Cordite Poetry Review

Field Report from the Night Watchman

Posted on February 4, 2025 by Margaret Malochleb

No one notices the edges slip away,
how the untoothed night simmers
in the streets and alleyways.
To the innocent, there’s no reason
to question whether dimensions shift
or wonder what happens in
the moments before the scrim is lifted.
I have spent many a darkness
pondering what is lost when
peripheries vanish—what beauty
or desolation, lacking witness,
is diminished. What creature steals
away to die, alone and undiscovered.
I can tell you this: My eyes have grown
accustomed to night’s trickeries—
the apparent ease with which the body
accepts injury, the scurrying figure
beneath the streetlight’s pale flicker.
Underlying every human wreckage
is an emptiness born of want.
Sometimes I feel it. Walking the vacant
hallways, I listen for the lost,
the inconsolable, the unforgiven.
I count their footsteps, carry the weight
of their brokenness in my bones.

Posted in 115: SPACE | Tagged Margaret Malochleb

Polish Polish

Posted on February 4, 2025 by Matt Hetherington

put a vase of small pink flowers on a window ledge
look at a field of potatoes for a month
while not forgetting wars & wars & wars
grow rain inside your lungs
put on woolen gloves
& only take them off to warm your hands over the fire
fall asleep dreaming of that dead star
kick pebbles along a lane
then curse your childishness and curse your black boots
pat a wet dog like you never had children
write a letter to the son you never had
smear beetroot on a white wall as you walk through the old town
waiting for the sun to come
when the sun comes make up a song about how you want to run into it
but you’re not brave enough and a catholic so you couldn’t go that far
hide your fears in a cigar-box
suck on something that tastes like your mother
raise a toast to zibby boniek and lucy bpm 37093
point to a figure in the crowd and ask them where all the dirt is coming from
do your best at sobbing louder than the public address system that’s shouting
all those lies again
enter into collusion with the confusion of a patriarchal illusion
take pictures of cream-puffs, or
sit in a downpour and let the drops be your new poem, or
write forty-four lines of ironic resignation
and rewrite until you die of neglect but still somehow caring

Posted in 115: SPACE | Tagged Matt Hetherington

backyard, earlwood

Posted on February 4, 2025 by Anastasia Radievska

on Sunday afternoon, the smoke alarm won’t stop
despite the neighbours who don’t live there coming

and finally finding it in the red bin, head high
above the fence to ask me for forgiveness – it is easy

to join them in their embarrassment, our kinship
immediately possible against the noise,

even when they do ask if I’ll be here next year
and I laugh and say it’s not up to me.

they have the tenants moving in tomorrow
and when they leave, it’s quiet for twenty minutes, then again

the beep, insistent against the lawnmowers and drills,
a bird beside trilling in mimicry. left long enough

space will attune to any sound –
already the cicadas start to sound like a fuse

but that is my own mimicry – the way
I start to write this poem in the noise

before I realise what I’m doing, get up
and crawl behind the compost bin,

under the rusty nail in the fence gap,
walk through their yard, open the bin to find the disk,

its batteries still inside, and slide them out
and hear the silence hanging overhead.

Posted in 115: SPACE | Tagged Anastasia Radievska

Kraken Air

Posted on February 4, 2025 by Damen O'Brien

inspired by ‘Kraken’ by China Mieville

At the apogee of oxygen
where cyan turns to cyanosis
and air frays and fritters into space,
where metaphysical angels sing
and ET friction-brakes his saucer
something loses its dispute with nothing
and up finally vanquishes down,
where satellites skim like fins of sharks
and all the stars are notched on night
where eagles do not dare, nor planes
find sufficient lift to place them there
and even party balloons won’t retreat,
the levitator’s overreach,
the other end of Jacob’s ladder,
doubt’s perigee, the rainbow’s arc,
they’ve not yet found a flying squid,
its skin as loose as paper crepe,
as big as a bus, as thin as tin,
diaphanous as the emperor’s rags,
tentacles as long as jet stream’s churn,
flung and blown and tossed
as though a barometric bathysphere,
old ebony beak a dull drawn dart,
eyes as big as Olympic rings,
substantial as a crystal cloud
wandering lonely as a radar fog,
so nothing much can get a glimpse,
not bats nor moths or little birds,
all unidentified flying things,
all clear air turbulence, water
squall, waved-off jets in solid cirrhus
and oops-exposed exposés,
photos of tentacular lenticular shapes,
this nautiloid, this cuttlefish cloud,
a sometimes drench of black ink
dreams, crop-dusted nightmare
drizzled down, cloud-seeded,
contrailed, black-dog bleed,
streamers, smoke-bomb blush
of ink, enough to drown the world
in drink, to stain the good glass
sky, to blank and place a headache
in each head, serpent, prophesied
doom, galed and weathered with
the storm, whichever way an ill-
wind roils, no whales to test it,
no harpooned hand to puncture,
high and dry, adrift and gone, in
oceans of air, sometimes fallout,
sometimes ash, the fritz that hits
the antenna’s spark, this bad-
faith mist, this persistent pall,
this shadow like a squid’s cold
span, this stealthy light leviathan.

Posted in 115: SPACE | Tagged Damen O'Brien

The Universal Laws

Posted on February 4, 2025 by Christopher Palmer


The Law of Optimism 















The Law of Possession















The Law of Averages















The Law of Symmetry 















The Law of Reflection  















The Law of Diminishing Returns

 
The Law of Community 















Murphy's Law















The Law of Delusion















The Law of Repulsion 















The Law of Equality















Natural Law

The Law of Nature















The Law of Physical Attraction















The Law of Ego















Common Law















The Law of Conservation of Energy















The Law of Ignorance

Posted in 115: SPACE | Tagged Christopher Palmer

Ad Astra in Three Parts

Posted on February 4, 2025 by Cole W. Williams

I. Life and Death
with line from Ad Astra screenplay by James Gray & Ethan Gross

We were marooned here on purpose
carapaces removed—exposed and wandering
We ransacked what we could of civil
life we wondered what made the earth shake
Our eyes were double-visioned all
the time now we wobbled just so just as they
said the earth would wobble before
and Roy was told one day at a desk with aplomb
by Brigadier General Fallon:

Your father has threatened the
destruction of our entire solar
system. Does that not mean
ANYTHING to you?!?

Then everything or nearly everything became
clear: if the monster was the father then
the world ending would be catastrophic and we
would end up eating ourselves

Pages: 1 2 3

Posted in 115: SPACE | Tagged Cole W. Williams

Moonlet

Posted on February 4, 2025 by Sarah Birch

craving connection as I silently spin. to the Samsung washing machine song. appearing when
the next cycle
begins?
‘r
o
u
n
d
a ‘bout there.
edging collision
like a death obsessed dominant.
circling right back to the start, I reinflate my lungs.

this is child’s play, you see? grown-ups laugh in deep tones with dimpled, grey faces. glowing
brighter. spectres highlighting a prize out of reach.
TO BE SOMETHING.
moon of a moon
not enough to dream upon.
almost celestial body
licking sacred water but unchristened.
TO BE MEANINGFUL.
if moons are satellites what clasps at her breast?
born without a purpose so hands and knees absorb the filth.
grasping at dying promises even after they have winked away.
desiring damage to make her
WHOLE.

Poppy, bloom for me in a violent way.

Posted in 115: SPACE | Tagged Sarah Birch

Sonnet

Posted on February 4, 2025 by Tess Ritchie

For Rose

In my fresh unpressed petal dress thin and petal-
printed hem to shoulder, I saw you see me and
see double: your gran? your nan? your neighbour?
Summer under the oak is my cloak but my coat –
buckles missing grime-blackened – is more me
the one I take to the Parade, sitting yellowed
at all of my ends, my fingers, my friends I saw you
see triple: she under the tree, she street hunched, she
for sugar at your door, all these mes, these Roses
When I left you double took, purple river underfoot
out the back, why the parcel still on my mat
I heard you, then, thru that bed of petals, call my sister
It was peaceful, she said they’d said, I’d tidied
I say I had a smoke, and then I saw the violet

Posted in 115: SPACE | Tagged Tess Ritchie

Exact Distances

Posted on February 4, 2025 by Toh Hsien Min

If it’s 48°C out the asphalt is
approaching the temperatures
where egg proteins start to link up,
so that cracking a million eggs
on the motorway turns it into
a river of yellow-white sludge,
and cars would not risk their tires
slipping on soft albumen. The skill is
finding an exact distance between
skydancers and string hoppers,
how Bedouin crossing the desert
always trace the tops of dunes.
Forget what you think you know
about entropy or dark matter;
the universe longs to be in between
things. It lives in the loophole
that it shoots an arrow through,
as dust mites live on dust motes,
measuring a moment in miniature
that could be a paraselenic linear space
if only you could both see it and be in it.

Posted in 115: SPACE | Tagged Toh Hsien Min

Gymea Lilies

Posted on February 4, 2025 by Toby Davidson

Pungent afterthoughts
of power, star-encrusted streets.

At the core of the rainstorm,
the heart of the flower.

Your highnesses
clump like scruffy planets.

Erupt, secrete
at the jesting distance.

Posted in 115: SPACE | Tagged Toby Davidson

focused, unfurling

Posted on February 4, 2025 by Rae White

After Jane du Rand’s Thriving: Brisbane Bush Turkeys (glazed and unglazed ceramic pieces, smalti and porcelain tiles, 2023)

cowl of yellow necklaces flecked
in summer’s gold. there’s negative space
of me you’ll never see –
my feathers unfurling like mushroom’s
fanned underside. over shadowed hill
of rotting moundtop, orange reddens
today’s busy sunset.
i’m not actually a bird.
call me: bald crown, garden
demolisher, pitchfork feet.
call me: focused not flightless.
watch me: as trained eye blackens,
revolves and hones to water-washed sky.
there’s something beyond the clouds
do you see it?

Posted in 115: SPACE | Tagged Rae White

Stone tongue

Posted on February 4, 2025 by Anne Elvey

after Jesper Svenbro ‘A Critique of Pure Representation’ and ‘Material for a Geological Theory of Language’

Immersed in speech before you knew
tongue. Ear to your own cry’s
primary exhalation. That tiny cave of bone.

Its tympani formed during your first
swim, tethered to tissue inside her pelvic
cage – osseous cells. Honeycomb. Rigid.

Porous. Surprisingly mobile. Expanding
to grasp you and let you go – slow as
your need, all being well. What

ancient stone-carved god imagined this
contraction and departure into world’s
genealogy of flesh? The toes stubbed

on the mineral throb of becoming. You
with your toothless voice a younger
sibling of mountains and their caverns

cool with percolated lime. Wind-
shaped miracles of gravity. Their eons
echo in the barest bones of things

Posted in 115: SPACE | Tagged Anne Elvey

Spectroscope

Posted on February 4, 2025 by Hannah Jenkins

Posted in 115: SPACE | Tagged Hannah Jenkins

Golden Record

Posted on February 4, 2025 by Kaya Ortiz

in memory of Lawrence Priest

I.

Lolo with his diamond-tipped
drill, shooting sparks.

A telescope large as my body
waits in silence.

In space diamonds are common
as sand, interstellar pressure

of fusion inside stars. On earth
there is just this carbon-bound life,

the body another kind of erosion,
tied to time. Bring my eye

to the glass – in this spectacle
of mirrors a planet gazes back,

one eye fixed on me. Who’s to say
there is no one else out there?

II.

In 1977 the Voyager II spacecraft
begun its journey out to space,

never to return to earth. A grain
of sand floating amongst stars,

it bears a record carved in copper,
plated gold – evidence of life

in music, humankind’s first and last
language. Is the vacuum of space

a silent place? Lolo would know
the answer, could drill it from

the earth, pluck it like stardust
out of air. What Voyager II asks for

is remembrance, is witness. If it
were to look back, what would it see?

III.

Now the song I move towards is
unspeakable, eternal as a diamond.

I take its pointed tip and drill,
carve the notes into everything

a song for the stars that is as old
as time, old as the blood-iron

fused inside stars. Somewhere,
lightyears away, time moves slowly

through the space warped by
grief. The space both past and future,

but never present. The space map
and history. In that space, I exist.

In that space, I am gazing through
a telescope back in time, and singing.

Posted in 115: SPACE | Tagged Kaya Ortiz

sky moments ground-dwellers tell

Posted on February 4, 2025 by Sue Hall Pyke

dad nods and we stop laughing
mum’s big story verified
no clouds up the hill new moon
this is Djargurd Wurrung land
bright like a lightbulb due north
next Sunday lunch what is that
window reflection but wait
that shape’s not a fluoro tube

years later spliff with a friend
sea roar night star rushing in
my greeting backslides to fear
the coast Purroitchihoorrong
‘the spirit voice that mocks you’
star gusts away to nothing
cold drops we trickle inside

a mate’s oldies are driving
car stops no reason midnight
sheet lightning time disappears
it’s Gunditjmara Country
nothing then there they are back
car starts they speed off no words
not a story for strangers

Posted in 115: SPACE | Tagged Sue Hall Pyke

kids game

Posted on February 4, 2025 by Matthew Jenkins

overgrown sun collapsing on the
outskirts. quartz block amethyst
block house with carpet interior,
wall art & A single bed. emerald
ingot melted down & crafted into
A lamp shade. move dad I can’t
see. A glass dining table with fruit
bowl made from rare ender pearl,
& outside there is A nether brick
sitting area with A polished diorite
patio for entertaining. the river is
an infinite pixel of blues and there
are fish below. & on the opposite
shoreline A much smaller abode
has been created with andesite
walls & A glass roof. the interior
follows the minimalist vein, there
are just three lanterns & A birch
chair, small side table also birch,
& A granite door. seems to be A
quiet space. dad can you please
move. whilst seated & looking up
through the solid glass block roof
you can see the basalt mountains
looming, pine trees & cacti scatter
across the formation. now out of
the chair & there is A set of calcite
stairs that rise up the mountain. it
is getting darker. ah come on dad
move. soul lanterns dot the rising
stairs & there is another birch chair
at halfway. looking back is never
easy. at the top of the mountain is
A patio of glowstone with amber
dust, & from the patio you can look
down & see the created world.

Posted in 115: SPACE | Tagged Matthew Jenkins

Red Beacons of Dawn

Posted on February 4, 2025 by Sam Illingworth

In the early morning dust
luminous spectres rise,
blooms of burgundy
consuming thought
and hope
and light.
Star-forges burning bright
across the sable sea –
fire-ghosts
born of unknown flames
to cast learning adrift
on paper boats of pride
and loss
and time.
In the infinite night,
we look
and blink
and sigh –
grasping
for a space
forever
out of reach.

This poem is inspired by the recent discovery of very red, luminous objects in the early universe that challenge our understanding
of galaxy and black hole formation.

Wang, B., Leja, J., de Graaff, A., Brammer, G.B., Weibel, A., van Dokkum, P., Baggen, J.F., Suess, K.A., Greene, J.E., Bezanson, R. and Cleri, N.J.,
2024. RUBIES: Evolved Stellar Populations with Extended Formation Histories at z∼ 7–8 in Candidate Massive Galaxies Identified with
JWST/NIRSpec. The Astrophysical Journal Letters, 969(1), Article L13. https://doi.org/10.3847/2041-8213/ad55f7

Posted in 115: SPACE | Tagged Sam Illingworth

(OCCULUS) RIFTS

Posted on February 4, 2025 by David Prater

– Oneohtrix Point Never

a universe every time he opens his little-boy mouth
see the craggy moon mountains of his jagged teeth
and his body tilting back to look at faraway things

i view myself as some kind of mystic geppetto (busy
lengthening and adjusting my sad songs and strings
& when the rift appears his body relaxes in my arms

he is a starship narcissus invincible in a flying mask
cruising crazy flight paths guided by algae rhythms
i am a puppet preacher at some river-space baptism

drop into my arms as you did when you were only
one minute old) i will hold you in the control room
prepare snacks for us & then warm up the consoles

welcome to your world for i am merely living in it
bringing you down gently to some small round dais
while an eye and a mountain and a moon look on

Posted in 115: SPACE | Tagged David Prater

One Foot After Another (Aldrin)

Posted on February 4, 2025 by Alice Gorman

Okay. You do have to be rather careful
to keep track of where your center of mass is.
Sometimes, it takes about two or three paces
to make sure you’ve got your feet underneath you.

About two to three or maybe four easy paces
can bring you to a fairly smooth stop.
Like a football player, you just have to put a foot
out to the side and cut a little bit.

The so-called kangaroo hop does work,
but it seems your forward mobility
is not quite as good as
it is in the more
conventional
one
foot
after
another.

Posted in 115: SPACE | Tagged Alice Gorman

Nox

Posted on February 4, 2025 by Jaye Kranz

When I call for you, my throat
on hot pillows, here inside this small
room, here beside the suddenness

of stone

where herds

pass through, running the length
of high walls—I see you were always
already here: unity of pitch,

spill

of silver

making even with what little is here,
a basketwork of light. Your low hymn
I know for the way, settling on my skin,

the feathers

winter,

the cricket rounds the ground,
taproots turn in dark acres and we bend
down, coming and going

through

the same dream,

reminding me again,
even the heap of yesterday’s
clothes on the floor

admits

starlight

Posted in 115: SPACE | Tagged Jaye Kranz

Untitled (Chinese SF periphrastic)

Posted on February 4, 2025 by Bernard Cohen

Impossible approaches, light sped,
I can’t read any more, carboniferous I
would burn by paragraph’s end; a signal, aliens
on page forty-two, plotted (curved, dashed)
untraceable, how I love home on page fifty-nine;
subtler aliens would cast a new Earth under
nearer, indifferent star-heated skies – given the effort
to visit this old planet, risk, cost, haven’t alien actuaries
audited? Beyond page one hundred and eighty-six, this calculus
of terns and gulls stitched over corduroy bays, jellyfish variables dotting
oceans of protein, material to build Qin monuments, labyrinths
of lost terracotta, everything we believed impossible, dactyl joints bending
the wills of atomic fish; what are we, what is home? this assemblage,
neon fractal mountains under violet vapour, under sulphur-tailed
manga comets, under scintillation marking out Mandelbrot tentacles,
and, by page six hundred, restlessly patient.

Note
Works referenced include: Jumpnauts and “Folding Beijing” by Hao Jingfang; The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin,
Waste Tide by Chen Qiufan, “Restaurant at the End of the Universe: Laba Porridge”, by Anna Wu; “The Demon-Enslaving Flask” by Xia Jia

Posted in 115: SPACE | Tagged Bernard Cohen

An Empty Speck in the Infinite Future

Posted on February 4, 2025 by Tamara Davis

The empty speck embodies loneliness

It screams into the void, silent

Eternity is quiet, still, poised for nothing

The memory of touch, vaporous

It feels heartbreak

For what it forgets it knew

Youthful energy squandered

The bitter taste of solitude

As it races to infinity

Thinking

I am the final life in a dead cosmos.

Posted in 115: SPACE | Tagged Tamara Davis

Interiors

Posted on February 4, 2025 by Sonal Kamble

in
ja-
nu-
ary you
deflect
summer in
your shadow i
lay and the n-
oontide sun
grows cold &
blue lie with
me for one s- you
econd one shelter
arm one leg in my room
one arm one hum into me in these white
leg birds walls im amazed at how the sound
only in is like wind like terror like being
the out- swallowed by a knot of current before
side drifting and recognising the path
only drifting and recognising still waters
over- drinking and recognising how the
head tongue has grown sweet
the window throbs oh
its a sparrow
beating into
the glass the l-
attice gasps and
you quiet its t-
error with a cur-
tain why does it
seek our quiet in-
terior as if
outside is
a cage?

you
wonder but i think of
when you found me nude around
pulled alive by clots of wind- my hands the
fall and asked why did i not cut leaf’s
see fine bones
you be- throbbed
fore water
? but the question i
ached with was why did
you look away? another
me drifts

its
body
to the
glass
and watches
how the
room cleans
my plumage
it sees how small
walls soften my body and
seeks the
inside wishing
it could

also
meet that quiet as it
cuts glass how it cuts
raw the open blue wishes it too
could be edgeless it too could
no longer
live a
blade

Posted in 115: SPACE | Tagged Sonal Kamble

DISORIENTATION: A SCIENCE POEM

Posted on February 4, 2025 by Katie Mack

I want to make you dizzy

I want to make you look up into the sky and comprehend, maybe for the first time, the darkness that lies beyond the evanescent wisp of the atmosphere, the endless depths of the cosmos, a desolation by degrees

I want the Earth to turn beneath you and knock your balance off, carry you eastward at a thousand miles an hour, into the light, and the dark, and the light again. I want you to watch the Earth rising you up to meet the rays of the morning sun

I want the sky to stop you dead in your tracks on your walk home tonight, because you happened to glance up and among all the shining pinpricks you recognized one as of the light of an alien world

I want you to taste the iron in your blood and see its likeness in the rust-red sands on the long dry dunes of Mars, born of the same nebular dust that coalesced random flotsam of stellar debris into rocks, oceans, your own beating heart

I want to reach into your consciousness and cast it outward, beyond the light of other suns, to expand it like the universe, not encroaching on some envelope of emptiness, but growing larger, unfolding inside itself

I want you to see your world from four billion miles away, a tiny glint of blue in the sharp white light of an ordinary star in the darkness. I want you to try to make out the boundaries of your nation from that vantage point, and fail

I want you to feel it, in your bones, in your breath, when two black holes colliding a billion light years away sends a tremor through spacetime that makes every cell in your body stretch, and strain

I want to make you nurse nostalgia for the stars long dead, the ones that fused your carbon nuclei and the ones whose last thermonuclear death throes outshined the entire galaxy to send a single photon into your eye

I want you to live forward but see backward, farther and deeper into the past, because in a relativistic universe you don’t have any other choice. I want the stale billion-year-old starlight of a distant galaxy to be your reward

I want to utterly disorient you and let you navigate back by the stars. I want you to lose yourself, and find it again, not just here, but everywhere, in everything

I want you to believe that the universe is a vast, random, uncaring place, in which our species, our world, has absolutely no significance. And I want you to believe that the only response is to make our own beauty and meaning and to share it while we can

I want to make you wonder what is out there. What dreams may come in waves of radiation across the breadth of an endless expanse. What we may know, given time, and what splendors might never, ever reach us

I want to make it mean something to you. That you are in the cosmos. That you are of the cosmos. That you are born from stardust and to stardust you will return. That you are a way for the universe to be in awe of itself.

Posted in 115: SPACE | Tagged Katie Mack

Issue Launches.Submissions Windows.

Issue Launches.
Submissions Windows.