barefoot with a hot meal

Posted on May 7, 2025 by Maya Gorman

I stood in the kitchen
scuffing crumbs off the bottom
of my bare feet onto the
cuff of my ankle.
I had said I loved him
and I did.
It didn’t matter though
because I didn’t want him.
The curry on the stove simmered gently
Large fleshy chunks of meat
rising to the surface
I looked at him across the expanse
of the bench between us
he stared back, angry and sad
perhaps afraid.
I turned down the
stove and let him pull me
up the single flight of carpeted stairs
sticky and hot he slid in and
out of me. Cardamom and salt
drifted upstairs. I’d
forgotten to add ginger.
I pissed him out of me
when he was done
and held wet toilet paper
to my raw skin.
He wandered downstairs
a while later.
and found me peeling a
thumb of ginger with a
carving knife.

Posted in 116: REMEMBER | Tagged

Forty Years

Posted on May 7, 2025 by Aylin Mulayim
Forty years since the conflict in 1974. Forty years since my mother’s family moved here. Nineteen years later I’m born on the day the border opens between the Turks and Greeks. Forty years later I’m on the phone. My uncle tells me about the blow to the wheel of his new car. He tells me he has loved kangaroos for forty years since coming here. He says in forty years he has loved kangaroos and never hit one on the road until today. I meet a man last week who tells me he’ll never change his five year old’s tongue. He’ll never correct her English. If she says karma like karrrrrma at school that’s because that is how it’s said. I am twenty-one, forty years after, when I learn how to spell my name, AYLİN not AYLIN, as I sign contracts to be a jewellery sales consultant. I want to be a poet and the Grand Bazaar of Melbourne, selling jewellery. I felt forty years behind on myself that day.
Posted in 116: REMEMBER | Tagged

Please explain this gap on your resumé

Posted on May 7, 2025 by Pierce Wilcox

He fought a bear once. He went to prison once. He started a vigilante gang once that was only mildly fascist. (Someone had to clean up the streets, okay, and there were real gangsters, not driven to it by economics, funded by a real estate developer, like usual, the big city pressing down on the river-split town, ready to fork its delta.) His father died. He played football. He disbanded his vigilante gang. He joined another gang. That one was driven by economics. He wrote songs. He wrote poems. He fixed a jalopy. He crashed the jalopy. His head hurt some days. He dated a teacher. He dated a student. He went to war once, he’s not sure which. There was a lot of smoke. In the smoke war looks like football. There’s another team. They tell him it’s that simple. It’s possible the bear took something vital. His dog died. His friend died. In the smoke a friend looks like a dog. He doesn’t know which to bury. He worked for the real estate developer. He stopped working for the real estate developer. He doesn’t know exactly what real estate development entails. Mostly he hit people. He worked construction for his uncle. He stopped. He went looking for the bear again. He wishes there was smoke. It opens its arms.

Posted in 116: REMEMBER | Tagged

Gin Fizz

Posted on May 7, 2025 by Jennifer Compton

For Tisa


I was anxious, I clasped your hand a little tighter.
I was maybe seven, and you weren’t going to school.

Our tall dark aunt had promised us a lovely holiday
but when she had driven us to a remote and primitive

shack where she lived with her new husband, she knelt
before us and said she would be going to work tomorrow

and I was to mind you till she got back. This dereliction of
adults was not new, they often abandoned us to circumstance

but this place was off my map. As we had been hustled down
the path a row of witchy trees had cast shadows and creaked.

And the kitten had wee-ed where it should not and raised our
aunt’s ire. One bare light bulb burned above. The house smelt.

The house with her old husband had been grand. In the garden
the brook with the bridge arching over. This house was a shock.

But downstairs in the bathroom, her bottle of Gin Fizz by Lubin
from which I took frequent aromatic therapy. The shapely flask.

She doesn’t remember, my tall dramatic aunt, curled in her bed
like a quarrelsome baby. We were so many, us children, arriving

for no good reason, or refusing to arrive, which was even worse.
She doesn’t remember that her high-heeled shoes slopped off

behind her as she knelt, or how her chin pointed grimly to the floor.
I was so afraid of having to look after you. You cute button, you.


*


The first day we played in the garden and I thought up ‘collecting
caterpillars’. I knew I had one life and that is what I did. I thought

it up. The caterpillars gave outcry and writhed, they were squidgy
brutes, and they poo-ed black tarry dots. I felt no pity, actually.

I found a box on the sideboard within which to imprison them,
but our distracted aunt said, after the very long day, that it was

a special box, a lucky box, that a dear dear friend had given her.
I turned on my heel and scrupulously rendered the lamenting

bodies of future butterflies back to where they came from. Hungry
hungry caterpillars. I’ve no memory of the kitten after the first time.

I do remember her crusted bowls on the kitchen lino. As I pressed
the lucky box into my aunt’s hands, I gave her a dark child’s look.

When would this end? I didn’t know. No one told a child anything.
And where was our new uncle? I had overheard his aggrieved voice

from the next room as I lay shivering in my chilly bed and our aunt,
a little squiffy, almost shrill, explaining and explaining. Late home

from the pub I expect, later than usual. Because of us. One thing was
certain. We were not welcome. And you, my little sister, snoring like

a prickle-backed hedgehog, lapped by the moonlight pouring through
the window without curtains. And we woke to another day. This life!


*


I helped you to the toilet, lifted you onto the bowl, although you could
wipe yourself. I pressed the flush. And then we found the steps down

to the beach cut into the cliff. You remembered, I saw you remember,
and you were so young to remember anything. How we loved the beach!

Those seagulls with red stockings on who are walking with high heels.
At low tide a sand bar poked its shoulder out and I risked the rippling

shallows. I was becoming bold. I knew that we had been abandoned
but I kept it from you as best I could. All that claptrap about a lovely

holiday! Those grown-ups couldn’t tell the truth or lie straight in their
beds. I sneaked downstairs and took another snifter of Gin Fizz. Nice!

Posted in 116: REMEMBER | Tagged

Arms

Posted on May 7, 2025 by Eleanor McCooey

My own story is full of missing links, full of blanks
said Chantel Ackerman. And I do not even have a child.
In heaven, they say I will without the mediation of any creature
find some divine essence with an intuitive vision. Move forth, I tell them
I am nearing thirty and I do not even have one abortion to show for it.
To prove my potential instead I whisper incantations of hospitable
Martyrdom. Wipe my fingers on the edge of my shirt and apply different lip gloss
to different mirrors. There before me, the markers of my numbing are contained
in a single vision that my life should unfold in recognisable steps.
Yet the terrace of my future is not so bright as to reflect sunsets
Or idyll voices where the headlights turn off at night. Rather please and thank you I say
to populate some move for acceptance. Where stillness captures my breath between the waves
And I can solemnly say to you my Father that I tried, forever ago
To put my longing to good use.

Posted in 116: REMEMBER | Tagged

Borderlands

Posted on May 7, 2025 by Mary Luck

Sunday mornings are for sex and to catch
on sleep. In the crook of your breath the bed sheets
are tenderness. Your arm reaches out and around our galaxy
of wants

only you can hold them.

Above the bed hangs a painting in an old timber frame, of a house
in Victorian style, with a pale blue pond, silent
outstretched in the foreground.
On the upper floor, in the left window you may see me drawn
peering down at the mess

of bed sheets, the cocoon, your crown. I live behind lace
and on Sunday mornings, I try to find my way out.

After the war, I went back to Beirut and the men that I knew there
had all lost weight. We forgot, they said
to eat. Amid the worry of bombs and guns

I have not tasted our life.

My father, who carries his sorrow pushed out before him
like an offering we must take up in order to love.

All of my life

My father, who sat in the backyard, accused me of not listening
the first time I said, I don’t agree.

high in a house.

In 2006, south Lebanon
still smelt of rubble and smoke. We drove
through the villages, shaking our heads. I saw a white house
lettered with spray paint as high as the roof

CLUSTER BOMBS HERE

A lament, a warning.

When cluster bombs drop, they fly into bright pieces
each primed to explode, and days or years later
children can run into fields, reaching for toys
that erupt in their hands.

I have walked to the brink but no further

outside
your promise
the most powerful storm.

We should weep for the children of Lebanon. We should weep
for the quiverful all east and west, born macerating
in madness.

But we are betrothed to the rage of injustice, barred
from grieving such loss.

My father once told me of a man who had written
some of my freest times were in prison

I choke at the memory

My father, who delivers his wisdom like unspent
munitions. In my father’s house

there are no mansions.

And, I am afraid of what I may find in these fields.

The bed sheets, your crown. As I dip into sleep

I smell the bread, in each house of the village.

Even after the world burst into pieces, people turned to each other
made sure each was fed. The men used to say

In Lebanon, no one will starve.

Posted in 116: REMEMBER | Tagged

Our mothers

Posted on May 7, 2025 by Jayant Kashyap

Last night the boys went to the
terrace—a bottle of gin, a coke, a large sprite, cans
of tonic water, Lana Del Rey’s Diet
Mountain Dew on speaker and nothing
else. Nothing. As in after the song was over
—twice, perhaps—none of us said a thing—
everyone quiet around eachother, even the drunk ones who’d struggled
taking the stairs only moments ago.
Now all of us reminiscing about our mothers—
as women who always fed us
before sitting themselves down for lunch
and for dinner,
and now we live in hostels, away
from our homes; and in some homes, still the absence
of mothers—and one says, tearing the blanketed
quiet of heavy January air
—they say our sons take from us all our flaws
like the shaving mirrors
from our Sunday routines, say
will mine understand grief exactly the way I do?

Posted in 116: REMEMBER | Tagged

Hurstville Station Platform 4

Posted on May 7, 2025 by Peter Frankis

after Rosalba-Paul / Hurstville Station, Platform 4 by Paul Higgs

Here below, the platform is dim,
water rushes from sinks, gutters,
flushed toilets, sluiced through
reckless downpipes

and even though it hasn’t rained for weeks
the weep-holes are slick:
isosceles of soot, of fecal umber,
algal verdure, of lime condensate.

~

In the gallery hung between
polemics and disco, the work
appears stolid: ‘string, pins, wood,
mesh, acrylic paint on paper’.

He says brush marks are a thing, not an abstraction:
take any object, a yellow ticket say (or a word),
move it around until…

~

The trains are late and the Waterfall service
now leaves from platform 2.
There are no straight lines
just a recursive descent off the plateau.

I dream of ordinary days: precarious
carparks, arguing over shopping lists,
the last time we caught the express to the city.

Take the escalator up to the mall: a Coles,
a greengrocer with bitter melon, coconuts,
trays of khajuri and sel roti, Taiwanese boys
in line for bubble tea.

Me and you, one and two
the incantation goes.
1 2 buckle my shoe, 3 4 open the door.

~

The train grinds on the curves,
through cuttings, abandoned works
rucked beneath the scarp.

I’m in the last carriage. Across from me
are two explorers, she ruffles his buzzcut.
I envy them this spectacle: the tender rainforest,
gliders on bald hill, a glimmer of creekwater
even though it hasn’t rained for weeks.

How do we meet our dead?
In the Quiet Carriage, a priest opens the door
and it’s you, halfway along staring at the blackened
dreamscape. Coins of sunshine, then a tunnel.
My heart so loud it echoes and moans
and when day returns
there’s nothing (of course).

How do we meet our dead?
After she died, he reworked it,
hammered on a balcony, a string of bunting.
went back over, wrote her name
in capitals, talismanic like cutting
into a tree-trunk or a good arm,
staunch the bleeding with ashes.
He re-named it Rosalba-Paul,

Says he doesn’t want the work
to be a sentimental memorial
to a couple,
one who died;
I see nothing else (of course).

Posted in 116: REMEMBER | Tagged

The Death of Burke

Posted on May 7, 2025 by Margaret Bradstock

“These rocks
are so old, they have forgotten the singing
and the shouting of the sea, the violence
of the earth in the making.”
– William Wills

A tempestuous leader, querulous
and autocratic, Burke thought to subdue
this insurgent landscape, as he did his men,
to call forth great lakes or watered plains
from its arid centre.

Shouting matches and thrashings
as well as deaths, reduced the party.
Abandoning most of the camel train
and much of their twenty tons of baggage
(as useless in that sandy stone country
as Burke’s transported dining-table)
they journeyed on, rewarded only
by waterholes and mangrove swamps.

Fearing the Aborigines, yet reliant on them for food
Burke shot at a tribesman stealing oilcloth
and the natives fled, shifting camp.

Beset by thirst and hunger, Burke died
entangled beneath a clump of box-trees
fossilised forever in the rocky outcrop
eyes staring out past the unflinching sky
into a surreal desert.
The land claims him
as he wrestles against it
hands and feet carried off by dingoes.

After David Boyd, Death of Burke (c.2003).

Posted in 116: REMEMBER | Tagged

Place of birth: Hong Kong

Posted on May 7, 2025 by HY

The home I loved is no longer
No, it was not war
that bombed the buildings
Nor famine
that made the people hunger
Nor plagues
though there was sickness
We thrived through colonisation
now a type of chill settled, spreading
over years

I don’t know what to believe
between my parents and the media
Everything is fake news
curated by someone
an invisible hand hovering like
a threat or protector
You can’t trust anyone
and it’s best not to talk about it
at yumcha or anywhere
No one can agree on
What happened or
who are the bad guys

I know this
嫲嫲 lives there
with all of my aunts and uncles
and the neon lights still shine in my memories
but it’s getting hard to remember
the good times buried
under all the things
we cannot forget


嫲嫲 [maa4 maa4] = Paternal grandmother

Posted in 116: REMEMBER | Tagged

Three Seedlings

Posted on May 7, 2025 by Yuemin He 



三株苗

种在花盆里的种子发芽了
但不是花。我记得去年秋后
曾把几粒辣椒籽、苦瓜籽和
丝瓜籽深深地埋进了土中
它们果然不负所望，破土而出
春天我就蹲在花盆旁，如果
将这情景放大，再放大
就能依稀看见一个人回到了他的老家
但他已经分辨不出哪是
辣椒苗，哪是苦瓜苗或丝瓜苗
三株幼苗从土里冒出来
像三个刚刚学步的孩童
在阳光或细雨中乱窜
我要扶稳它们，等它们长大
自报家门，而这样一天
让平庸的生活有了盼头










Three Seedlings

The seeds planted in the pot germinated 
but they will not be flowers. I remember after last autumn
I had several seeds of pepper, bitter melon and
sponge gourd buried in the soil
They did not fail me, and germinated
In spring I squatted by the pot, if we
magnify this scene, and magnify even larger
we would see a man returned to his hometown
but he could no longer distinguish
pepper, bitter melon and sponge gourd from one another
Three seedlings popped up from the ground
like three toddlers taking their first step 
and staggering in the sun or rain
I am holding them steady, waiting for them to grow up
to tell me what they are, and that makes life
something to look forward to despite its mediocrity





Posted in 116: REMEMBER | Tagged ,

chameleon

Posted on May 7, 2025 by Crispin Rodrigues

ask them to pull their pants down and see the colour of their pantat! – my father

my dad always had a turn of phrase which we could print on t-shorts. he was referring her to our cousins in perth, the ones who had hidden among the white folk in their mown suburbs, who had two children and a dog, who had a barby in the backyard, who had a garden in the front, who said their yes and naur, who complimented that we were tanner than usual, who prayed by holding hands at the dining table, who looked in horror when we did not use the serving spoons, who gasped at using our hands to rip chicken apart, who called them chooks, who instructed us which sauces go with which dishes, who said chilli jam instead of chilli sauce, who summoned forth the wiggles to entertain a toddler, who drove us to the hotel, who gave dad ten dollars to buy a bouquet for his mom’s grave back in singapore, for whom we never saw again for the rest of the trip, for whom we gave the angbao and casually put it on the table without saying thanks, who told us moving from a bungalow to another bungalow was considered an upgrade, who told us about wildfire warnings, who told us about reading the bible right, who said he liked his curry mild, who said we no longer do those things here.

Posted in 116: REMEMBER | Tagged

how to live at The End of Days

Posted on May 7, 2025 by Courtney Mason

When the end comes
it is easy to live
Trust me,
you do not need much

a thick layer of
vegemite spread to
the corners of toast

shaving your legs
twice a year
and your pubic hair
even less

an hour-long phone call
to hear their voice

a whiff of the flowers
as a reminder
they only exist to die
and this is the way of things

using the thin-stemmed
wine glasses prone to shattering
and the left over perfume
from Duty-Free

the cold relief
of the ocean
and the pleasure
beneath a solar shower

your nose nuzzling the nape
of my neck in the morning

Yes. You are needed to live

Let us live these last days
together hand-in-hand
with the nice glasses topped
to the rim with red

drinking it all in
before the collapse

Posted in 116: REMEMBER | Tagged

After Injury

Posted on May 7, 2025 by Grace Roodenrys

After injury, my father told me,
the house was so quiet he could live by listening.

Outside: rain. Cicadas bristling.
Our neighbour fumbling softly with his gate’s useless lock.

I remember the awful intimacy of those months:
your sleep was a sound I woke to.

All summer the neighbour swept leaves beneath his fruit trees.
It hurt me, remember, how he tended his awkward privacy,

yelling yes, I love you, no I can’t help you
at the shallow breathing of his wounded dog.

Posted in 116: REMEMBER | Tagged

Letter from Overseas

Posted on May 7, 2025 by Brian Obiri-Asare

Sunday 15th September

One day here, one day there, me ho mfa me. I do not
know what has happened to the man I married,
where he has gone. We live in a house without words.
Loving him, it is plenty hard work, and there is a hole
where our future is supposed to be. I feel cold
about what has burned. Ekua and Kweku are gone,
scattered, like the wind, the sunsets, wɔyɛ mmerɛw –
no fire, no purple – and in this house,
the bitter brew of silence is hard to digest. Abeg,
believe me. Over barramundi and chablis, after church,
I had to keep reminding myself I am a child of the wind.
Just like you said. Remember when we used to race,
and I would always win? And you would say run, Steph,
run? Run like the wind? That is it. Like the Harmattan wind.
I want to know what it feels like to break free
from the hope that is always trying to choke me.

Posted in 116: REMEMBER | Tagged

Life cycle

Posted on May 7, 2025 by March Abuyuan-Llanes

Isn’t it too soon
for the cicadas to be singing
like this?
When I was a child, I read
in a book that it takes exactly 14
or 18 years for them to emerge
from their burrows underground—in other words:
how long it takes a boy
to learn the meaning
of loss
or how long it took you
to teach me something else. Winged,
they leave their little
bedrooms in the earth
and fly straight for
the trees, never to look
back. They spend the rest
of their short lives there,
as music, rubbing
their brittle and see-through bones
together to find love and
nothing else. If they’re lucky,
they see the full moon once
before they lay their eggs
and die, and the cycle
repeats. Shouldn’t it still be so
silent tonight, and every other
night? I swear, I already heard them
last summer. But here you are
beside me, twilight’s chorus loud
and hidden in the canopy of branches
above us: the whole forest
humming a harana
and swansong to nobody
and everyone—even
the stars.
Maybe on this nameless
mountain where my mother dreamed
of growing old, the cicadas
are different.
I take your hand in mine
and you tell me
you hear them, too.
You look at me
as if they’ll be singing
forever.

Posted in 116: REMEMBER | Tagged

Everyone you know is a Cancer

Posted on May 7, 2025 by Angelita Biscotti 
‘If I wanted only to hold you
I would hold you prisoner.’ – Louise Glück, ‘Circe’s Power’



The water you put outside for the possums
has become a birdbath

You forgot to hit send on that e-mail draft
You usually make the opposite mistake

Everyone you know is a Cancer
(Something about you is catnip for water-sign men)

Possum calls sound like acid bass

The iPhone, a misery-delivery service

Impossible for non-locals to distinguish Lebanon from Gaza on Instagram

A blood-soaked teddy bear, fallen battler in the rubble

That cellist playing the Schindler's List theme in a city flattened by Israel using American
bombs enabled by Australian and global manufacturers

7NEWS winning the Walkleys

C sharp minor is not mournful enough to hold the grief of the deliberately unheard

Darfur women committing suicide to avoid being raped to death

A Gaza surgeon raped to death in an Israeli prison

A psychoanalyst earning 200+ AUD for <45 mins, in Naarm

I look for your signature in all the Gaza solidarity statements because that’s where I hope to
find the humanity I’ve been missing in our recent conversations

If I wanted only to hold you
I would hold you accountable
Posted in 116: REMEMBER | Tagged

Taxidermy

Posted on May 7, 2025 by Rozanna Lilley

In the Museum’s
enfolding hush
the Superb Lyrebird
stretches splayed toes
on wooden platform
to rake leaflitter
tawny tailfeathers

Posterity preserved
glassy eyes peering past
Burke’s inscribed revolver
through double doors
to forest deep listening
as an axe strikes blackwood
her wild mate offering

A perfect imitation
turns her head to hear
hooves of half-starved
cattle High Street vagrants
sticking necks over
neat garden fences
eating everything in reach

A profusion of pink
roses & scarlet
passion flowers captured
inside a glass globe
a bouquet of prize-winning
petals modelled in wax
with precise fidelity

By Mrs De Jacques
pristine charm never lost
disposed of by Art Union
ticket 2-0-0-8
held by Richard Warren
now jostling for space
on a crowded mantel

Next to a clutch of eggs
cotton wool nestled
property of a large pelican
shot at Staghorn Flat
stuffed by an amateur
skin mounted for display
at the Yackandandah Athenaeum


Note: A Superb Lyrebird is currently displayed at the Burke Museum in Beechworth, part of
a larger taxidermy collection. The inscribed revolver was presented to Robert O’Hara Burke,
Superintendent of Police, by his fellow officers when he left Beechworth in 1858. Mrs De
Jacques won a prize at the Beechworth Horticultural Show in March 1879 for her bouquet of
wax flowers exhibited inside a glass globe. The phrases ‘precise fidelity’ and ‘pristine charm
never lost’ are found text from J. and H. Minton’s 1844 The Hand-Book for Modelling Wax
Flowers. A number of images are sourced from 1879 editions of Victorian regional
newspaper, The Ovens and Murray Advertiser, including the locally shot and stuffed pelican
as well as complaints about cattle wandering the streets.

Posted in 116: REMEMBER | Tagged

22, part two

Posted on May 7, 2025 by Owen Bullock

I leave the UK
to emigrate to New Zealand
with a small day pack
half-full
it contains
22 objects
5 balls
3 clubs
(I learnt to juggle just before
we left
and had time to visit
Oddballs in London)
2 books: a Good News Bible
(which I kept for another twenty years
then dropped into the Waihi recycling bin)
a notebook housing
13 of my poems
culled from 700
(which I burnt in the garden) –
one of the poems is sort of okay
has a nice Dylan Thomas-ish
line,
“to where the sea and swarm of bluebells
chases the night-dark woods”
the rest can be forgiven –
a spare shirt
underwear . . .
the only object I still own
is that notebook
(I’ve changed juggling props)
I don’t miss anything

Posted in 116: REMEMBER | Tagged

Scapegoat

Posted on May 7, 2025 by Torrey Bruinstroop

I beat my brother with a badminton racket,
bouncing the frame off his calves
until he swings and strikes my temple
with a cricket bat.
My shirt shoots red
so fast it can’t be real. Have I lost
too much? Mum says I need stitches, but
Dad says I got what I gave—I should’ve known my brother
likes a fight.
Mum helps me change:
removes my stained pyjamas, blots blood
with a rag, cups my head
with ice to stop
the weeping.

Later, during morning Mass, I play Christ
speared and limp on the cross. Dressed as disciples,
my classmates cut me down, bind me
in linen and carry me to my tomb
behind the altar.
They deviate
from scripture and drop me
head first onto the floor.
When I rise
to show that sin has been wiped clean,
the blood is real.

Posted in 116: REMEMBER | Tagged

Romances

Posted on May 7, 2025 by Janet Reinhardt

1.

Remember that Art Deco hotel in Cuba
On the first morning we rose early
before the heat to visit the grave
of that famous poet I forget his name
but he was something of a destination

I can still see the towel you dropped on the floor
the marks your fingers left in the soap
on the shelf in that ornate bathroom
The elaborate plans we made are still there
the lamp beside the bed is still burning

11.

Remember that late-winter weekend in Cork
We’d shunned Guinness for the tart taste of retsina
That small bottle you’d bought in Athens
to drink, you said, on the plane

We sat in drizzle on a damp wooden bench
willing the alcohol to warm us
watched the afternoon’s pallid sunlight
fade in the cloud-crowded sky

It was bitter cold but we both pretended to be delighted

Posted in 116: REMEMBER | Tagged

history // painting

Posted on May 7, 2025 by Bradley Visaka David

*Sources:
E. Phillips Fox, Landing of Captain Cook at Botany Bay 1770, 1902 oil on canvas, 192 x 265 cm, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
(not currently on display, archived in NGV as ‘History and Legend’)
(inset detail) Raphael, The School of Athens, 1508-11, fresco, 500 x 900 cm (approx.), Stanza della Segnatura, Vatican City

Benjamin Duterrau, The Conciliation, 1840 oil on canvas, 121 x 170.5 cm, Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart
(not currently on display, written by art historians as “the first epic historical painting of the colonies”)

(quote) “truth is a negotiated outcome” – Greg Lehman, “Fearing Truganini” Artlink 31.2 (2011)

The font is “Instagram Sans” – a downloadable font used across Meta and associated technologies.

Posted in 116: REMEMBER | Tagged

tha an speur a’ seinn

Posted on May 7, 2025 by Eartha Davis

aroha blooms in wingtaps of rain
(water forgives her sudden vertigo)

the whole world croaks kindness, acacia says
the whole world casts off her tangled net to dream…

a touch that ladles the loss from lungs
a touch that sheds the trenches of time
the slew of subways
the cataracts of forgetting

nighean, river says
(daughter, dreamer)
follow the ministrations of flowers
nighean, mountain says
(daughter, dreamer) nighean, ancestor says
let the ocean wake in you forgive the snow of yesterday

under Monday’s patina, lovers remember their hands
(they touch)
bones remember their birthplace
(they return)
faith remembers her bird
(she sings)
the day carries sky
kisses her on the mouth
(love is a kite in their shared hand)

slowly,
slowly,
life plants seeds in a mother’s palm

& dreams
trickle back to the creek
exhaled from wind
nesting with wheuna
with mother daughter sister sky

note: aroha is Te Reo Māori for compassion; wheuna is Te Reo Māori for land, placenta, where our ancestors lived and breathed and danced

Posted in 116: REMEMBER | Tagged

The Sixth Sister

Posted on May 7, 2025 by Rita Tognini
One of the sculptured female figures, called caryatids, that held up the Erechtheion, an ancient temple on the north side of the Acropolis dedicated to the goddess Athena, was brought to England by Lord Elgin and is presently housed in the British Museum.


‘The wildest of inventions!’ That’s how they describe me after two and a half millennia. A woman, an architectural column, balancing a small temple on my head. A feat, I’ll grant you. But I did not do it alone. We did it together, my sisters and I. We stood on a low wall near the summit of the craggy hill above Athens. We faced south, overlooking our city, head baskets bearing our crown as lightly as the zephyrs that breathed on our cheeks and mussed the folds of our robes. We maidens stood on our porch as in a trance, watching the korai, our earthly sisters, virgins from the best of families as they led the procession, carried the libation bowls and baskets filled with fruits of the forest. Theirs was the honour of carrying the garlands to decorate the bull. Of bearing the sacrificial knife through the city, up the jagged face of the Acropolis to the altar in the Parthenon. And ours, to raise Athena’s temple at its side. My sisters are still there, though now in shelter. They keep vigil over our city, keep watch on the avatars who bear our crown. I am here. Alone in this huge, stony, windowless hall. Tomb, I’d say, if it were not for strangers who stand before me daily, fawning compliments. They whisper about my dreamlike stance—arms clasped behind my back and left leg slightly bent, as if I were relaxed despite the knobbly stump where my left foot should be. They admire my high small breasts, firm beneath my robes clasped at the shoulders by floral brooches. They know my story. Some pity my damaged nose and chin, the gouged-out elbow, the fretted pleats of my robes. Some ponder my abduction, consider me fortunate, safe from the hands of other grasping men. Others marvel at how I lit men’s minds, compelled them to copy me for their own temples. All drift away, drawn to sculptures and friezes prised from the Parthenon, to sun and the scent of rosemary; to the cries of victory that echo in the air.



korai: maiden

Posted in 116: REMEMBER | Tagged