Evening Raga

Posted on December 3, 2025 by Estill Pollock

street stalls of books outside
the shop in Charing Cross tatty stacks of Edwardian
memoir, kitchen-sink Osborne looking
back in anger
and Punch

novels from days
of smoky pubs and bombsite London

my vagrant hour, rummaging broken spines, bargains
fifty pence, in mythic memory before
asymmetrical towers shouldered
skylines near St. Paul’s before WiFi facial recognition
software future fantasy
heralds

everything, pre

there John Berryman

diamond geezer moonshine Homage to Mistress Bradstreet
signed
‘Harriet from John, a fellow traveler, with all good wishes’

from my last pound note, fifty pence
change held back to feed the meter in my room

Pimlico shabby chic, chipped-paint mantlepiece Dali print
of melting time on the table, the book of poems

through the window, wet streets a red
phone box
opposite, blood-garish the phone

ringing and ringing

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Days

Posted on December 3, 2025 by Michael Hall

Somehow the after-days kept their structure.
My bus followed its scheduled
route, the usual people hopped on

and off. One day, I began finding
pumice in my yet-unmade bed, as light
rolled about the world like a pair of socks.

Then in the left-hand pocket of my jacket –
and on the strewn floor of the shower; every
where the ruin of an underworld.

On another, I found two on the turntable
of the microwave. And when I walked the weekend
streets, they clinked – clattering about my

forgotten feet; but soon after, I just enjoyed
kicking them away, watching them
scatter from the heart’s broken moment.

Yes, there is usually a quiet Krakatoa
beyond the brightening horizon that no one
notices. Sometimes you even hear it.

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Black + Blue(s) Plastics

Posted on December 3, 2025 by Jeremy Jacob Peretz

for Hughie Stanislas

the houses press closer & closer
against the don drumming light. against
sky that is their living monument
—Kamau Brathwaite, “Koker”

A plank of hardwood cut like teeth –^–^–^–^–^–

to hold in place the steps of a staircase

serving as footbridge across trench

of blackwater and mudded earth

sprouting victoria lilies and ‘one-foot’

wild eddo whose lofty purple-veined

legs sway in the softened seabreeze,

a gentle, moist and salty heir, who

conveys the sounds of cows contented

with birds on their backs pecking at

insects and disturbed flesh, parrots

in the yellow plum plimpler branches

above, amassing in the dungs tree *
* *
at the center of this abandoned lot ^
^
now accommodating the village dump. ^
^
That saline draught also carries an acrid ^

smoke of scorched refuse, rubbish

gathered into the cavity of a rusted-out

refrigerator turned on its back from

where a smoldering plastic bag caught

that same wind, and silently lit upon

my young boy’s wrist instantaneously

attaching to and liquifying his touched flesh

sending lower limbs sprinting up the steps

in astonishment, upper limbs cradling torso

silently inside to be coddled, cared, why rebuked?

for creating future scars: monuments unveiled.

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Unbroken

Posted on December 3, 2025 by Vek Lewis

1.
Intimate, as one flesh, we read
her bodily signs, a language learnt in childhood.

You know why I brought you korma, mum?
Yes, because you know I like it.

Dinnertimes at this age involve
gentle coaxing:
a gradual accumulation.

The tin of stuffed chillies
from Mexico
draw the other ladies’ disgust.

She won’t do salad
with bread. We settle for a movie.
The others go to bed.

2.
Reversals:
I tend to you as once
you tended me.

Ease you out of bed
in the afternoons
offer you tea

help you mobilise.
Wheelie walker always
in reach.

3.
CT HEAD
Clinical Details: Increasingly vague. Past history of left parieto
occipital change. Differential diagnosis: HSV encephalitis or CAA
related macrobleed.
Findings: The widespread oedema/decreased attenuation within
the temporoparietal and occipital lobes has substantially reduced
as compared to the prior CT scan performed on 17 February
2019.
The previously documented left parieto-occipital haemorrhage
has resolved.
There is no evidence of an intracranial space-occupying lesion
nor midline shift. The ventricular system, basal cisterns and
cortical sulci are reasonably well maintained.

4.
Not just clinical notes.
Nothing can encompass:

The struggles were from disbelief.
as if I wouldn’t know my own mother

Sat there, over an hour, trembling, at 7am.
“Refused to eat”, the RN notes.

She has nausea, I say, get her
some IV maxalon, not ondansetron.

“The patient must be able to state this”.
Me: I know my mum.

5.
When you had an EEG
you were Wired For Sound
skating through aether

singing the Cliff Richard song
Then: back in the room –
flying cats.

6.
The vertigo of your constant
comebacks

shocked us out of our skin
One instant fallen: Glasgow Scale 6.

Next morning
up and singing.

7.
Time dilated:
we swam in it, whole pools of it
the seconds, the minutes
stretched out endlessly.

This could have been infinity: it was not.
You left us, when
our sun and Antares aligned:
the soul-portal open.

8.
The other night, five years hence
my brother reports in a dream:
Mum has been calling… when will you pick up?

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Chekhov’s Dog

Posted on December 3, 2025 by Ruth Larner

The train North rocks. Like a drunk.
We fold into a dining car booth, our tenth anniversary hanging
above us, grim as a wilting mistletoe. He pulls

from the archives that reverent, watery gaze – a by-product of utmost sentimentality.
I open my lips to a screwdriver and calcify in the wet cement of the near-past:
our discarded child, a loaded jack-in-a-box in the centre of my chest.

He leans in, takes my hand. A-G-A-P-E, he spells passionately. Goes wild with fire
metaphors: rekindle, fan flames, tend sparks.
I prefer the horticultural ones, I say. Cultivate, prune, nurture, water, grow. He appears

not to have heard me. Love is a verb, he says, stressing this last word. He is quoting
Bell Hooks, or is it Massive Attack? I concur, gardening or arson, we must try.
For the rest of the afternoon, I smile but cannot shake the image of a singing foetus.

The colossal red rock stretches, yawns, and plummets like a graph with tragic findings.
We gawk into its smooth buttocks. The guide calls me sister.
Don’t you feel like we’re part of a problem? my husband asks when we’re alone.

Speak for yourself.
As tourists, though.
I nod, recall that joke about the wombat – eats, roots, and leaves is its punchline.
At night, we watch the stars loosen: incalculable cubes of glass lolling about on a

cosmic hammock. In the lurching lounge, he bumps his elbow on the table’s rim.
Bumps it, moans, curses. My eyes remain fixed on the sliding landscape, flattening itself
into a coarse, red palm. Wind stirs the dunes, but there are no oak trees

to trouble. If I were ______, you would have soothed me.
Are you a child? Are you?
A penetrating silence.
As the day unfolds, we stringently exchange words, but do not talk. Our cabin

smells of coffee and feet. Shelved on the top bunk, I read of war in the paper.
The article is sad and deeply biased. I ask why we allocate compassion so selectively?
It’s like that drooling dog, he answers from underneath me. Chekhov’s.

Pavlov’s.
Once we determine who the Cowboys are and who the Indians are, we have our stimuli.
I suck air between my teeth.
Tell me I’m wrong.

On the way to Adelaide, it rains. The confused, cracked-heel earth clenches
and softens. Taking care of oneself – our private euphemism for masturbation. I assume
this is what nature is enacting, until I see the wonder across his face and realise

it is an act of mercy.

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Treatment plan requirements

Posted on December 3, 2025 by Belinda Rule

it is extremely important
when you make a fried cheese sandwich with a hole in it for an egg
that you make an additional
tiny fried cheese sandwich with the bread from the hole

it is extremely important
not to fire me from my job for weeping

if you are my mother
it is important
not to talk in that tone

if you fire me from my job for weeping
you should not owe me six thousand dollars

if you are a cat you should get out of the bin,
you should not lick my muffin

if you are a possum you should not
dance the polka on my roof, you should not
vent your cruise-ship steam turbine

if you are an employment office
you should answer your phone

if you are a neighbour you should not have any friends

if you are the sky you should bathe me in delicate light

if you are an occupational rehabilitation provider
you should not ask me how I am
if you are going to panic

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Rats

Posted on December 3, 2025 by Kacey Martin

a witch, a lunatic, and a poet walk into a bar—no, a pharmacy. and i am not the poet. /// tapping our feet together in the lunch-rush line. /// a refrigerator murmur meant only for my frequency. i imagine it full: plastic rings to curb my womb, cornflower shots to blunt my craving. /// oh, i must remember to get cat food while i am out. /// food. feast. a hundred-dollar uber eats order. people like me keep economies afloat. /// black-buttoned blouse, blank tan face and sleepy stare. “how can i help you?” /// perhaps it is that time of year where i watch titanic (again)—but no one will watch it with me. i like the part when the ship is sinking because it makes me cry. i only cry in sad movies or when i remember, as i try to fall asleep, that one day my cats will die. /// the man behind me shakes with a fever, like bubbling kettle water awaiting the peppermint that will make it into tea. we are all sick with, sick of, something. /// over dinner last night, a friend (yes, i do have friends, you know) and i pondered free will. but i have only known those who are slaves to their natures. /// sorry, what did you say? i was sinking into the spiral void. /// “your prescription expired a week ago.” /// rats.

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Project Eden

Posted on December 3, 2025 by Caitlin Maling

My uncle receives a phone call
a neighbour’s dog frothing and fitting.
He’s already shoved his hose down his its throat
forced what was down up.
They stay up all night, it takes 24 hours
but it survives, bull terrier,
my aunt says, “tough”;
another neighbour came round, young kelpy in arms
nothing to do, it dies
picked the bait just off the road,
Eagle Bluff. The problem is
they can be anywhere, the crows move them
and a dried bait can stay toxic
through 40mm of rainfall, 12 months in the semi arid
conditions of Point Peron, there they lie
like a shrivelled sausage and “what’s the point”
my aunt says, as we see a cat
scarper across the road, a young one too.
The bait’s not meant to, but she thinks it might kill the roos.
When it’s dry they’ll jump into backyards
to get at cardboard, thin, maybe struck
or just drought. Who’s to say the poison pea
doesn’t then fester in their supposedly immune
guts. “It’s only those who haven’t seen what it does
that don’t mind”.

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Nosedive

Posted on December 3, 2025 by Ana Morales

The refinery stuffs male chicks into sewage
pipes, then charges you for daydreaming on the
job. Where there are walls, there will always be
hands—or, hand—and stream of conscious
piss painting a masterpiece on the graffiti-lined
echo chamber disguised as dissent. It’s not
hell, it’s not even purgatory, it’s a headline
repurposed to be a poem. Shake your prick well
before zipping up your jeans. Don’t apologize,
there’s nothing to be happy for. The sound of metal
grazes your cheek. Cuts through casus belli and
your 9 a.m. strategy meeting. Somewhere a woman
slices onions with the knife she kisses in secret. Some-
where she rests her hand on your knee to stop
it from throttling the kitchen counter as you
talk about why you don’t want to talk about the
thing. The thing is an old story. The thing is, burning,
speeding, gaining unwanted velocity will be the end
of you who has not even begun. Tomorrow was
the same as today, as swollen as the moon lighting
your nightly walks to the convenience store. Experts
say that that one city’s colonial past is linked to flooding
and poor urban planning. Well, of course. Outpour
will breed repetition and the demise of health
benefits, coupons, and expired pay. Paternity leave is
seven days too short to hold the baby, to cradle her
brittle neck, and to kiss her eyelids. So tell her that
no one will ever hurt her. Trace her cheek with the
finger you purposefully stapled this morning. Hand
her back to her mother. Don’t forget to clock out
after you do.

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The Hurt

Posted on December 3, 2025 by Scott-Patrick Mitchell

for my haters

I used to think that if I kept moving I could outrun the pain.

Proud human. Foolish child.

Now I know the value of sitting still.

Let it come. Let it in. Let it own your being.

A violence of consumption, I turn my heart, my tender throat, toward
the teeth of it.

Stitch. Cramp. Toothache.

Ideation is the most common part my life–has been for three decades
a worn jacket I keep wearing, keep tearing, how it does nothing to
hold back wind, rain. But see how it dazzles with starlit seams.

Dream of trees, the perfect branch.

Of helium headmasks.

Of the hottest hot shot, the burning vein, the final slump.

Oh endless nod.

Small white horse, stampede me, grant annihilation.

In his office, the scientist and I discuss the anglerfish that came to the
surface, that this can equate to rare footage of a possible common
occurrence.

The deep sea hurts, he says.

Animals lean to carry it, push through it, live.

Sometimes, coming up is an easing: swim toward the light, little fish.

All existence hurts, the scientist adds.

His office, a molasses of comfort dripping thick with these harsh facts.

Endurance as grace.

And what is addiction to Class A substances if not a desire to step
closer to death, the end, body thrilling with burning of life.

There are days I crave for the ice, the shard, to drive to Marmion or
Koondoola or Balga, score to set fire to the night.

Sprint from the smoke.

A syringe turning my blood back into myself. As poison.

Ukanite. Black obsidian. Selenite.

I clutch crystals of another kind.

Out there in Perth Canyon, in a world full of corners, those beings
who call it home cannot outswim the agony we are inflicting.

They must endure.

To do so is to reincarnate place, a legacy that changed shape when
drowned 10,000 years ago.

Glass sponge. Grey banded cod. Whaler shark.

They must endure. They must all endure.

And so must I.

Sit, human. Stay, child.

Embrace it.

Write another poem.

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Ass

Posted on December 3, 2025 by Rachael Boast

From the Pyrenees to Inisherin, from Inisherin to Shalem,
emissary of burden, holier than humans – Bel-shar-uzur,
ur-star of those who carry an unkind weight at random,
not because they choose to but because they can do
and do so without breaking – nearly losing hope, almost
all hope, among hostile peaks under an impossibly blue sky;
or as companion to buffoons who can’t let be,
turning their only ally against themselves, wondering
how anyone could possibly play the fiddle without fingers.
What’s the point of heaping woes onto a saddle?
Bray as loudly as you can, Bel-shar-uzur, ur-star,
until the storm-world passes and two ears appear –
Asellus Borealis, Asellus Australis – humility and devotion,
superior to the human beast woeful in its war room.

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democracy sausage

Posted on December 3, 2025 by Sarah Gory

We are come
for the democracy sausage
instead we have steel cut oats with rhubarb
and oysters, champagne.
On the way home:
‘free worm wee’
advertised on a hand-written sign,
hanging on a fence, picket.
We are a household that composts, you know.
The kids don’t like McDonalds,
can’t abide the stuff.
They prefer sushi (fresh) and
ricotta cannoli from the bakery.

In this way,
democracy thrives.

We are come for the
poetry, too, something
we can sink our teeth into
(pardon the pun). Because ‘if we are only ever relational /
where do I hang my rabbit fur cloak?’
— E., in the corner of a gallery, work in progress

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Stubbornness in the Face (Love Story)

Posted on December 3, 2025 by Lee Fraser

Our tale is one of a love
for vows; for stubbornness in the face
of dismay. A love for playing
the long game, meanwhile
the wrong loyalty cards close to our chest,
hard to get into someone’s hands by the rules.
Learning by ear to love slipping
your feet into the same pair of
dice for 16 years.

I love the way you drag yourself
to face the tragedy and clowns at work,
the scene at home, the mirror critic;
the way you ache
to do what’s right when integrity has left the building;
the way you light up with someone else
who points you to your soul, when I am not
a glowing review – I never wanted you to love me
more than truth; more than becoming yourself.

My love for you is armoured up
against lickbait with its poison envelope;
for batting the odds, the leaving tide.
My love for you is in the raw
places that you peel, to peer, to mend;
is furrowed fog light,
backstage diamonds,
faithfulness to colouring
inside the lines of these two wedding rings.

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Portrait of a Friend with HIV Dementia

Posted on December 3, 2025 by Peter Davis

He fell like hell did through the ground
and held to the arms of a weary ghost.
On his 37th birthday, Gerry received a walking stick. He lived in a high-rise flat
and had sudden fencing duels with the stairs.

His heart grew light then ceased to pound.
He kept warm by the flames of memory.
When his phone rang, Gerry rarely answered it. We nicknamed him ‘possum.’
He liked to sleep during the day upon a curtained balcony.

His mouth felt dry and sore to sound.
His skin was desert red and yellow.
Once, I found Gerry cheering with some winos on Brunswick Street.
He had shared with them all his barbiturates.
Together, they ran and hobbled so high with Gerry for one night
almost the leader.

He searched for love in the lost and found.
His smile rose like bubbles from champagne.
Gerry had a reputation inside big department stores. He could carry
his bulk quite well: two leather jackets, three shirts. He left a trail
of discarded store-tags but was never arrested. Instead, the many
security guards became attached to him.

If Rosalind Russell were not re-wound
then he would weep like Isabella Rossellini. In the shade
of a venetian-blind, Gerry sat with a remote control and replayed
his few favourite movies. He liked to sip from a nutrition supplement
and just listen, “I’m ready for my close up, Mr. De Mille.”

Twice I visited his burial mound.
He still listens to me like a friend.
Hey, Gerry, in peer-support-group last week,
we were asked to describe what grief is like.
I said that there became too many funerals to cry at each anymore.
I seem to accrue grief like a year’s worth of newspapers,
which I rarely think about and keep till they clutter my hall.
It’s lonely being alive at times. What’s that you’re saying to me?
My silly newspapers analogy? Yes?
Cut and save favourite clippings from each and recycle what remains.

This poem recollects 1995, the last year prior to the availability of effective HIV antiretroviral treatments.

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Lure, Endure

Posted on December 3, 2025 by Medha Singh

You know what I found
in your centre
of metal, mortar?
Within, wet fruit, bound
in flesh, convulsing
with shame, bare
in the wrong street.
Here you were, refusing age
time’s demands—
discipline, elegance, tact—
as this void thirsted
for a bloodless happiness
it once knew, small but enough
& once upon a morning, thin enough
to have woven
into a world of green glass—
Let me now rescue
that bright pleasure,
O joy-idiotic, all mine; warm sun
coiling its way into moist
intestines, never even coming
to know its unknowing. The aught,
that Body-Before you were cornered,
a simpler light had thrived inside us.
One we kept awake for
till the end of our days—
Do you know revenge is only revenge
when it is proportional to the crime?
Not your fault, the doctors
had intoned. Ants crawled in
as desire does, on the soft, lone
carcass of a butterfly. What is this
pale shame sitting in your eyes?
answer it. Let me. It’s a slow
drawl under cotton sheets,
low hum of devastation
come to congeal you
into silence.
And you, do you let it eat
your remaining days?
Are you breathing,
may I
enter?

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Cosmolalia

Posted on December 3, 2025 by Luke Patterson

I’m looking for a word.

The (ex)plosives are ambiguous.

Everything sounds like a bomb during the age of artillery.

A crow in the line of fire.

As sensitive as an eagle in Pisces.

Dragging my intestines along his taut transit.

Everything connected like one big sonata.

Morning Star misnomer, westward, life.

Death, spiritual, oversight.

Sunrise to sunset.

I’m being sanctimonious.

I’m out of key in these spheres.

I cast the long shadow of escapism.

I dare you to tread on me.

Will I answer when someone returns to the pond?

Years down the track asking what it all means?

Do we really need another wagtail?

Another riddle with wings?

Another King who leaves no other?

‘I have moved on to better things.’

To another creator of rivers and tears and split tongues.

A purveyor of boutique ochres and spears.

I’m all ears

as the word escapes me.

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Dry Mountains

Posted on December 3, 2025 by Louise Crisp

1. Moth

Small light-footed, winged, creatures of the Alps
– Yaitmathang summers:
mountain pygmy possum, smoky mouse, broad toothed rat,
bush rat, Bogong moth, alpine tree frog, alpine water skink
lives in bogs, long-nosed bandicoot, Swainson’s antechinus
tiger quoll, nine species of bat; in winter sub-nivean inhabitants:
one possum, two rats and an antechinus

Bogong High Plains
1853: lowing arrival

HORNS, HOOFS, SKIN, HIDE, EYES, EARS, FUR, TONGUE:

2. Ranunculus

Anemone Buttercup flower buds form in autumn
wintering under snow its white flowers are the first
to appear after snowmelt
recorded by J Stirling on Mt Hotham in 1887
vanished so rapidly due to cattle grazing
that later botanists considered the record
of Ranunculus anemoneus erroneous

3. Mossbeds

Around the springs which form the headwaters of all the streams and along the streams –
mossbeds, from a distance they take on a brownish colour of shrub foliage which obscures the
underlying golden spahgnum holding up 24 times its weight in water, cattle come to the
mossbeds for water and palatable plants the total area of mossbeds is very great 3,350 ha on
Bogong High Plains the sphagnum buffers the flow of water the mossbeds were a nuisance to
the cattlemen death traps for the unwary it was impossible to ride a horse through and cattle
going into them to drink were frequently bogged the locals adopted a policy of burning them out
water runs fast that once flowed slow undercut the stream banks lowered the water table down
to stony pavements by the 1950s 50% of mossbeds had dried out on the high plains and on the
isolated steeper mountains Hotham, Loch, Feathertop, and Bogong where water is scarce the
sphagnum bogs have almost disappeared – as a result of continued grazing, burning and
trampling I have not yet seen an undamaged mossbed a breath of cold air will strike you as go
past taking several hundred years to recover




Notes:
The Alpine National Park was established in 1989; cattle were finally excluded from Bogong High Plains in 2006.

Sources:
Moth
Carr, Stella G.M 1962, The Discovery of the Bogong High Plains, Proceedings of the Royal Soc Vic 75 (2), pp285-289.
Parks Victoria, Fauna of the Australian Alps pdf, Parks Victoria Education Resource accessed 18.10.2025

Ranunculus
Gillbank, Linden, 1991, The Biological Heritage of Victoria’s Alps: an Historical exploration, Historical Places Section, DC&E Vic. p26, 62
Stirling, James, 1887, Notes on the flora of Mount Hotham, The Victorian Naturalist, vol 4 (1887-1888), pp72-78, Field Naturalists Club of Victoria

Mossbeds
Carr, Stella G.M. & J. S. Turner, 1959, The Ecology of the Bogong High Plains, 1. The Environmental Factors and the Grassland Communities,
Aust Journal Botany, (7), p13 Costin, A.B., 1957, High Mountain Catchments in Victoria in Relation to Land Use, Soil Conservation Authority,
p18, 25
Fawcett, Maisie to Professor Turner, Botany School, University of Melbourne, undated letter, John Stewart Turner Papers UMA BOX 121
TURN 00892 Soil Conservation – Omeo, SMF to JST letters 1948
Fawcett, S. G. Maisie and J. S. Turner 1948, Ecological work on the High Plains, Bogong, in connection with soil erosion: second report
July 22nd, 1948, Botany Department, University of Melbourne, p31
Fawcet, S.G.M. 1949, Soil Conservation in the Hume Catchment, Victorian Compost News vol 3, no 8, p88
Turner, J. S, et al.1957, A report on the high mountain catchments of New South Wales and Victoria, Australian Academy of Science, p14,18, 27

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Byways

Posted on December 3, 2025 by Gaele Sobott

deeply etched into my skin
i hid my atypical
under fungal outcrops of shame
in damp caves
where no one would suspect

but the gods of weakening corporeality
claimed me in their name
my body passed as normal no more
with lowered eyes i mouthed humiliation
and danced the crooked byways

one step two steps knees hyperextended
quadriceps weakening
my resolve
shaken by the aftershock of collapsing
limbs lopsided to earth
i’d say to those who offered assistance
stand behind and grab me under the arms
like firefighters do the best pick me up

my legs thinned my crip pride bloomed
and crawled smug around my tonsils
i recced labyrinths and staircases
as impossible to access as giants’ castles
or witches’ lairs i learned that power
is irony my weapon my shield
my opportunity to refuse the fairytale
where passers-by attempt to lay hands
upon my body pray for me
or ask out of the condescending blue
what’s wrong with you?

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The Victorian Parliamentary Inquiry into the Recruitment Methods and Impacts of Cults and Organised Fringe Groups

Posted on December 3, 2025 by Claire Gaskin
I crawl into the guts of pain and its glorious   group based coercive control   the carcass on the beach   focused on behavior not beliefs   a submission for the inquiry   a winter rainbow in a gumboot   patterned sustained tactics   do I own selfless   gradual   what is in accordance with targets ability to act or think independently   a photo of me in my twenties   group based coercive matrix   the waiting leaning against the car in the wind tunnel   the 6am full moon   the fox in the driveway   the drive out of town   the stopping for coffee   the road ahead   the talk of a business plan   the wet road   the wet bark   the walk in the fine rain at the top of the mountain   6 domains of coercive control   standing on volcanic rock   the fluorescent greens of moss   the walker’s wet dog   the standing by the fire someone left burning   the kookaburra on the fence post   the full moon in the morning window   200 coercive acts to 40 existing laws   linguistic risk is a vulnerable generosity   I grew up in a cult   14 recommendations   wind under my skin   victim to perpetrator continuum   addiction to lack of commitment   who is doing what to whom   closed ideologically framed settings   carefully drying my hair saying you are not sure if you are doing it right   tenderness creates a universe where right is not the issue   with no   structural risks   the distant crow in the ache in my shoulder   on the clothes line of my wet skeleton   the blue eggshell sky   charter of human rights   the cross hatched weave of   authorized   committing to abandonment   reasonable   confusion of longing for love   necessary   how can you be so resolved your DNA still in my bed   precautionary   your hair on the sink   a bin full of tissues   to fulfil duty of care   ice-cream in the freezer   my head on your chest your heartbeat the percussion to the tanpura master we watch on your phone   I was able to ask you to play while I wrote my submission   I give myself clear and mutual consistency of self


The italicized words are from Beyond Belief, a report responding to coercive cults and high-control groups. The report was submitted to the Victorian Parliamentary Inquiry into the Impacts into Recruitment Methods and Impacts of Cults and Organised Fringe Groups.
Authors: Patrick McIvor, Clare McIvor, and Renee Spencer, on behalf of Survivors of Coercive Cults and High-Control Groups (SOCCHG) and Stop Religious Coercion Australia (SRCA), with guidance from the Survivor Working Group on Group-Based Coercive Control July 2025

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Heart of God

Posted on December 3, 2025 by Kim Cope Tait
I can’t write about little girls swept away in flash floods   brown roiling river glutted on the bird boned babies of Christian families left with empty hands   fingers spread so all the coins fall through    I suppose people want to know their stories because there are fewer of them    Twenty-seven is a digestible number    Terrible and calamitous   but manageable for the brain    Twenty-seven families    Twenty-seven childless stuffies covered in mud    Twenty-seven photographs and backstories and names    They have names    Little knock-kneed cuties smiling and laughing and turning cartwheels    

It is possible to withstand twenty-seven tragedies   twenty-seven graves   The finite nature of it    There is no God to appease in the case of disasters like this    No dictator for us to fail to seize    Though it tears us from our roots   we accept the absurdity    How a river can rip one home from its foundation   leave its barbecue sitting untouched on the houseless decking   deposit three school lunch boxes still in a row atop their kitchen bench two kilometres downriver

I don’t believe it’s because of the colour of their skin    Or their religion    Or even the physical distance    It’s because we are so vulnerable to story    And without it we are nothing    Deprived of the stories of 14,500 dead Palestinian children   our empathy starves   but here   where twenty-seven Texas families grieve   we are fed stories that make our blood run cold    Stories that hold mirrors up to us like all good stories do    I can’t scroll Instagram without crying   and it’s these Christian children and it’s these Muslim ones    These Jewish ones    The alive ones   they’re hungry    And afraid    They’re the next generation   and they are being either destroyed or radicalised by grief    We will all regret this in time    

Maybe it is easier to experience such loss in the midst of war   where everything is blowing up   losing its shape and substance    The mind cannot fixate on the single hole in the universe but must   instead   keep navigating change and catastrophe   one after another   dragging one’s grief like a dying dog on a lead but moving forward nonetheless    What I know is that I can’t look at it any more    Yes   it’s fucked that I can’t handle any more of other people’s grief   but there it is    Snowflake self    And the hollowed out heart of God

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When a man’s wife is a pre-surgery patient

Posted on December 3, 2025 by Ross Jackson

on live tv—
helicopters out at sea before dawn
searchlights are yellow knives
stabbing into a filthy darkness

—sticking your head outside
from upstairs bathroom window
so strangely humid for Perth, I imagine a clammy feel
to every neck
being kissed right now

—looking east
huge, grey modesty curtains drawn across distant suburbs
cockatoos (dubious forecasters)
clearing out in scrappy lines of screeching black
from one bunch of trees to another

—while driving to get
to where you’d rather
not have to be going—
confused by the hunt for the demister button
a view of storm driven fairways
where golf being played by stoics

after a tight park at The Mount Hospital
reading your wrist indicates
that you must wait

bounce down’s timed for eleven sharp
is what you’ve been told

just going by as you get out of the car
…lower half of a body
the set of legs
underneath an umbrella
feet hobbling over a drain choked by soaked poplar leaves
another poor bastard, you guess, who’s finding it tough getting old

feeling a need
to pre-empt an assumption of doom…

you turn to face hospital stairs
and sigh
they know what they’re doing
she’ll be right as rain
on the way to the toilet, on repeat
‘They know what they’re doing; she’ll be right as rain’

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Late Responses

Posted on December 3, 2025 by Lachlan Brown

For JF

as well as can be
calendars remind us of contract-
negotiated days, time in lieu of
time. on your morning walk you
flinch when a runner passes, swift
second breath in the shock of cold.

a strange and challenging year
do less with more. do more with
more. do less with less. do more
with less. with less do more. with
more do more. with less do less.
with more do and do and do and do.

running by the house
footprints become quote marks
reminding you of an ironic dist-
ance between self and world.
many rooms, many rooms; are
we allowed to head for home?

who’s counting?
the numbers only work for
those in control: hours saved,
positions removed (never re-
membering the time spent
putting on the data-driven coat).

walking the hill
our paths cross in theory, your
photos trying to grab the words
that spilled from my head hours
ago, my poems attaching to scenes
that have not been developed yet.

a darker turn
predawn sky like a locked phone-
screen. halfway up beauty point ave-
nue the airways constrict, forcing you
to stop. still, there are planes flying
overhead, holding everything together.

leaning into this new direction
see, I am doing a new thing! I am
changing playlists, I am updating
the operating system, I am taking
up exercise and k-pop fandom in
non-ironic ways [insert applause].

something living in a notebook
that’s a poem or at least part of
a poem. or perhaps the offcuts
of a poem. who knows until
the thing actually writes itself? so
keep walking, moving, ma(s)king…

add to the images
the burned-out car atop willans hill
testifies to a sacred immolation. stolen
bike cast into stolen scrub. two roos sur-
prised by footfall and appearance. below,
industry illumines industry over and over.

the same paths
…nearby couches risk exposure, cast off
or positioned. when you run the same route
you can only see the same things. at least,
that’s what some change-managed moment
declares to a treeline that shivers in the wind.

never meet
you are almost present, the after-effect
of a long exposure. dawn’s darkroom
bringing focus slowly at first, then all
at once. lorikeets shriek and shoot
through these accidents and shadows.

between images and text
sunrise pictograph, lawnmown riv-
erina firmament. there is no language
for what the crunch of frost gifts you
(crisp imitation of an urtext disturbance,
margins dark with the traces of failure)

associations and departures
regionally-engaged thinktank agri-
business community entrepreneurial
health-related local area startup con-
sultancy success story: eucalypt leaf
turned sideways, creek bed dry and silent.

take your time
I attempt to divide a day into quarter
hour segments but soon give up when
magpies crowd consciousness and morn-
ing fog refuses to lift. a voice calls across
the billable-billabong, ghost on unseen shore.

everything that is happening
night audits day at dawn, then again
at dusk; management consultants get
you both ways. crows arrive and pick
over a wombat, dense with fur and car-
stopped dignity (in the black/ in the red).

no rush
the kelpie runs from her owner but
returns when called. this mistbreath
and earnestness becomes you: learnt
fervour vs inbuilt restraint, more tiny
reminders of grace reversing the darkness.

find the time
lost, lost, forever lost! I forgot to press
the workout button so these steps aren’t
even being recorded. What’s the point
when a heartrate can’t be monitored?
just take the hard path and don’t ever stop.

take care
birdsong on the hill, waiting music on
the employee assistance line, sessional
directives on looking after one another, sky
fracturing into outsourced mini-dominions.
grab a heel, james, we may soon be lifting off…

Posted in 118: PRECARIOUS | Tagged

undiagnosed after moving

Posted on December 3, 2025 by Nadia Rhook

the brain simmering in
the saucepan of the

skull, hands, plunging,
rescuing thoughts from
uncertainty’s pureed soup

it’s not that the violence is
beyond words but that

words are too full – their meanings mean
uncounted other things as well

‘stop’ means there are
screams that have no ceilings

‘tired’ means there are
screams that have no lungs, if

words were able to carry the world
it would … it would …

no.

have a good day, says the shop assistant
glancing at my fumbling hand

did you want some scissors to cut the tag off?

how can a city love you back other than in
their organs? Ballarat is a lakeside heart, a pulse

of ordered wetlands, I ran into my grandfather in
the supermarket carpark! my yoga teacher is
the mayor!

folding your childhood
home into your adult self is
quicker than it looks, I’m

multitudes, sure, but not in a ‘one plus one plus is
two’ kind of way, but in the way my child has
renamed infinity, ‘confinity’

as though we need to stay alongside
the limitless rather than risk entering

anyway, complete thoughts are overrated,
far too articulate to be true

I had an iron transfusion. months later, here we are
let causes be causes and effects be
fleeting lessons, in

Her Majesty’s theatre anniversary concert, a
poet coincidentally sits next to me. proof that
it only takes one poet to make a place poetic

I refuse to join a chorus singing the name of a
dead and murderous namesake so instead I sing loudly
to the sovereign Queens on stage

is subversion subversion if only you know
it’s subversion? this question

cannot absorb one more note, a single drop of
lyric falling from the leaking
stage might spill my brain into

the audience, we can’t contain my constant
confusion + this theatre can’t keep asserting
hegemony = clash

Posted in 118: PRECARIOUS | Tagged

The Masked Owl Looks Back at Us

Posted on December 3, 2025 by Mike Ladd

Too big to eat.
So loud.
Feather? Flesh? Fur?
All danger.

Hatch from shiny eggs.
Eggs with two night-suns.
Hit hard.
My kin stop dead.

Pellets spread.
Rat taint.
Gut bleed.

Big yellow claws
rip hollows.

They nest on tree-gone ground.
Dark they eat.
Quiet kill.

More them
than mouse plague.

Over hill haze of them.

Hunt new must.
Hide must.

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