I was Lectured About Mitosis from Trivia While News of War Played in the Background.

Posted on August 12, 2025 by Chris Andrei Cruz

“Mitosis – a process of cell duplication, or reproduction, during which one cell gives rise to two genetically identical daughter cells.”

The body remains singular, but it divides itself based on belief, amidst its ambition to historicize all the senses of relief. It is dependent on where home can be. For example, I sleep soundly while bombs fall thousands of miles away. Quiet, once my peace, becomes unsure of the family it shelters. The spokesperson on the television tells otherwise. “Peace is sure, we have seen development. Let us wait.” Confident, yet invalidating, at the same time. “You will be saved.” Who could tell such a thing? It’s never a question of how. It’s always a question of which hue. It’s always a matter of comfort. As it is, what it means: Certainty. Whoever sleeps easily at night grows to their heart’s content and leaves their husk and bones easily. The body remains singular.

The body remains singular

But it divides itself based on belief

Amidst its ambition to historicize

All the sense of its relief

It is dependent on where home can be

For example, I sleep soundly

While bombs fall thousands of miles away

Quiet, once my peace, becomes unsure of its family.

The spokesperson on the television tells otherwise

“Peace is sure, we have seen development. Let us wait.”

Confident, yet invalidating at the same time

Who could tell such a thing?

“You will be saved”

It’s never a question of how.

It’s always a matter of which hue

It’s always a matter of comfort.

As it is, what it means: Certainty

Whoever sleeps easily at night,

Grows with the heart’s content

Leave their husk and bones easily.

The body remains singular.

Posted in 117: NO THEME 14 | Tagged

Under Rain

Posted on August 12, 2025 by Will Vincent

between the crow and its croak
the general’s breath curls cold

over the blasted heath in death
metal’s blast bleats of the hot

cramped Volvo I find darker shades of decibel and speed

where the garage TV myst glows in the same bad movie I hear the phlegm-
stuck throat call of the crow

let them come

to hover to peel cheese from plastic in paved floodplains to let wind

spell billow my black silk shirt as I amble

the drought-struck concrete sunburnt scheming another day raw and eaten by critic

children I see a red bicycle halved by flood

crow let crow come

let crow come click in subsong and drown gun

snuff flame with wing cloud let kevlar molt let them
click open bursting mega-mart turkey in basements of cold America let us zone further out

on storage wars in a concerted campaign let crow come from roach electroshock into undeath

every buried thing let wingbeat eclipse our hallowed yawp
the crow is always new
they come in 2s, 4s, 8s slanted infinites in 16s doubling harried flaps cup
salt-spray dissonant warbles pilfer op-eds from columnists’ gloom-filled navels


let torn bullet money adorn their scrawled nest let crows feed their crowlettes–tongues pointing in need

fed from scavenged stolen light
let the squall come pell-mell in clouds to slip

over berg-cold sea with slick black wings and crag coast coughing

let crowfoot be quiet on peat moss soft as they walk black-taloned

green as rain hastens pine

let their plumes block satellites beaming data

let midnight spill over creek the path let them open me like teenagers twitch-born

let their looping math beam through me mad down through my gut drum

let their raw youth speedrun my whole life concoct

operas in shared worlds

let me nod in approximate communion

as I catch open klieg lights beckon

let me fall into the crow’s abyssal lake-cold eye let it burn a look to pluto locked in dance with charon

two shards huddling with lesser moons hydra styx nyx dangling mass

I wade flooded bomb shelters

in storm drains we play at drowning

where the wire sparks hot a headless snake through puddles

let the weird come switched on

let hell clean

let their siren croak crack cragged rock

let me shovel corn in the wastebasket movies let crow choke the poison

cough repeal with legal and brute grunt

let crow call run their voices’ hoarse

let flap beak hold their eyes forever

let crow croak fight for honest life

let crow call in krill in awk- in coil in malcolm hecate

shock clock crock

talk pocked

in skulk in cawdor locked its skitch beckoning beak of mate

let speech-weeping eyes stick in the crow’s beak vacant

rubble aswarm with crows crawl

over ears with rake

Posted in 117: NO THEME 14 | Tagged

The Bronze Man’s Burden

Posted on August 12, 2025 by Troy Wong

A mantis shrimp can see four times our visible light spectrum
but to excuse your colour blindness as only human
was my mistake. Yours was knowing one fact about every animal
and nothing about surviving a world that wasn’t made for you.

You were my fair lady to course-correct into the culture,
a minister’s son set too straight, grown too narrow.
I had my work cut out, clearly:
a worm with its head cut off can regrow its entire body.

You loved every person made in your god’s image
and that made you holier. Shame that only a fair few are chosen
while others must be bleached to whiteness. Was I
a yellowed xerox of your paper saviour or just a chink

in your defenses? I’ll never know. I’ve released myself
from my bronze man’s burden of swimming in your pool,
paring lap from laboured lap with the blade of my body
only for the water to smooth over again faster than I can

draw breath—but by all means, keep furrowing your brow.
Mistake that for the work. Pray on our conversations,
take your guilt to Sunday service, anything but actual solidarity
while the protestors march and brown bodies burn again

for the fiftieth week. Wile away your mornings tapping out
your poems, tepid verse for tepid men. Continue to make
no difference. Sting and feel stung; retreat again
to your wasps’ nest. Bees at least will die after the first jab.

Another animal fact: I made you more than bland.
I gave you legitimacy. For years you monopolised
my patience for the pedestrian until last summer my god,
iris-dark, knotted as mangroves’ roots, messier than

the arc of the moral universe spoke to me
in words even you could understand:
No more pearls before swine.
You have given this clown enough of your time.

So if you want forgiveness, I am not your man.
Possibly I never was one. Go grovel to your god instead
who counts you among his precious children
and me among the animals.

Posted in 117: NO THEME 14 | Tagged

My DoorDash audition will not bring me fame (but hopefully will bring me a $3000 fortune minus tax)

Posted on August 12, 2025 by Claire Sullivan

1
I walked to the forest to write poetry.
I found the correct log in the correct amount of sunshine. It looked like a spot a bush
poet would write a bush poem in or an old boy poet would write a old boy poem
about the old boys of the war (the ANZACs are my heroes etcetera, I love my local
RSL etcetera, I put my pink five dollar note on the bar every day and every day the
barman serves me a pony of beer. One pony at a time etcetera. The barman calls
me Chook and this is my spot and I carry with me a photo of my best friend, my
special friend from when we were just teen-agers, he was only 19 etcetera)
I sat down
Felt the earth (Spotify wants me to listen to Carole King and so I listen
to Carole King over and over again) crunch beneath my shoes
(my Blundstones that were my good Blundstones until my everyday Blundstones
wore out and now my good Blundstones are my everyday Blundstones)
I picked at a pimple and listened to the birds and I thought about Britney Spears and
how she dances in the greige (see: sad beige baby) tiled space next to her lounge
room in front of her camera with her eyeliner thick and black just like how I wore it
when I was 13 and a few years into the choking freedom of adolescents (this is a
story about a girl named Lucky)
and opened Instagram on my phone.

2
The humiliation of working at the desk, tied to the desk like a rat in a rat sized office,
while redundant
is so big and stupid and why did I buy the lie that a job at a bank will mean security
when you can just get the (cashless) cow for free (read: nothing).

3
I sent in my latest audition for DoorDash but I live in the country where I see a man
walking his Shetland pony down the main street like how the people here don’t walk
their dogs.
You don’t get DoorDash here. Or Ubereats or Menulog or all the other gig economy
jobs for when you’re overqualified but you can’t get a job elsewhere because we live
in this big, endless, racist Australia so big so boundless (no plains, no sharing) (no
hat, no play).

I humiliated myself for DoorDash and stepped on a crack and the devil broke my
back – fuck – from dancing too hard in my DoorDash audition.

Now I need ibuprofen, tiger balm (like my mother used to rub on her neck in the spot
where she whipped and lashed five years before my birth her car folded and was
placed inside out at the wreckers yard now my mother jumps and gasps in the car
and her passenger foot breaks like I’m learning)
My yoga teacher cancelled because she just can’t work out (and the doctors don’t
know and she’s on her third round of antibiotics) why her voice is just sitting and
refusing, gasping for air on the edge of her throat.
So I did yoga in my Cotton-On Body teal (not like the party) yoga crossback bra and
my Cotton-On Body black (like our coffee in bed with the sun in love with you, I read
in the morning) ribbed (for her pleasure when I worked for Durex not Dulux and then
my contract finished and my dad died and I lost the password to that account
anyway, we all gotta make our living some way, bring home the bread, be the bacon
winner, the winner takes it all) bike shorts on my Kmart yoga mat with Yoga with
Adriene (she’s free) (hello Benji)

And I am forced to watch a DoorDash advert before I can stretch out what I did for a
DoorDash audition
so I opened Depop on my phone.

Posted in 117: NO THEME 14 | Tagged

Calliste

Posted on August 12, 2025 by Athena Melliar

So small was
your earth clod
thrown out of Argo,
it crawled into a tectonic hole —
the hole is black,
tears the cyan —
you came up for air,
we didn’t breathe a word.

Now you swell and swirl,
you erupt till you burn
to obsidian hopping on archipelago.
Love fears of you
so love dreams of you,
builts houses and poleis for you
and crowds them so full
to awe your loveliness.

Calliste, half-moon Calliste, don’t tremble,
we cannot love you any less.

Seismic tremors rattle Santorini as Greeks fear a big earthquake. Santorini is indeed a volcanic island and I’ve been thinking about
the myth of her creation. One of the Argonauts, Euphemus, dreamed of making love to the sea-nymph Calliste (meaning “the
most beautiful”). In his dream Calliste became pregnant with his child and asked him to throw a clod of earth into the sea to
create a safe place for her to give birth; as Argo was sailing, Euphemus threw a clod of earth and an island emerged. He called this
half-moon shaped island Calliste (modern name Santorini).

Posted in 117: NO THEME 14 | Tagged

Jolly Phonics

Posted on August 12, 2025 by James Achusiogu

They pronounce your name wrong they all pronounce your name wrong they pronounce.
Your name wrong.
You furrow your brows and say “pronounciation” and the whites of your friend’s eyes gleam. You steel yourself for the strike, but are still bowled over when the herd gathers.
“Pronounciation? It’s pronounced pronunciation.”
You are pronouncing my name wrong, you think but do not say.

Every morning your class gathers silently, eyes on the hunt for mischief.
Every morning a teacher shuffles in, simmering anger made more pungent by having to teach your class.
First on the roll, first to fall victim to your teacher’s blatant disinterest.
Your name, so beautiful when your mother calls it, shouting for you as you huddle over your computer trying to type just one more sentence, is now
Mangled in the mouth of your teacher, who glares at you pre-emptively daring
You to speak.
“Here.” You mumble, and try to sound happy about it.

Chicken change. It starts because of chicken change. Something you know you know you’ve heard
Your father say. Chicken change, it sounds so ugly in the mouth of your friend, who curls her lip and says
“What.”
Chicken change. You stammer out. It’s a Nigerian phrase, you manage to say before she says, her joke a gash across your face,
Well are we Nigerian?
No, you have to admit. No they are not.

International Mindedness Week is a week for whites to become aware of coloureds. You know this.
They don’t.
They make a pageantry out of it, with all you in your costumes, and you clutch the material and wish you were anything but who you are.
In the safety of your home you can make fun of their lazy ignorance, because if you got the privilege of being ignorant, you would at least make something of it.
Instead, here, they call you to the stage to give your address in Igbo. Your name, so uncarefully practised, falls off their tongue and shatters on the floor.
You try not to wince as you rise, and with the whites’ eyes heavy on your back, their tongues panting, salivating for a taste of your culture,
You speak the words you have so carefully practised,
So unlike the lazy ignorance they don’t even know to flaunt.

Europe-ean. It becomes an inside joke for your friend group, and you know it’s an inside joke because you are outside it, beating your fists angrily on the glass.
It’s not even a funny mispronounciation. You made a mistake.
It doesn’t seem to matter.
The next day the teacher laughs as they take in the first name on the roll.
“I’m not even going to try to pronounce this one.”

Posted in 117: NO THEME 14 | Tagged

Triptych

Posted on August 12, 2025 by Emma Barnes
The recipe


They will tell you that there are things alone, things gone, things wearing shirts that would have been ugly in the 90s. They will tell you. They might tell you. They will say something, likely mostly nothing. But they will have said something even though the thickest meaning present is nothing. The season is an ebb. A tide left out too long so the mud has dried. I know the tide returns but there are days where it seems unlikely it ever could. You do not know what to say to this doubt. I do not know what to say to this either. Whether the climate changes and the seas dry up or we take ourselves off to some other way of thinking about people I cannot say. If I never hear the self-satisfied loudness and laughter of men taking up space like this it won’t be soon enough. And if I stop trading labour for something we just made up I will probably start trading it for something else we just made up. This is what happens when things like this happen. One thing is a straight swap for another thing. It’s all straight around here. Tiresome in its lack of imagination. Tiresome in its insistence on a binary back and forth. Just leave they would say. Just go. Just leave it all behind. But it is never that simple or orderly it’s all just a big systemic mess. Too pea-brained to think ourselves out of anything we hang here inventing technology we can’t even use to save ourselves. The recipe is repeated, only not to perfect it.
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Posted in 117: NO THEME 14 | Tagged

My lover from another continent eats pandesal

Posted on August 12, 2025 by Hunny Laurente

after he savors his cup of coffee
into a long stretch of morning’s infant hours.
Part milk, heaps of sugar, a whole modest
affair of candied indulgence, this

childish happiness. Unfold this bagged
breakfast, warm with its sands
of crumbs. Slice it in half though not
all the way, pull it apart and birth a bed

cupped in palm. And how simple
is coconut jam, no measurements
needed, control discarded, all want
and remembering. How this may be

no viennoiserie, but childhood
is brought back to him, those summers
in the South of France, crusty baked rolls
served by the sea, so strikingly

similar to pandesal. How expensive those were,
he says. How heavenly these are, he whispers.
Flour, sugar, yeast, and salt, how simple
melting is. Far too simple unlike what it took

for us to reunite – their policies abided,
procedures tolerated, just to end
that distance, that cruel hunger
from gated borders. Then, at last,
to share bread with you.

Posted in 117: NO THEME 14 | Tagged

Thermal Runaway

Posted on August 12, 2025 by Toby Fitch

At thirty-two weeks in utero, babies
start dreaming. Sometimes during the collapse of
an iceberg you can see the dark blue colour
of its underside.

Dreaming about WHAT. Iceland holds funeral
for the first glacier lost to climate change.
Visitors must be present to buy tickets.
Billionaires want to

go to space because guillotines rely on
gravity to work. DREAMING ABOUT WHAT. Ice
churn, burning goo. Rinse, repeat. Remote control
white phosphorus and

sea spray, another child vaporised on screen.
Evie asks me, Would you rather be a twig
or a piece of dust? Can I be a plastic
particle in the

Arctic snow? If we took the excess carbon
in the atmosphere and made one big diamond
it would be 3 billion cubic metres
or a cube the size

of Everest. This is an advertisement
disguised as life advice. Would you rather hug
a koala or a quokka? Tilda asks.
Our planet’s poorly

equipped for delight. Your password must contain
an upper case letter, at least one number,
a gang sign, a haiku, a hieroglyph and
the pink blood of a

unicorn. The boy’s scared of blue skies because
the drones don’t fly when the skies are grey. Elsewhere
the weather’s a xenomorph in a black dress.
While you’re watching bombs

are dropping. Under cloaks of diversity
and justice visuals. That dark wispy mass
floating above Sydney Harbour has fully
baffled the masses.

I do not think, therefore I do not am. We
must snatch pleasure from the days to come. Was it
liquid metal, a dementor, pollution,
or just a scud cloud?

There are more hydrogen molecules in a
single molecule of water than there are
stars in the solar system. Are we not here
to fuck spiders? I

am dreaming my teeth out again. Government
as high corporation. To let us know your
feedback on genocide or the weird weather,
please consult this form.

Blue-sky thinktank. Our AI team will get back
to you. Would you rather a tsunami or
a bushfire? asks Evie. At our next presser
will be blandishments

on unrelated tissues. The same people
responsible for Robodebt will be re-
sponsible for a reactor. In this life
it’s not hard to die.

Blue-sky blood clot. Tilda asks, Would you rather
swim in a pool of Nutella or maple
syrup? AI is now the ocean plastic
of the internet.

To make life is far more difficult. Would you
rather stumble across a panther in the
Blue Mountains or a thylacine near Cradle
Mountain? People watch

people reacting to people streaming games.
Smoke from the burning Amazon rainforest
plunges São Paulo into darkness in the
middle of the day.

When male and female anglerfish mate, they melt
into one other, share bodies forever.
Overcome with emulsion, I’m going to work
until my bones turn

to dust. The tiny variations in a
singer’s melodic conviction that increase
across the arc of a song. Would you rather
plague or famine? These

sapphics are so unsubtle. This meme wants
everyone to realise that Australia is
two mining companies, seven landlords and a
bunch of asbestos

in a trench coat. Blue-sky drinking. Cuts against
the iambic grain of English with its fixed
pattern of falling stresses. Would your rather
eat yttrium or

lanthanum? Oil-company simps, business hicks,
debate-club bedwetters. A line is a fuse that’s lit.
Selling off their grandchildren’s breathable air
to buy an under-

ground bunker to fuck their cousins in. Housing
bubble or bust. Next, an iceberg the size of
London breaks off the side of the Antarctic
ice shelf. The decline

of the northern carbon sink. Just wait until
the stratospheric cloud shelf evaporates.
Maybe they’ll drink their teeth in their sleep.
Can we have some more

dragons in our climate predictions? Mortgage
originates from the old French dead pledge. My
children probably won’t be able to.
Would you rather work

non-stop for the rest of your life or sleep out
your days? The line smoulders, the rhyme explodes. And
by a stanza a city is blown to bits.
I’m so tired of folks

only talking about politics. I want
to talk about the trees. Blue-sky flooding.
Did you know that plants have photoreceptors
and can tell if you’re

wearing a red or blue shirt? I don’t know, bruh,
that sounds like politics. Israeli settlers
are burning Palestinian olive trees.
‘Australia’ is

an Enlightened blank space for colonial
experiments structured around a booming
land market. Nothing’s as precious as a hole
in the ground. Meanwhile

invasive and bushfire-fuelling buffel grass
has overtaken ecosystems wholesale
in the continent’s centre. Would you rather
inherit a house

or the planet? Would you rather drink algae
blooms or a toilet full of lava? My hair
is a mansion for nits, Evie yells. I buy
McHappy Meals and

ask for the toys to be removed. They
include them anyway. In 2050
there’ll be more plastic than fish in the ocean.
Would you rather be

in a zombie a robot apocalypse?
Raccoons are trying to break into Cybertrucks
because they’re literally confusing them
with dumpsters. Sewage

in Gaza laced with Polio. Chernobyl
wolves resisting cancer. Don’t forget to like
and subscribe to the dystopian beauty
of an oil rig. A

nurdle washed from my eyeball will soon join the
Great Pacific Garbage Patch, which viewed from space
is a nurdle. Say a prayer for the ether
which is obsolete.

Leave the birdies to contend with dark matter.
Wobbly space-time explains the expansion of
the universe and galactic rotation.
Your capital eye.

Gravity has a history of being
a trickster. I is some other. So there’s no
point fretting that what we’re doing will cut ice.
Don’t feel constrained by

the world limit. Strip a rhino of its porn.
Shit on a plate, charge a fall guy a fortune.
Thousands of lorikeets are unable. All
possibilities

for meaning have been suspended or crushed. Now
poetry can only be barbaric, weird,
estranged from atrocity. Would you rather
be hellish or hold

out for heaven? I got the Blue Screen of Death.
What if dreams were real and life was fake? The sun’s
plasma clouds interject. I address my kids’
fair demands to the

system, expecting the system to comply.
A pink-green glow sways like an iron curtain
to the south. Hail the earthworm rain. Every
precipitation

precipitates another. The long extinct
takahe lives. Techno-solutionism.
Their bodies appear perfectly spherical.
With blue-green plumage

they look like a model planet Earth perched on
two spindly, bright red, windmilling legs. The
kids are alright, clambering across coal trains.
If you hacks can’t hack

civil disobedience, I’d recommend
the Euthanasia Coaster. Private jets get
ready to leave for climate change conference
in Dubai, get stuck,

frozen on a runway in Munich. Now is
the winter of my kids’ disco tent. Zoo Snooze
is a riot. Lions escape. Instead of
this old world ending

catastrophically, what if one by one we
got sleepier and sleepier until it
gently stopped. Don’t say bedtime, say fuck the cops.
Campus encampments

our last resort. Would you rather never fly
in a plane or never swim in the ocean
again? The water in your body is just
visiting. I was

a thunderstorm the week before last. I will be
the ocean soon. Verify you are human.
Most of your cells come and go like morning dew.
Black mayonnaise dredged

from the depths of canals. We are more weather
pattern than stone monument. Green sunlight on
mist. Summer lightning. Would you rather dream in
Adriatic or

amniotic fluid? Fuck around, find out.
Your choices outweigh your substance. The child who
is not embraced by the village will burn it
down to feel its warmth.







Note: ‘Thermal Runaway’ mines various social media feeds, appropriating,
for instance, Elias Greig’s tweet, ‘AI is already the ocean plastic of the
internet’, among others, while quoting phrases from Vladimir Mayakovsky’s
poems ‘To Sergei Esenin’ and ‘A Conversation with the Inspector of Taxes
about Poetry’ (both 1926, and the translations are my own), and a line
from the Midnight Oil song ‘Blue Sky Mine’ (1990). The poem ends with
a proverb purportedly of African origin.

Posted in 117: NO THEME 14 | Tagged

GMT-8

Posted on August 12, 2025 by Shanai Tanwar

i tangle dreams within dreams
spinning entire runways like cotton through a charkha

“journeys end in lovers meeting” or so i hear

i traverse entire landscapes with the gentle
छम छम of my paayal breezing through the wind;
this is not your village, not my city
but somewhere in between

suspended in this limbo of here and there
i try to punctuate the journey between यहाँ and वहाँ
from the liminal spaces of airport gates; where one life ends and
another begins—i am here, there, everywhere, and achingly nowhere

i think of how my friend likes Turkish tea
as i gargle down precooked airplane meals
// from through the looking glass of a layover
i see day break in istanbul
/// i long for my mother’s pav bhaji and chai

somewhere, my neighbour’s cat plays with a toy i bought for her /
my lover checks anxiously for arrival times // my father must have left for his walk
my sister must be getting ready for class /// my dog could have had a seizure
all my relations, dislocated from myself — defined by their relationship with
Greenwich Meridian Time

i spin dreams within dreams
and wish i could weave together the ones i love
like a piece of فلسطیني tatreez;
i do not want to miss you all forever
i cannot miss you all forever

Posted in 117: NO THEME 14 | Tagged

Thoughts on the recent international student caps?

Posted on August 12, 2025 by Suri Matondkar

r/AskAnAustralian • 17 hr. ago
flyguy_25

Thoughts on the recent international student caps?

it hasn’t come quickly enough/imo we’re overrun/can’t set foot in a cityside rental without getting outnumbered by their lot/had seventy of them at the last place/indian by the sounds/*smells* you mean/ha-ha/throw them out! next question!/are we being a bit hasty about this stuff/friends working in unis say massive layoffs aren’t far/oh propaganda and fearmongering that’s all/yeah unis know they’ve messed up/they’re just trying to save their golden goose from slaughter/their fault for handing out degrees like chupa chups/these kids are all scammers gagging for residency/personally don’t have anything against them but they need to stop trying to stay after/same I’m not against them coming but students are meant to stay students not try to become citizens/we’re already full!!/that’s exactly right/amen say it louder so they can hear/say it slower because they barely understand words/it’s annoying that’s what/don’t they have to take some sort of language test before they get here though/they scam it like they scam everything else for sure/I spek eengleesh vary vell sir/cue head nods/aggressive head nods are the worst/their like bad knock knock jokes/they can just stay in their third world countries and learn on zoom if they want it that much/another reason to go back to the 60s I suppose/bet they never had to deal with this stuff back then/the good ole days when you could buy a house and land for a goat and three eggs/the good ole days when you might get an infection and die in a week/I mean I think the 60s weren’t that bad/unless you were anything except a rich white man I guess/yep the 60s a time of great land prices and some miscellaneous societal and health concerns/but no international students/!!!!NO INTERNATIONAL STUDENTS!!!!/my grandpa didn’t live through the crap he did for us to suffer now/get a shitty little overpriced rental or wait weeks for a consult/grandad probably didn’t go to a doc those guys were a different breed of tough/true he always said you needed a stomach of steel to leave your home country and make a life in a new one/I have so much admiration for my grandparents who also came here way back when/mine too/mine too/mine too/mine as well/can’t even imagine how hard it must have been for them.
Posted in 117: NO THEME 14 | Tagged

The Unfinished Endnotes of Forgotten Rituals Compiled in Transit by Those Who Left

Posted on August 12, 2025 by Tess Ezzy

[1] Thumbprint in Dough as Homeland. Recorded on the back of a shipping manifest. The recipe lost. The gesture remains. Each loaf shaped like a prayer that never quite rose.

[2] Red Thread, East Window. Found knotted around an immigration form. The thread snapped in customs. No one could explain its use. Still, someone packed it.

[3] On Whistling After Dark. This law was never written. It travelled in blood. It was broken in the new country where everything was louder and ghosts came anyway.

[4] The Ritual of Folding Clothes for the Suitcase. Author: all our mothers. Only rule: leave some behind. Regret will be waiting on the other side.

[5] The Proper Care of Basil When the Soil Has Changed. Original climate no longer applicable. Still watered as if the sun remembered.

[6] A Knife Not Meant for Cutting. Declared at the airport. Confiscated. It was not sharp, only sacred. The officer did not understand the difference.

[7] Lullabies With No Translation. Sounded strange in strange rooms. Children forgot the words first. Mothers hummed under their breath, pretending not to notice.

[8] The Covering of Mirrors Before Departure. Done without knowing why. Cloth placed gently. A custom folded into muscle. The reflection was too much to carry.

[9] Why We Do Not Speak Certain Names in the New Country. Not out of shame. But out of reverence. But out of protection. But out of something the language couldn’t hold.

[10] Cloves Sewn into Hemlines. A girl stitched them into her school uniform. They were called strange. She wore them anyway.

[11] The Forgotten Saints of Border Crossings. No icons. No feast days. Just the women who walked alone and didn’t lose the thread.

[12] Say It Softly or Not At All. A catalogue of blessings for things left behind: olive oil, soft bread, the key under the mat. An entire village of longing folded into a goodbye.

[13] Last Entry. A woman, at the sink, washing fruit she doesn’t recognise.
She places it in a bowl from the old place.
She says nothing.
The water carries the rest.

Note –
This archive is incomplete.
Some entries were buried with the speakers.
Some were rewritten in the language of forgetting.
Some arrived too early. Some too late.
Still,
they come.

Posted in 117: NO THEME 14 | Tagged

When My Father Built a Fence, He Said It Would Keep the Bears Out, But I Knew It Wouldn’t

Posted on August 12, 2025 by Rowan Tate

Bitterroot. Minor apocalypse. Because I am the keeper of the rainwater,
I scatter it over the wild garlic like a sermon. There must be a river
for everything to return to.

Who will speak today? Who will answer?
Every woman has a day when she stops feeding the birds
and starts breaking mirrors.

My mother said her prayers like petals falling off roses
but God was tired of getting flowers. She left the basement
tiled with canning jars,

peach halves suspended like lungs, dust a soft skin
on every lid. I keep the voicemail saved. Play it
when the house is too quiet.

Do the dark shapes in the forest know you’re afraid of them?
The best gods let you believe the rain can be convinced
to fall upward.

The kitchen clock is wrong again, or maybe right
for a different life. Grief grows fingers, learns to braid
the hair of daughters.

Posted in 117: NO THEME 14 | Tagged

blessed fruit

Posted on August 12, 2025 by Lisa Nan Joo

i see a photo of a pumpkin that looks like Jesus
a carrot resembling an astronaut
a bifurcated turnip that could win
a lovely legs competition

on wish dot com there is a plastic mould
that shapes pears into Buddhas
so i buy one for all my close friends
and we have a party to consume
our enlightened fruits

on the radio there is a famous psychic
who says Amelia Earheart isn’t dead
she is living in a cloud-world
populated by ancient deities
the really fertile ones
which is why the sky
seems so hormonal all the time
flushing, leaking, all that zing!

you can call on 1-800-AVIATE
and get a free zodiac chart
written by Amelia
which seems plausible
because surely, up in the clouds
she has a more cosmological outlook
than almost anyone else i can think of
guided by the clairvoyance
of loved-up godheads

i call at once
to find out what the stars hold for me
but the line is busy
and then goes dead
my future
disconnected

my father has an inflamed gallbladder
in anatomical drawings
it resembles a ripening fig
he asks the doctors to save it
from medical waste
and displays it in his garage
afloat in pink preservative
overseeing his retirement hobbies:
repairing home appliances
riding the peloton
writing a natural history of compost
basking in the glow of
his own vestigial flesh

finally i get through to Amelia
i want to know how
long my father will live
if he will lose more critical organs
a lobe of lung
a kernel of pancreas
and whether i should look for
the shape of meaning in them
symbols or icons
major or minor miracles
the face of god that appears
sometimes in damp walls
tree trunks
and toast

she tells me that all organic matter
is a constellation
an enzyme can be an effigy
your heredity a hagiography
the world is mostly flesh
of one kind or another
with enough ambiguity in between
to make a miraculous
mess

Amelia says she’ll mail me
an astrological chart
a tea cleanse
and a reiki doll
to soothe my existential woe

the line goes dead
and all i hear
is the signal tone
myself
munching down on
my reborn pear
wondering if my beatific colon
counts for
or against
on my scorecard
of piety

Posted in 117: NO THEME 14 | Tagged

how to be an immigrant without leaving

Posted on August 12, 2025 by Sreeja Naskar

i changed my name at school and kept my mother’s in my pocket.
— it bled through the lining
(it always does)
her vowels too round for their roll call

i swallowed her accent to fit into my own throat
but some days it still
clings to my gums

/ and tastes like apology

i wrote HOME in my math notebook
with a pencil i stole

and erased it so hard the page gave in

(how else do you learn belonging?)
except by losing?

the teacher said my name wrong
for three years straight
and i never corrected her

(i wanted to be liked more than i wanted to exist)

i learned to laugh where they laughed
(even when it hurt)
i became fluent in not-looking-back

the kids asked me where i’m from
and i said
here.
(but they looked at my hands like liars)

i learned silence is
easier than explanation
but some days it still chews through my teeth

my grandfather never left his village
and still
they called us foreign

i told them my skin is not a translation

(they laughed)

the flag on the classroom wall
always looked like a dare

// i stopped standing

i wear my mother’s name
inside my hoodie sleeve
(where i can press it when no one’s watching)
she calls me in her tongue
and i answer like a ghost

this is how to leave:
with your shoes still on
with your passport untouched
with your story mispronounced

this is how to stay:
quiet
and almost
and in pieces

i immigrate every time
i speak
and don’t explain

i still dream in a language
i never learned to write
i still say thank you like i’m asking
to be allowed

one day
i’ll say my name
and it won’t flinch.

Posted in 117: NO THEME 14 | Tagged

Daydream An Index

Posted on August 12, 2025 by S K Kelen

Recall a distant past life a victorious lion
Restless, trying to remember the mislaid
Suddenly remembered the word, insomniac,
A golden age, until blood explodes from jugulars.
Home and all in one peace (sic)
Dear ______, thank you, life is spinning out of control
Off-duty crew bunked down, glad to be silent underwater
Back to a day in 1996, when lightning struck the plane
Still, a glacier or two
1996: watching the news on a TV at the airport
Wandering in a happy state
Flocks of birds cavort over a playing field scores of cockatoos fly kamikaze style the
Two young bronzewing pigeons bob up and down
Next we meet Chornobyl’s special babies:
Friendly apes are gone so our closest living relatives are cars and
There are episodes you’re glad you missed
Thinking can clutter, do more harm than good.
The old Police rapid response ‘Flying Squad’,
Standing as still as possible in a straggly line
Red-eyed teddy-boys tarting in clubland
Say nothing and the power of the wind feeds
Here you are, you are here – X marks the spot –
Over the phone an uncalled for speech:
Driving in search of the address we’d been given
A door materialises, you arrive from the future,
thank the lords of gleam
Promising an invisible world and the inspiration
Boot splash
ate flying saucers,
no honour seeing
doom car doom music
hard rain, crazed possum
training cat to be
suburban Rimbaud
they can’t remember
Pokémon sneak in
can think of nothing
beyond redemption
flying squad ends up
our kids are messy
burning the midnight
one day there will be
the secret of good
toy orangutans
too much me, me, me
you blazing bird-shark
go out and have fun
rain settles pollen
no air force can stop
waits till his family
young kamikaze
this loneliness is
two clever beggars
moon trapped in quiet
Reality bends into itself, we think we’re going places
Master Sun Tzu, say something before
Politics is mostly men in a bear pit;
An empty room
Another three weeks basic training
The way a beast fumbles among its belongings—an
So many times since the day he died, I’d met him
Breathing exhilaration, life is wonderful worth living, and
Also known as a part time love poet he
Drove by the house where you grew up
Justin Bieber ringtone saves Russian man
In captivity the elephants
Lament trees and tigers,
He rose from the vision and knew what to do;
Eternal kitchen amid playful spinifex
Raindrops plash
Walk down the quiet path,
The clouds are always there
He starts a landslide shooting a
Sun shines a gone Sunday, the assignation
We lived in electricity’s future
A green Mallarmé floats ethereal over the Harbour Bridge
The river and creeks carry sweet ash,
People don’t understand you
How quiet the mind is can determine
Diminished world. The demagogue’s cruel slogans
Puffed up non-com, big-noting himself for an alien woman
Not born a robot, but I pursued the robot way –
Once upon a time stars in the sky
Planet X arrived to hang around
Common nouns personified can come to life
Begins on a distant, creaking world
The galaxy.
Captain’s quill scratched
The travel agent’s eyes bubbled
Ask any question.
Mrs Possum sniffs the air, smells slices of bread
Zeus handed Troy’s smoking altars to the Greeks
All the world’s a game and we

Posted in 117: NO THEME 14 | Tagged

Notes on a glory hole (cut up)

Posted on August 12, 2025 by Ted Greensmith-West

Cut up from Newshub article dated 18th January 2024, titled: CONCERNED GREY LYNN RESIDENT BATTLES TO STOP PUBLIC BATHROOM SEX
AFTER ‘GETTING NOWHERE WITH POLICE’, accessed online here.

Pitman, entering as he walked.
“Away with that!” – the glory I was trying with the
bathroom battle: that was Tuesday.

“Once,” he said, at the hole intersection,
threatening around for guys.

the kids from

the opposite hole, at the corner bathrooms, are
concerned – and just like Grey Lynn, in public.
The many going in, walked in a stream, and
I use a primary plate. I have a toilet but removed it.

At that plugger
sit the sex men,
the Resident Sexual Five.

Imagine: Grey Lynn with its bathroom activity site!
on a Tuesday! in the middle of school!
In minutes: he, Pitman, came
on around to patch numerous
‘activities’, he said.

Having to use the hole after, Police immediately
repatched before the location and had instances
to report. Being the new repatched behaviour, they are not
scheduled to actively witness an incident.

Council’s new metal hole-cover has scheduled an
ongoing indecent activity:
Tuesday is 111, the Police is 105,
Pitman is men lining up and going at it.

Posted in 117: NO THEME 14 | Tagged

tropical skimming

Posted on August 12, 2025 by Dominic Symes

from what I can remember gleaning
it was a gas pipe issue

& I’ve already let reception know

considering this errant thong atop a recycling bin

I treat the surface of the poem like
it were the fresh water and I
the smooth stone heading t’ward
a crocodile’s beady eye

as strangler figs are stagflating the old growth
leaves fucking everywhere gathered
expectantly like workers around a picket
protesting seasons

four in a day? try two in a year!
as compensation we’re offered
expired beers & crocodile tears

how you gon’ be mad on vacation?
the stereo asks the restaurant’s other guests

was it kanye or keynes who said
to take a day off because automation
won’t do it for you?

only that’s politically incorrect
& I check my emails as a dirty joke

like a golf club to a cane toad
like a cassowary to a main road

when I find the room doesn’t have wifi
I lock the doors & stay up to watch the towels dry
on the bathroom floor

(they don’t)

so we all go on strike
like the golden orb by the front counter
who stops spinning webs
to peer inside a XXXX gold

Posted in 117: NO THEME 14 | Tagged

weetootla

Posted on August 12, 2025 by berni m janssen


Posted in 117: NO THEME 14 | Tagged

The New York City Garbage Strike Of 1968

Posted on August 12, 2025 by Izzy Maxson

In this photo men in suits and hats are smashing pinball machines with hammers

A portrait of New York City’s 30 year ban on the machines for being a form of gambling, from 1942 as a matter of moral imperative and a shortage of materials for the war until 1976 when a looming bankruptcy made them think twice about gambling revenue

The pinball world champion himself, sworn in in a courtroom in front of god, bureaucracy and TV cameras, said exactly where the silver ball was going to go, to prove skill over luck, and to the astonishment of everyone watching, the called shot happened exactly as he said it would.

And here we have two rooms, in one the cracked facades and burned out bulbs, the boxes like coffins, like the dead clocks of the future, gathered up into a heap, all quarters stripped from their bellies

The other room is empty, here is where the machines that were saved were kept, under oil rags and tarps, sleeping time machines, locked and keyed, one day forgotten, then another day, vanished, taken away all once from the damp brick vault

Here in the space between catastrophes where we attempt our immurement

It’s so easy to believe that the past was populated exclusively by children

Led out of their pastures by a pillar of smoke, a bonfire of their own discarded naivety, armed with pitchforks and torches like the mob at the end of every Frankenstein movie, out of an iron prison, and into a fire growing in color and beauty

Here is a forest growing, here, a place where all the bucks are worth five points and there’s unlimited ammunition

To discard one game for another, oh so easy to believe, that this was the day, all those men with hammers, had just that very morning, put away their teddy bears or stitched shut their beady eyes for the day’s bloody work ahead, here was the very day the rats took over, we don’t remember exactly what it is drove them out again, but the sugar cubes you can find on the street, are best not eaten, unless you’re sure where they came from, and no one really is

Posted in 117: NO THEME 14 | Tagged

Boot

Posted on August 12, 2025 by Ledya Khamou

SYLVIA PLATH WOULD HATE YOU AND FREUD
WOULD LOVE ME. I HAVE TO ADDRESS THE CLICHES
BEFORE THEY BLUNT.
MY BROAD SHOULDERS ARE YOURS REALLY
AND MY WIRE ROD HOT TEMPER IS YOURS REALLY
AND YOUR DEMERIT POINTS ARE REALLY MY CAR CRASHES,
MY PARKING TICKETS. YOUR HIGH BLOOD PRESSURE
IS REALLY MY LOW BLOOD PRESSURE AND YOUR ANXIETY
MEDICATION IS REALLY MY ANTIDEPRESSANTS,
AND YOUR VIOLENT VICTIMISED CHILDHOOD IS
REALLY MY PASSIVE PUSHOVER CHILDHOOD.
I COULD GO ON, BUT I NEED A FULL STOP
BEFORE I OVERSPILL. BEFORE I REMEMBER YOUR
READING GLASSES AND YOUR TECHNOLOGY
BLINDNESS. GUILT WILL BLEED FROM EVERY WOUND YOU INFLICTED;
I WILL LAP AT IT LIKE A DUMB DOG. LIKE A BITCH.
REMEMBER WHEN YOU CALLED ME THAT.
YOUR PRONUNCIATION WAS OFF,
THE ‘I’ DRAGGED OUT, THE ‘B’ TOO SOFT.
OR PERHAPS MY EARS WERE NOT ATTUNED,
YOUR VOICE SOAKED IN VENOM. I WAS TEN STEPS
FROM THE FRONT DOOR, BAGS SLIDING OFF MY SHOULDERS
BEFORE I REALISED WHAT YOU MEANT.
A THUMP ON MY BACKBONE. WORSE THAN
ALL THE BACKHANDS OF MY YOUNGER YEARS.
I SHOULD HAVE MARKED THE TIME. I BECAME BUT A WOMAN
YOU HATE, ONE OF THE MANY WOMEN YOU HATE.
I NEED TO SAY EVERYTHING SHORT AND SIMPLE
SO THAT YOU CAN UNDERSTAND MY ENGLISH.
I AM SICK. I HAVE NOT SLEPT IN THREE YEARS.
I WANT YOU TO BE PROUD OF ME AND I
NEVER WANT TO SPEAK TO YOU AGAIN.
THIS IS FUTILE PROSE. YOU WILL NEVER READ THIS.
YOU WANTED ME TO WRITE SOMETHING ABOUT ASSYRIA.
I KNOW VERY LITTLE, AND THIS IS ALL I CAN GIVE YOU.
BUT I KNOW, YOU KNOW,
I CAN SAY EVERY MEAN THOUGHT IN MY HEAD
BUT HERE I AM:
FILLING IN THE BRUTE BRUTE BOOTS
OF A BRUTE LIKE YOU.

Posted in 117: NO THEME 14 | Tagged

WATER-SOLUBLE

Posted on August 12, 2025 by Isra Hassan

For my birthday, I’ve come to be
an antonym: economic with my tears

and water-soluble. Annually, I lose
the fear of my ineptitude, and
kindred light switches pantomime.

It is not the day, but I, who chases
the night, and it is not the moon, but
I, who’s suspended there.

Water, in its imminent plural form, stipulates
its obligations, collected in smatterings,
glistening on the coves others may call cheeks.

Clouds are present, accumulating by
the droves, resolute in their exhaustions.

Posted in 117: NO THEME 14 | Tagged

To Loan Applicant #18503592

Posted on August 12, 2025 by Coco Huang

Let’s make a transaction: I’ll join you at the
-$7.30 Green Beans Café
each morning and you can tell me about the used Gibson you bought off
-$1,464.90 eBay seller: mattiesmusic
and how you almost forgot to pay
-$325.00 Paul rent
I’ll ask about that time you went to
-$5.05 Sing KK World
by yourself on a Wednesday afternoon, and you’ll insist karaoke’s better
-$32.99 Purrfect Pets Warehouse
when you can howl your heart out alone
-$130.93 Woolworths Next Day Delivery
you want me to lend you a few hundred ks to build your dream
-$370.00 Recording Studio, 5h hire
while you’re tethered to last-minute shifts minding kids at
+$450.72 KFC Salary
and I know it’s hard for you to get by on the occasional
+$140.00 The Kooka Friday gig
when you’ve got to budget for
-$67.00 MyTelco Promo Plus Plan
-$30.00 Transport for NSW Opal Aus Card
-$27.95 PharmaCare Discount Chemist
but no one knows you the way I do
+$2.91 Credit interest
I believe in bending numbers and pulling-off strings
+$250.00 Songwriting workshop
and maybe one day, when you’ve made it big, you’ll send me a
-$158.35 GENIE Polaris Tour – Box A Ticket
to your show and I’ll write a proper poem for you.

Posted in 117: NO THEME 14 | Tagged

目送 (or In bed after lunch)

Posted on August 12, 2025 by Haoyi Zhang

He receives me in last centuries’ hospital best: blue shirt, grey cardi. He dresses her too: a black hairpin holds back long waves of speckled hair from gray-green ringed irises.

Delicate in weathered banana-pulp skin-paper, they’d hate to rub raw like this before strangers. In bed after lunch, she whispers for him carefully to turn over for her the day’s events and characters, like smoothed rocks. At the bathroom door, my girl-grandma shies, hand curved against wall like I’m a wolf in her house.

I remember his lips a dark mauve, wet, always moving. Purpling and loose now, they dribble tuneless songs to long-knuckled hands above the sink, between doorways and over my tiny tight anxieties.

At the other end of the hallway, his shoulders slope a gentle question mark, traced in my years of absence. I turn mine away, lamely; spoon-face toward elevator.

Posted in 117: NO THEME 14 | Tagged