she could not have put down writing then. What was most necessary was to persist in writing, to survive, to pass the time. In a way, she was careless with time. She was young and unafraid of death, caught unaware of loved ones fading away.

Like bell hooks, I recognize that writing began for me in the heartbreak church1, from familial wounds that made me silent as a child, but like her, I do not want to worship in this church. When I searched my poetry for the original wound that compelled me to write, I saw how patriarchy affected generations of women in my family. I was both complicit witness and victim to the violence of love. In my mythic conception of a writing life, it is not bell hooks’s wounds of passion I find on my body, but wounds of silence. The symptom of this wound was always my writing. When my grandmother passed away on 1 September 2024, what was a record of my wounds was transformed into a record of her life, and I wrote to record some more. Vis-a-vis death, I wrote poems as documents that existed in liminality, ever incomplete and ongoing. I was writing time to save and forgive myself.

Time informed my work. It was clear that generational trauma flowed inside me like a river, sometimes raging, sometimes calm. My grandmother, a single mother, a teacher, was a woman we managed to hurt as a family unit, and it was writing about her that made me free of my broken doll house. When I recognize the source of my wounds, it finally no longer belongs to just me, even though writing it for myself was necessary, was what saved me. My grandmother’s hurt was the hurt of my father, because she was his mother. It will be the same for myself and my mother. This story was set in stone from the moment I was born, from my first childhood trauma. We are destined to be hurt, no matter if we are also loved, but I am not a firm believer I will write the same story over and over again, because I have written about other things. As long as I am alive, I can write about other things. It is this hope that keeps me writing still, that makes still writing an act of faith.

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Fake Gamers, Real Workers

Posted on December 3, 2025 by Rory Gillen

This interactive essay is best experienced on a desktop device. Click the image below to open the essay.

Fake gamers, real workers

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PRECARIOUS Editorial

Posted on December 3, 2025 by Andy Jackson

What actually do we mean by “precarious”? When I made the call for submissions, I had particular “at risk” spaces on my mind – employment, peace, health, community, ecosystems, social systems. Not only the global but the bodily. Not only systems of meaning-making but the water and the air. So, yes, what isn’t precarious, especially these days?

I read hundreds of submitted poems, and soon enough I realised that what I was looking for were poems that gave voice to some particular aspect of precarity, not only in what they spoke about, but how they spoke. I wasn’t interested in abstraction, solid ground, hygenic clarity, pyrotechnical displays or cool. The poems needed to themselves be teetering, staggering, bedridden or exposed.

The poems I’ve chosen for this issue of Cordite each, in their own way, face our acute, unavoidable vulnerability head on, while simultaneously staring it down. They don’t offer solutions, not overtly anyway (there isn’t any “solution” to precarity, not entirely). But their very existence – you reading them – is a kind of counterweight. What connects us, what keeps us going, is reinforced, maybe even amplified.

These poems speak to each other, across aesthetic and experiential distinctions. “I cannot help // I feel” (Eileen Chong, ‘Glide / Elide’) echoes quietly in “I forget the username / for my blood” (Dan Hogan, ‘Slippery’). Those “limbs lopsided to earth” (Gaele Sobott, ‘Byways’) remind me of “you whose emergencies / go unregistered” (Khairani Barokka, ‘praise poem for these girls i was’). And while the “hungry rust [is] eating / the underneath” (Kobus Moolman, ‘Flat’), for those lives under threat, including our own, another voice cries out, “They must endure. They must all endure” (Scott-Patrick Mitchell, ‘The Hurt’).

I experienced “I have not yet seen an undamaged mossbed” (Louise Crisp, ‘Dry Mountains’) as an unsettling parallel of “Austerity is the cure that displaces the sickness onto the poor” (Eleni Stecopoulos, ‘Becalmed’). And I couldn’t divorce the phrase “there became too many funerals to cry at anymore” (Peter Davis, ‘Portrait of a friend with HIV dementia’) from “tenderness creates a universe where right is not the issue” (Claire Gaskin, ‘The Victorian Parliamentary Inquiry into the Recruitment Methods and Impacts of Cults and Organised Fringe Groups’).

These poems say, “I’m looking for a word / The (ex)plosives are ambiguous” (Luke Patterson, ‘Cosmolalia’). They find their own language, including the stutters and silences, in their own experiments, and in each other. And in you. They ask, “If I’m a wrong one, will you also be that / with me” (Jill Jones, ‘Observations On a Friday Evening When It Might Rain, When It Might Change’). And, “Are you breathing, / May I / enter?” (Medha Singh, ‘Lure, Endure’). They are, like Rachael Boast’s ‘Ass’, “emissar[ies] of burden”.

Honestly, I want to quote every one of these poems. There are sinkholes, handfish, chemotherapy, door-to-door evangelists, a fried cheese sandwich, colonialism, the abyss, ruinous rentals, Gugaamgan (the Gumbaynggirr word for ‘emu’), Sappho, plastics, war, and families. But read them yourself, and make your own connective tissue.

It’s fascinating to see, too, how through the anonymous submission process, quite a few of my favourite poets were behind the poems I chose. And there are also a good number of poets I’m not at all familiar with. The world of poetry might not escape precarity, but it’s vigorous.

In her book, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing asks, “What if precarity, indeterminacy, and what we imagine as trivial are the centre of the systematicity we seek?.. .A precarious world is a world without teleology. [This] is frightening, but thinking through precarity makes it evident that indeterminacy also makes life possible.” (20)

There’s an abundance of life in these poems, gesturing towards how we might live together.

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Poetry as Protest; Protest as Poetry

Posted on December 3, 2025 by Dženana Vucic

Dzenana Vucic

We’ve had reason, lately, to wonder at the effectiveness of protest. Movements like Black Lives Matter and Me Too (or, earlier: the Occupy Movement) mobilised millions of people around the world, yet it feels – particularly in our current political moment – as though despairingly little has changed. This frustration is felt with acute horror in the face of Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza, which has seen protestors gathering in the tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands every week for two years, demanding an end to the violence only to be ignored or painted as extremists by their governments.

Like protest, poetry, too, faces suspicions of material impotence. Poetry, after all, “makes nothing happen,” as goes Auden’s half-remembered and oft-repeated line. And yet, people continue to write it; people continue to protest; often, people do both at once. What, after all, is a chant if not a line of poetry?

In our thousands, in our millions / We are all Palestinians; the people, united / will never be defeated; Siamo tutti / antifascisti [we are all / antifascists]

Chants – frequently taking the form of couplets – rely on rhythm and metre to be memorable and repeatable, making poetry the medium through which most people engage with public protest and the predominant language through which protest is articulated. Even when it is not being shouted, poetry in inextricable from protest movements, as has been recently highlighted by Readers and Writers Against the Genocide, whose striking T-shirts and totes, each featuring poems or lines of poetry by writers like Evelyn Araluen, Omar Sakr and Sara M. Saleh on their back, have become ubiquitous at literary events and pro-Palestine demonstrations across the country.

There is a difference, of course, between a chant and a poem, and indeed, between a poem and a protest poem, though the line is blurry at best. Not so much a genre as an activist orientation towards poetics, ‘protest poetry’ has been described by Maggie Queeney for Poetry Foundation, as “a poetry of dissent”, a poetry which “exists to reveal what those in power seek to hide, to criticise and challenge, and to protest and resist established values and ideas.” Protest poetry is, definitionally, political. Though, as Solmaz Sharif writes, so is all poetry: “Every poem is an action. Every action is political. Every poem is political.” Explicitly political poetry goes further in that it must ‘speak truth to power’ and, as Solmaz explains in her conversation with Evie Shockley at the Radcliffe Institute, this means that it must speak to the moment, it must insist on specificity. The same is true of protest poetry.

‘Protest poetry’ is an admittedly awkward term, though it is the most succinct signifier that English offers to name the entangled concept of poetry-as-protest/protest-as-poetry. I use it to delimit something perhaps narrower still than what Queeney suggests and to foreground its goal-oriented character. In using the term ‘protest poetry’, I am not referring to poetry which depicts injustice or which attempts to place, as Seamus Heaney offers in ‘The Redress of Poetry’, “a counter-reality in the scales – a reality which may be only imagined but which nevertheless has weight because it is imagined within the gravitational pull of the actual and can therefore hold its own and balance out against the historical situation […] a glimpsed alternative, a revelation of potential that is denied or constantly threatened by circumstances.” My meaning is narrower, too, than poetry that attempts to bring the reader to share a moral view with the poet. Rather, what I mean by ‘protest poetry’ is poetry that seeks to inspire revolutionary action towards a change in the world. As Fargo Tbakhi writes in in his essay Notes of Craft: Writing in the Hour of Genocide: “what the long middle of revolution requires,” (he is talking, specifically, of Palestine) is “an approach to writing whose primary purpose is to gather others up with us, to generate within them an energy which their bodies cannot translate into anything but revolutionary movement.” (original italics). This is the purpose of protest poetry, and what makes it such.

It goes without saying that to be effective as protest poetry, the work must also be effective as poetry. What this means, according to Rajeev S Patke in his chapter ‘Postcolonial Protest Poetry’ from the Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Poetry, is that it must “constitute a memorable utterance that is relevant to the circumstances which bring it into existence, but also capable of sustaining a more lasting resonance.” In practice, this definition is somewhat subjective as Patke himself demonstrates by providing examples of what he believes to be an effective and an ineffective poem protesting South African apartheid: he praises Keith Gottschalk’s ‘After’ for its poetic irony and distance while referring to Dennis Brutus’s ‘A poem about Sharpeville’ as “banal and prosaic”. Yet Brutus’ words, a preliminary Google search shows, are widely shared and clearly deeply resonant.

As Tbakhi argues, there is power in clarity, in the plain speech that Patke might call prosaicness: “One of the basic conditions of success is a clear perspective of things,” he writes. This clarity may well be one of the defining features of protest poetry, which must be understood if it is to be acted upon. Vagueness, ambivalence, equivocation, obscurity: these are the enemies of political action and of protest poetry. It is, Tbakhi writes, “[b]etter to know what we’re saying and why, and to say it with force” than to submit to the “machine” of Craft. Indeed, Tbakhi is deeply suspicious of ‘Craft’, describing it as “a machine built to produce and reproduce ethical failures,” a “counterrevolutionary machine,” intended for “regulation, estrangement, sanitization” and to “elide and foreclose political thought.” Craft, he argues, allows a reader to read a work, feel a response to it, then put the work down and go about their day. It does not compel them to act.

The kind of writing that he argues for, on the other hand, “calls others into mobilization, generating feeling within [the] audience that cannot be dispersed through the act of reading, but must be carried out into collective action.” This is not to say that a protest poem must explicitly demand a particular action, but rather that such writing depends on clarity of expression because to be effective as protest it cannot allow for the inhibiting effect of ambiguity; it must be understood as a demand for change.

As with explicitly political poetry, a poem intending to ‘bring change’ must, according to the activist poet John Kinsella, have immediacy. It “necessarily lives in the moment”, though is not confined to it. It must speak to a contemporary issue, but this does not prevent it speaking with new and powerful reverberations as time passes or circumstances change. Such a poem, Kinsella writes, may “lose its activist event ‘purpose’ as its ‘moment’ passes, but it can be recovered, recontextualised, and brought back to act anew.” I am reminded, for example, of Iraqi poet Dunya Mikhail’s devastating irony in ‘The War Works Hard’, a poem which speaks equally to the Iraq war, as to the wars in Congo, in Gaza, in Sudan, in Ukraine: 

How magnificent the war is!
How eager
And efficient!
Early in the morning, 
It wakes up the sirens
and dispatches ambulances
to various places,
swings corpses through the air,
rolls stretchers to the wounded,
summons rain
from the eyes of mothers

Indeed, we have seen this recovery and recontextualization many times over: the persistence of pieces like Gil Scott-Heron’s ‘The Revolution Will Not Be Televised’ or Maya Angelou’s ‘Still I Rise’, which never fade away but resurface with renewed conviction in response acts of white supremacist violence against Black people in the USA. More recently, there is the the virality of ‘If I Must Die’ after the death of its author, Gazan poet and academic Refaat Alareer who posted the poem to Twitter in November 2023.

Arguably, ‘If I Must Die’ was not written as a protest poem but has become one after Alareer and his family were killed by an Israeli airstrike in December 2023. The poem begins: ‘If I must die / you must live / to tell my story’ and ends: ‘If I must die / let it bring hope / let it be a tale’. Readers quickly took up his call, and the poem amassed 33 million views and was translated into over a hundred languages with protestors flying kites in Alareer’s name and reading his words at demonstrations and vigils around the world. Though written in 2011 (a year with no shortage of Israeli violence itself), ‘If I Must Die’ gained renewed immediacy as a symbol of resistance to the intensified genocide in Gaza.

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Regeneration Is Not a Metaphor

Posted on December 3, 2025 by Lulu Houdini

Lulu Houdini

Letter to my fourth great-granddaughter. Written seven generations from now, by me as an Ancestor, in her starry sky.



yaama waabi, hello baby

I’m coming to you in English because the tall ships’ memory is still in my psyche, and in the time when I was born in 1992, this lingo was the first language for most of us on the east coast. Even when my youngest granddaughter passed over, they were still speaking in English.

Because of how often I watch and listen to you from up here, I am becoming fluent in our Gamilaraay mother tongue — something I always wanted to achieve in my own lifetime. Whereas before, I was translating everything you said back into English. My Indigenous thoughts no longer have to be translated, and for that my little grannie, I feel more restful than I ever have.

I felt called to write to you now, in the year 2200, after we spoke in your dream last week — where you called me into your clear mind and your strong body. In your yearnings to know me better, I do something very old: I write you a long letter.

Because of where my daughter was born, you’re connected to the gulayaali. But I am still bigibilla because of my grandmother six generations ago, and also for the wirayl — the echidna quill — because I’m a writer. I am close to echidna, because the wirayl still sits inside my foot. I am bigibilla because she is a mother of pups and the houdini of the bush. I hope the stories you’ve heard of me live up to these expectations bub.

When I was born, I was covered in brown hair — my head, my shoulders, my forehead, even my feet. I remember when my daughter was born, she was the same: a crying, hairy little angel. The vernix that licked her fresh skin was pink with a mix of my blood and biome, which now sits in the soil and the tree you visit on our grandmother Biddy’s Country, on southern Gomeroi homelands.

Baby girl, in nine big moons’ time, I’ll watch you birth your sixth guyaangul-djuul with all the girls around you and I wish I was the one there catching your baby and rubbing him with gurruwii. Our songs have survived these generations — where everything was coming back — and I’m gonna make sure it’s there for you in the wind on your big special night.

In 2022, I joined a powerful clan of women reviving birthing on Country practices within Yuin Country. Back then, that reshaped this continent, my girl — don’t forget what women have done, for you now to birth your babies in peace, in land, in water, in spirit, and in sovereignty.

I remember seeing that change in 2027, all those years ago, with the first of our birth centres. It was the first time I really felt the future was going to be okay for you, bub.

One hundred and seventy-five years later, and now our babies thrive well past the first 2000 days, entering classrooms not only with their pride, but with a huge welcoming presence from the people in there who value them.

In 2059, I watched the helicopters drop masses of mangrove seeds down onto Country for the regeneration of our waterways. That was David Unaipon, long before me — and his technology of flight path and the returning boomerang. The seed collection — well, that was our generation. My mum, and lots of others, taught me how valuable the mangrove seed would be, and that’s why we kept them.

That began the regeneration in Warra, where me and your great aunties and uncles were grown, as the second generation of our family living off Country — where our saltwater Murri line began.

All the land and sea animals have come back now, hey bub. The ones in the ocean near to where you live have colours so vibrant we can see them from the clouds on a still day. By nighttime, we sit up here and watch the bioluminescence sway them in glitter-storm tides. They light up like dancing water trees under the glassy surface, and I sit up here with my cuppa. When I was your age, the seasons were still all mixed up. But now that everything is almost restored to rhythm, I know when to come and watch you take your babies down to the beach in the early evening. When they scream in joy at being the first ones to see the plankton, we hear it all the way up here. I receive noise complaints — that’s your mob, Lulu.

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The Algae Will Stay Another Day

Posted on December 3, 2025 by Mali Harkin-Noack

Mali Harkin-Noac

I’m staring up at this precious night sky and I wish on a shooting star that the algal bloom will go away. When I look a little harder, I see it’s not a shooting star, but one of Musk’s Starlink Satellites.

Ten years old, I was standing on a rock out to shore singing a made-up song about islands. Water washing up to my feet, my hair wet and dreaded around my shoulders. I lived in that ocean, in the throws and tides, salty and sandy and wrapped in a towel. Even then, I was creating art about the waves. I was singing that song because I loved where I was. There was a perfect sunset over slow-moving waves, with soft, dry sand, precious clouds above soaring birds, and an endless, exquisite horizon.

Nowadays, the water is thick, soupy, and angry. You can smell the toxin before you can see the beach. I’ve sat on mosaic benches at the edges of cliffs for hours, watching the algae float at the surface of each wave. I can see the bloom’s perfect structure, shifting and growing just below the surface. The sand is covered in warm foam, surrounded by dead fish along the coast. I keep watching it, so badly it hurts, and I’m looking at my mother earth and asking, “What did they do to you?” Begging, “How can I help you?” But it’s not up to me, a year 10 student from Thebarton, a hobby writer, a Narungga girl who’s watching the algal bloom wrecking the beaches of her banggara hours away. The people who are ruining our ecosystems won’t be alive to see them collapse. But I know I will.

I write this for the ocean that has guided me for all my life, that holds my soul so delicately, that fed my ancestors so generously, because I don’t know what else to do. What can the powerless do? What can the children do? And I still visit the beaches, and people ask me, “Why would you want to go when it’s like that?” and I think of when my pop was in palliative care, years ago. We sit with our loved ones and hold their hands when they’re sick, we give them our stuffed toys to comfort them, we keep the light behind our eyes so they remember to, too. So, I sit with this aching ocean. I count the waves and keep away from the foam. I stay close enough to feel this body again, but I stay far enough away that I don’t start to cough.

When I was 16 I met a dead ray on one of my trips. She was about the size of my arm, and had a long, straight tail. I sat with her and counted the beautiful stripes on her back, I ran my finger along her smooth skin. She was completely dry, completely still, and so heavy on the gasping sand. My heart rested heavy in my chest. I don’t know how long I sat with her; I didn’t want to leave. Eventually someone dragged me away. I think if she’d found me floating in the water she would have stayed with me, too. This is what we do when we care.

I was six when my family and I met 200 people at the beach one morning for Greenpeace. We all stood in a line and held hands in front of the water, a protest against oil drilling in Mirning country along the Bight. I had bare feet, my hair was frizzy in the salty air, and we all promised we’d protect the waters. We gripped hands so tightly that day, we were all such strangers to one another and still, we clutched onto each other like lifelines. We told the waves, “We’ve got you, we’re on your side, we’ll look after you.” I don’t know what to say to the ocean now because we didn’t manage to protect it; we didn’t do enough. Maybe we couldn’t have ever done enough. I think all I could say is “We’re sorry.”

Fifteen years old, I was at Brighton beach with my best friends, standing hip-height in the water and throwing a ball back and forth. The sky was empty of clouds, a perfect blue, the water crystal clear and shimmering. We’d taken the rickety train on the Seaford line, ate salami sandwiches, and carved words in the sand that’d be washed away by moonlight. Watching the others throwing and catching, something suddenly came out under my foot and gripped its sharp claws around my toes before I jolted away, screaming. “There’s crabs!” I yelled out to them all, floating now, while they laughed loudly. I angrily cursed out the ocean, ashamedly, and all the damned Brighton Crabs. Looking back on it now, I’d do anything to be there again. I’d get pinched by thousands of crabs. I’d sleep in a tank of crustaceans if it meant I could have that crystal clear water again. My memory often swims back to that day.

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Posted in ESSAYS | Tagged

15 Artworks by Elyas Alavi

Posted on December 3, 2025 by Elyas Alavi


Elyas Alavi, Installation view of ALAM exhibition, 2024 , gold leaf, iron, steel, prints on velvet, photo by Kai Wasikowki

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15
Posted in ARTWORKS | Tagged

from BECALMED

Posted on December 3, 2025 by Eleni Stecopoulos

On the night the congresswoman wore her ballgown emblazoned with TAX THE RICH and the left muttered, Eat the rich, I dream of being a cannibal.

We’re on the move, not to shut down the port or expel Patriot Prayer—no, we’re dropping down onto the roofs of billionaires to dig out chunks of flesh from their backs. There is no affect around this action; it’s grunt work and cults are dull. A chef serves us crudités slathered in pink caviar: persona foie grata. Am I dreaming the dream that capital has incubated in me? Grow your brand.

On TV, Guillotin discovers the nobility are infected with a virus that drives them to feed on the peasants. In reality, the plutocrats devour many and feed slowly on others, like parasites clever enough to keep their hosts just barely alive. Austerity is the cure that displaces the sickness so that greed can mutate with ever more virulence.

§

One morning we woke and it was night, it was nighttime all day, the sky orange with wildfire smoke, the bridge and the skyline shadow puppets cast by an absent sun.

In Aurélia, Gérard de Nerval imagines the earth knocked off its orbit, wandering through the firmament like a dismasted ship.

We are becalmed. The virus passes over the land, then passes over again. We suffocate in a leaking boat, bake under a tyrant sun. There is no horizon. All is horizon.

Insomnia is epidemic, we say, symptomatic of “dark times.” But what is a symptom? The etymology points to a falling-together or a falling-at-the-same-time. In the incubation cults it meant the coincidence of a supplicant’s dream with a priest’s dream, which signaled the time was right to go into the dark. The symptom was the sign to enter the closed part of the dormitory, the place “not to be stepped into.” The symptom tells you to enter a structural impasse to gain knowledge about the condition that has stranded you in impasse.

Insomnia is symptomatic of what is asymptotos, what does not fall together. The asymptote is our common symptom. We wait for what we know will happen, yet resist knowing. We watch the approaching limit.

As if to sleep would be a moral failure: to abandon the watch.

As if to sleep would be to tell yourself the blight of the world can always be transferred to the page, the way bandages were hung on trees. That the blight will not show up in your heart, your lungs, your gut. That you can pass through.

And yet to sleep would also be to see what is done in your dreams. To allow the open acts into the dark.

To be symptomatic is to align your body with the common plight. And we do not want to have the same dreams. No one wants to share symptoms. The pandemic’s contagion is an inconvenient reminder that we still take physical form, the way Edgar Allan Poe needed characters to work out his vectors of metempsychosis.

§

Tell yourself that tale—the one that begins with the ship going down—on the brink of the whirlpool—the narrator—on the brink of going over—voice breaking off—and yet—the manuscript is in our hands—we’re reading a tale written—by the one whose heart must have stopped before the towering shroud—the one who must have plummeted within the walls of the sea—the one whose principal grief was that I should never be able to tell.

Poe wanted to watch the ship go down while on the ship, stay conscious through the descent into oblivion. Matter would return to its source through katabasis but always there would be the anabasis, the comeback—to tell the tale, win the prize, reap the fame.

Insomnia insists on presence, staving off the wreck. And insomnia comes after, anticipating the next act against nature, slow death under the sun.

Posted in 118: PRECARIOUS | Tagged

GLIDE / ELIDE

Posted on December 3, 2025 by Eileen Chong

travel by train
women
a fox

her neck
a rage my father
married
Life
sex
unconscious harm
for my

suicide need
at least
disguised as
very fox
animal
I think
if I died
very bad day[s]
exciting
realization
of a desire
so very difficult
present

terror abandoned

it is a fact

complete

I cannot help

I feel

Note:

This is an erasure poem utilising the text from a loose sheet of writing from Louise Bourgeois’s
archive, titled 10 October 1958 (LB-0449), which is held in the Collection Louise Bourgeois Archive,
The Easton Foundation New York. The original text, selected from Louise Bourgeois’s dream
recordings by Philip Larratt-Smith, was reproduced on page 70 of Louise Bourgeois: Has The Day
Invaded The Night Or Has The Night Invaded The Day? (ed. Justin Paton, 2023, Art Gallery of New
South Wales).

Posted in 118: PRECARIOUS | Tagged

Slippery

Posted on December 3, 2025 by Dan Hogan

rocks. The link is coming from inside
the biography. Especially given this
inbox is not monitored. Do not
curtain the rail with me, warmly
tenant. There is never going to be
a holiday from rent. The ‘in’ in
‘inbox’ is short for inferno

(Dante). Trigger a mercy ticket
with our friendly chatbot. 24/7
is here. Before you could squeeze
water from afar, many were window.
The house? I don’t know about
the house. Maybe it’s mental health,

maybe it’s the property manager. Or none
other than the pigeon’s office where
the corner of the bathroom used to be.
Not like the sky is a tombstone. Maybe
you have a new lease on outside things
becoming inside things. Maybe a candle
stabbed into a urinal cake can be a happy
birthday. A wish-making moment. A panting
sucker for a happy medium. Not many
would sit here. True, I forget the username
for my blood. Used one neck too many. When
miracles attack: what do we do?

Bourbon. In moderation. Heaps of moderation.
Not too much bourbon. It’s a weak night. Keen,
not keen. To be fair, even the butteriest flowerheads

bask, wobble shitful. It is nearly the year
2055. Why are people still going
online? No more can the dustmite
mung skin, are we engorged by
nostalgia. Welcome to landlord
or cake? (Only one way to find out.)
The game where you, warmly
tenant, can have your landlord
and eat it, too. It’s always, let them eat
cake but never let them eat landlord.
That’s so society. So glacially
erratic. When memories have their
little leadership spills, I like to think
they are criticising what passes for
insight around here. Alas, old mate
will be back. His headlamp won’t
charge itself and I’m not doing it.
That’s my glass half full of habitable
atmosphere instead of bourbon-dread
for you. Opened the window to dry my lips
but nothing happened except I put on
a hoodie. I can see old mate from up here.
Here he comes. Got his laptop. He loves
that thing too much. Maybe it’s mental health,

maybe it’s the overinvestment in the dominant
symbolic regime? I’ve heard pink batts mumble
slurs. Swear. Print emails without first considering
the environment. I threw the window out of myself.
Evening was there and moths pattered the decorative
gravel, round river, tumbled sandstone. Delectable
seed borers met those rocks stunned or worse.

Posted in 118: PRECARIOUS | Tagged

Little Brain

Posted on December 3, 2025 by Taliesin Don

The cerebellum—
from Latin means little brain,

learns by repetition.
It stores the choreography
of walking, writing,
wanting.

MRI speaks in code,
metallic syntax,
bone grammar,
an alphabet of damage.

I calcify in hospitals,
a fossil under fluorescents,
stillness taught
like a second language.

There’s a measuring tape
curled in my gut,
a snake,
too tired to strike.

Clipboard, murmur,
needle—
tooth, claw, prey.

I keep naming it
with flowers,
yew, larkspur,
bonewort.

Astrocytoma—
a star-shaped cell.
I feel its root system
branching in me
like lichen,
or grief.

Posted in 118: PRECARIOUS | Tagged

boyhood

Posted on December 3, 2025 by Andrew Flett

one night i intervene
as he gores my mother
my pinprick then
the tomcat’s magic kill
loyal mouse
toyed with
dismembered
you reconfigure
like lego overnight

Posted in 118: PRECARIOUS | Tagged

Another Notice to Vacate

Posted on December 3, 2025 by Gayelene Carbis
Forced to move. Again. Here now in a house I hate. This house is hard. This house is cold. Freezing. To sit on the toilet. To take. A shower. Shower over the bath. Narrow. Deep. Leg over slowly. Don’t fall. The other leg. Stand in that small space. Try not to fall. Keep your thighs tight. Don’t spread out. If you do. The sides of your feet curve. Into. The side of the bath. You feel unstable. Don’t move too much. You can hardly move your arms. They bang up against the tiles. The shower curtain. You can’t do chicken wings. You have to hold them close. To your side. You can’t stand straight under it. Feel the water on your face. It’s the angle of the shower head. To feel it on your face, you have to turn. Right round. If you step back any further, you’ll be on top of the drain. To wash your hair, you have to throw your head back. Far as it can go. You think of The Exorcist. Are you supposed to swivel your head here? I used to love taking a bath. For my bad back. But not now. Surrounded by chill. You move through cold air. As if you’re outside not in. But who cares about the bloody bathroom. The not wanting. Never now wanting. To go to the loo. To take a shower. So what. How long are you in there anyway? How long does it take. To take a shit. Shower. You can survive 3 minutes surely. But that’s under the tap. Then. You’ve got to get out. Dry yourself. Freeze. Seems here I am frozen too. I am stopping. I am not getting to the main thing. The most important. Room. I haven’t got to that. Yet. I could go on about the bathroom. The outside laundry. The two separate taps in the laundry. My handwashing. My cheap clothes. Wanting to rinse. Have to do it now. In cold water. Two separate taps in the kitchen. The dark lounge room. The light I used to work by in other places. This is a hard place to live and work. My bedroom. The place where I work. Where I live. The room that matters more than any other. I am a homebody. I am at my computer. I am attached to my desktop. My chair. But this room. The cold. My feet now. Are always freezing. My face. I don’t recognise this face. This body. In this place. In this room. Take the light. For instance. There’s a blind. I have to constantly. Put up and down. All day. I’ve had to move my desk. It was in front of the window. The light the glare. My eyes grew sore. I couldn’t stand it. Now my desk. Is at the side. 90 degree angle to the window. But still. The light the glare. The blind up and down. I don’t know what. I’ll do in the summer. To get away from the sun. The room utterly black. When the blind is down. Then there’s the debris that fell. From cracks in the wall. This land. Built on a swamp. There’s structural movement. Debris on top of my computer. Into the back of my printer. Had to move the desk the table. Everything in front. Of that window. For the handyman. To seal the cracks. To stop the debris. Falling on top of me. Into spaces. Nooks and crannies. My tools. I spent each day. Escaping. After I moved in. Not wanting to be. In this place. Hard dark cold. Even in summer. No insulation. Double brick. Old. The best I could get. The Notice to Vacate. The 60 – 120 at inspections. Could hardly move or see. Anything. The high rents and shit houses. Worse flats. Tiny. Terrible. It hurts to hear. The word home. I can’t say it. I can’t call this that. When I say I’m going – where? ‘The place where I live.’ What a mouthful. ‘Back. There.’ I don’t know what to call it. I still can’t believe it. I am here. There is nowhere else to go. There is no way out. At every turn. Every room. Like waging a war. My body in battle. I feel strange here/there. I don’t know to live. Here. Or how to launch myself. Into the world. From here/there. It feels like I carry it. Around with me. I rarely get away from it. It waits for me to come back. I see it in my mind all the time. I never knew how the cold. Gets into your bones. My mother’s previous rental. Of forty-three years. Bitterly cold too. She never complained. Said she was used to it. Her old brick house. Sure it had a heater. In the lounge room. Threw out so little heat. All my friends, my boyfriends, my ex-partner saying. That house. Is fucking freezing. That kind of cold. You can’t think straight. Can think of nothing else. Heating doesn’t help. Sure, there’s a split system in the lounge room. But it doesn’t heat. The whole house. Doesn’t help the kitchen. The bathroom. The bedroom. The laundry outside. Such cold. You can’t put it behind you. You carry it. You carry the image. Of the place in your mind. You carry the cold. You know you have to return to it. There are people all over this country. Living like this. I have told myself. Hate doesn’t help. I have read books. Know/n struggling friends. Family. I know I know. Things could be worse. I could lose my sight, a limb; my life too young. I could be living in some other country. Or even here. Floods. Fire. Losing everything. I have lost so many so-called homes. So many times. And now. Had to get out. Just before I turned sixty. Happy Birthday to me. Merry Christmas. Packing again. Looking again. December. January. Applying again. I can’t tell you. How much time. And energy. And exhaustion. That takes. I said to a friend. In the middle of it. My life is a nightmare. She didn’t like it. She was shocked. Perhaps disapproving. She said Your life isn’t a nightmare. Look at all the support you’ve got. Including her. She could see it. I was surrounded. This time I’d put out a call. Asked friends to help. The packing. The moving. Usually it’s only my family. And my old best friend. I was beyond that this time. They’ve all grown older. All have bad backs. They still helped. But I had a whole band of others. Still, when I said my life felt like a nightmare, I meant it. The packing. The looking. The moving. All the help. They can’t keep doing this. Neither can I.
Posted in 118: PRECARIOUS | Tagged

the writing life

Posted on December 3, 2025 by Shu-Ling Chua
After Grace Yee



post-VPLAs we pile into ShanDong MaMa.
order dumplings by the dozen.
gossip. avoid ‘what we’re working on’.

i almost walk into a pole while texting.
J calls, ‘TAXIIIII…’
i yell at him for not protecting me from the pole.

in little bourke street we ramble
tipsy, idle, inept and mutinous.

‘the writing life’ was written for, and first performed at, the launch of Grace Yee’s Joss: A History.
It was inspired by her poem ‘for the chinese merchants of melbourne’.

Posted in 118: PRECARIOUS | Tagged

Closing night

Posted on December 3, 2025 by Unity Akashvani

My life has ended and I’m living in encore,
each muscle shrivelled, each gland sucked of the salty
sweat of life. Lopsided lipstick smile,
the fading evidence of performance.

Clapping clapping clapping clapping clapping
clapping I’m bowing bowing bowing bent
over arms brushing the sticky stage floor.

Last season I lived army crawl as my only mode
of mobility. Not with military efficiency. Like I’d been
stabbed over and over and I needed to get to my phone
but I didn’t know what room it was in, didn’t know
if I’d left it on the bus last night. Survival
was exhausting so I labelled it a tomorrow problem,
and fell asleep, face down in my smeared blood.

This season I’m on a merry-go-round and instead of a pony
my ride is a big slab of newly drying concrete I have to walk
through. Tap the red runny nose of the clown face
on the other side. Turn around, walk back, fast
as I can. Turn back towards the grin in the mirror. The merry
-go-round is on its side, close to the wings.

There’s an identical one
in my brain, gaining speed before it thwacks against the top
of my spinal cord every time it goes around. Nightly performances
for months and I stay in character, sleep in the cockles of the concrete
bed kept-ever gluggy by leaks in the roof and industrial humidifiers.

I want the audience to go home so I can too
but they want autographs, drinks, dancing. They want me
to come home and fix their roofs, their relationships,
their climate anxiety, their dinner –
something leafy and colourful
and not from a packet.

They need massages and hope and streaks and streaks
of my laughter enthusiastically smacking
their bright plump
days and warm, sticky nights.

I am turning to heavy dusty curtains, to the historic
kitty litter preserved backstage, to disintegrating
front row tickets in a scrapbook of regret, to a jumble
of licked wounds still thriving on occasional sentimental
thoughts in a garbage bag that refuses to suffocate me

because it too was in the audience of my life
and wants me to carry on, to strut and strut, and fret.

I lift my head up from my deep bow and I see
the next season, promises of script all dark wit, raw
dripping performances. My wonky smile
crudely drawn on, stares back
from the glossy flyer.

Posted in 118: PRECARIOUS | Tagged

The problem with society is heteronormativity

Posted on December 3, 2025 by Kylie A Hough

The problem with society is heteronormativity. The problem
with everything is heteronormativity. There is no other problem
if you are somebody’s wife, mother, daughter, which I am no good
at being, but can’t escape. They were always using Mum, Dad,
Billy and Jane as their example. Rather than moving to a lesbian
commune in Ecuador, I hoped my husband would be gay. And
here I am, divergent, disordered, definitely queer. When people
write about culture, they say that you need it to belong, to thrive.
What is it to belong and what, on God’s green earth, is this verb
they dub, thrive? Returning to heteronormativity, for two decades
I participated in a nuclear family in suburbia. After seven years
the sound of his key in the door made me twitch, then there was
the sound of dogs; it was a suburb of pensioners, Shih T-
zus everywhere. When I left, naturally, he disowned me.

Posted in 118: PRECARIOUS | Tagged

Dromaius novaehollandiae

Posted on December 3, 2025 by Merinda Dutton

Dear Gugaamgan1

Too long – since your plumes traced the ocean in abundance
Now, salted feathers fracture into splinters – a memory
They named us dying and waged war on us, too
Named us unworthy of their false flag
Or any flag
Named us savages
Named this place, terra nullius
Named her, last of her tribe
daughter of the last king, they insisted
But kings wear crowns and we wear kinship
not to mention, we smuggled survival in our blood
sixty thousand years nestled underneath our tongues
Our bones hold memories of your shadow
a feathered prophecy stitched into an autumn sky
we still remember seasons charted in the shape of you
But you are not an exhibit
nor in a museum
are the living rendition of a constellation
a fleshed and embodied memory
a hero within a long-ago story
This is our duty
to gather up adornments you leave behind
to wear a revolution you carried in your wings
to protect your nesting grounds against highways
and forgetting
When we fly again, they will say your name
and hold you in reverence – Gugaamgan

Posted in 118: PRECARIOUS | Tagged

Brunswick Park

Posted on December 3, 2025 by Daniel Fraser

Wind sharpens
the March air—

seed fragments in fast forward
and the grey rags
of pigeons

a sprinter trailing dreads as she practices

everywhere the strain
into life
of an early season.

No centre to truth,
only these small-holdings—

urchins of skeletal burrs
caught in the rasp

a woman between home
and work thumbing rind off an orange—

each saying
loudly don’t refuse this

each saying
it contains us.

Posted in 118: PRECARIOUS | Tagged

Swamp Thing

Posted on December 3, 2025 by Juan Carlos Felipe G. Montenegro

I impersonate a body
By becoming body itself;
An assembly of mangrove

Limbs that even the fog
Could not conceal, a hand deciphering

Where foliage ends
And skin begins. An aorta

Of branches convinces me I am still
Somewhere—Life

In between cracks of conscience.
A ghost in muscles of lichen and weeds,
All facsimile. Life nonetheless.

How would you feel If you found out

You were mere protozoa
Fantasy—a eukaryote plucked from dream

And desire. What Adam took
From the garden I became. He failed
To realize I wanted him more —

To be permissible. I make conversation with roots and vines
To disappear my conversion of root and vine.

My face is a cocoon and underneath it
Was not another face, but a prayer

Or negotiation. My pleas turned elegy.
I envied caterpillars for what comes after.

Instead of genesis, I was autopsy.
Not mine but I inherited his pain

And claimed his want. I knew
the world

Before I knew the word for it.

Posted in 118: PRECARIOUS | Tagged

transport tissue

Posted on December 3, 2025 by Jem Rice

it’s a strange thing – this loss of focus
my consciousness turning from what the graphemes say to
the effect of this monitor screen against billowing gums


I’m doing my readings amidst this
struggle to translate letters into leaves


learning about the 19th century split between the
material and aesthetic
cramming concepts as if into an Amazon warehouse
limbs itching to dance them into being


why are the trees behind glass
my consciousness fragmenting
each distraction like a knife through the
xylem of a wildflower?


before this muted canopy
like cool water over jagged neurons
stories get projected in cells of light
kept in supercomputers that need air conditioning
to breathe

Posted in 118: PRECARIOUS | Tagged

Personae, or, Goodness

Posted on December 3, 2025 by Jo Langdon

‘goodness makes me want to be sick’
—Clarice Lispector, Near to the Wild Heart


Her revenge will be
personal and artistic: she wants it

each way—poems spiked
with spite—a familiar face:

I think of Lydia Deetz’s
neat features, peach

eyelids, cheek and brow bones,
Winona’s cartoon counterpart

bubbling out in my slow brain.
‘You have to be good’, you’re not

just getting an academic
job in this country

this clown says, crunching
numbers and casual causalities.

She’s not getting off
the treadmill, but her spite will

be elusive and allusive: her once
friend’s face

front-paged with
wage theft (shock her dead).

There’s a Smirko sneer she knows
but no one’s here to kiss crumb

maidens, spiders
would be more sociable, I mean

a particular kind
of aetiology: arachnids

in patient repetition, mending
and knowing. It’s not straightforward

misanthropy, mise-en-scène
of the hot-desk hallway, its hubris.

Her fair-weather friends in poetry
said she was sleeping

her way ahead. You have to
be good, you’re not

paying attention, finger
on the possibilities, pulsing. Better off

banging out some
shock jock expressions, appropriating

the pain of others, it’s okay
to fake it a while. I think spiders might

do it better though, thread
with integrity. Her insecurity,

doubling, could meet its own
dull brain in a meme.

Posted in 118: PRECARIOUS | Tagged

Fucking Autumn

Posted on December 3, 2025 by Kristen de Kline

+
My mother went mad

comets flutter
rain snarls
the hardest things
to do
to say
don’t get easier

+
I ran away

43 degrees Preston
strange/r men
collapse
on sidewalks

is it a bad batch of goey?

awkwardly beat poets waltz
in a Fire Station café

Ken searches for a missing snow leopard
we drink glass necks
of two white rabbits
skinned pale

Me: I never learnt to waltz in my gender.
Ken: I can’t walk in this body.

+
For a moment
I thought
I belonged (hold that thought)

I forgot
Whatever
I was scribbling
fell from present tense
to past

memory to madness
flaunted
poetry and physics

+
The Son of Sam was arrested the same day they carted her off
It must have been at least two decades
before
I told you:
it (those leaves . . . that season)
doesn’t get
any easier

Posted in 118: PRECARIOUS | Tagged

Observations On a Friday Evening When It Might Rain, When It Might Change

Posted on December 3, 2025 by Jill Jones

Does language always fail or simply tear itself up
into gaps, like flakes
of papyrus and ink like love

All the words wriggle away into earth
blow into tonight’s suburban haze
flush into stormwater or waiting seas
but also to where thought works itself out

Maybe I want to call to other beings
but they squirt back in my face cry out
run from me, burn, crumble, rot, die away

Sometimes I stand stupid, nonplussed, curious
angry, withdrawn as if
I should get something more back

Sometimes I should just howl, cry coo a little
empty my mind welcome the wrong foot
forget being an adult of any history any gender
forget being solemn, cool, wary important

I’m not what I believe myself to be
I’m the one afraid of stains Cleanliness
is next to murder

There are powers we don’t know in every garden
rubbish dump, fatberg, forest the spray of
a spoken word slag heap, supermarket toilet, dam

A beach never stays the same
just ask the shells and seaweed beach glass
discarded towels and sunscreen the floating shit

Our stories break up like geological eras
or transmissions from stars gashes, ruptures
orgasmic oblivion, platonic slippage

Or curve forwards to an end as so many facts
dense as the milky way
or root systems fossils, graveyards, sea beds

Is water a consciousness or simply a stream
a throughway as it pushes us
towards another stream, and another

So, I’m looking for form like some poet?
I’ll never find it
Every form remakes itself
Every genre begets another or crosses it out

What if I sing like the wind, a whale
so many birds
a dog the whole eisteddfodau

If I’m a wrong one, will you also be that
with me almost righted
in the stream, holding on or going down together

But time to stop talking
time to show up, hear the other sounds
They don’t care about me, about us

And that is what matters
What is without us And what we are without

It’s an emergency
But also, where different forms emerge
Entwined?
Yes, sometimes we are

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