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.

Posted in 118: PRECARIOUS | Tagged

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…

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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

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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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Ripe Wheat Ruined with Rust

Posted on December 3, 2025 by Coral Carter

december 12

I am a liar
I lie every time
how are you? arrives
I lean towards the question
shape my face into a smile
expose my teeth in two white rows
from behind my mask
I lie

since I won a prize
in the bad luck lottery
I am hip deep
in ripe wheat ruined with rust
my breast is a blighted potato
my breast has blossom rot
my breast is home to a codling moth

my blood has betrayed me
my bones are not my own
my flesh is not what I want it to be
my body is trying to kill me

on the day to go under
I prune green leaves
from the variegated aspidistra
step on a wounded bee
I see a dancing shoe at a stop sign
a glitter star in the gutter
one black feather

january 6

the shamans wear celestial blue
gather around me
bones and shells in hand
as I close down for maintenance
I listen to them
speak an arcane language
only bad cells understand
ten six point one seven
they plot a course
to the tumour’s hiding place

march 9

other shamans
wear regrowth green
logos and names
stitched above their hearts
lay me out with gloved fingers
a woman from nowhere appears
she draws a blue circle on my chest
says we are curing cancer here
leaves the shamans to their work
to whisper ritual prayer
ten six point one seven

they make an image
of my breast
I am inked
a trinity of tattoos
in the name of the blood
and the bone
and the holy flesh

first they photograph
my breasts from above
then for identity
my face
I am not smiling

april 10

10.58 am

first visit of sixteen
cancer centre car park
ground into cement
three cigarette butts

I begin
self-service medicine
1. Touch the screen
2. Scan the barcode
3. Proceed to Banksia waiting room
4. Try not to think of dieback

11.15am

we all wait together
all wearing the same gowns
some sit arms folded
hold themselves to themselves
some watch the daily soap
or read about the prince’s love life
others seek sanctuary
in their phone’s dumb light

we are provided with an aquarium
a sign instructs us
to get to know the fish

11.35 am

the shamans begin
take each arm
shake prod align me
beneath a laser cruciform
they call and respond
ten six point one seven

today’s piped music
‘love me tender’
tomorrow I hope for
‘jail break’

I am left alone
in a room adorned only
with ceiling stars
I am prepared
to receive healing fire

something moves
above then over and around me
it could have been a machine
but I heard it speak
click hum sigh
it could have been a machine
but I saw it glide
a stingray in open water
its bottom-feeding mouth full of steel teeth
it could have been a machine
as shamans put the invisible to work

11.41am

helpers appear
as if nothing has happened here
they hand me a modesty towel
seems my breasts are suddenly bare

the door is opened
IONISATION
no longer
IN PROGRESS
I imagine I hear as I leave
next please!

may 2

final visit
zap zap zap
then the shamans said
that was that
the work of ten thousand
suns was done

at the exit
a parking machine’s
digital font
wishes me
a nice trip

one in three
one two three
not you
not you
but me.

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Petrology for the Family on the New Floodplain

Posted on December 3, 2025 by Oz Hardwick
Boots full of water, we’re bobbing for rocks as the world swims around us. Twigs, branches, whole trees surge by, spun by forces too huge to contemplate, but still we plunge our hands into the icy current, in search of perfect stones. My mother, father, and sister are all here, strong as mountains, shining with a faith that, although I can’t share it, bolsters my resolve through pure example. Garden furniture, cars, and even small buildings sweep past, bearing people and animals, all singing songs of the sea and faraway shores. They wave, and we wave back, before dipping once more, then again and again, into the muddy ooze, in search of those elusive nuggets and boulders. They don’t have to be valuable, for these things have no meaning anymore. And they don’t have to be beautiful, for that is in the eye of the beholder, and all eyes are on a world turned to water and a sky holding nothing but storm. They only need to anchor us to this precarious spot, close enough to each other to touch our wrinkled fingertips: close enough to say goodbye.
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Discipline

Posted on December 3, 2025 by Vuong Pham

A few students in the back rows snicker,
pull at their eyes in mockery. Rats in the trenches
of desks. My eyes narrowed like a sniper squinting

and cleanly taking the shots upon their little bones,
scattering their formation through the study hall.
The ringleader tapped his pen like morse code

for the others to assemble. I dismantle the rattle
by lobbing a flashbang to shatter
their puny games. Troublemakers ask for a break.

“Sure,” I say, and release the trapdoor of sharpened
bamboo stakes. Their hostile eyes once gleamed
like a gun under a merciless sun, but now faint

as a distant shore in the shattered sea, as if to say
there will be no mutiny. Outside, autumn she-oaks
were bare as refugees, with nothing but the hulls

of leaves, ruined. Clouds row past the window
like sailing boats in an ocean-blue sky, bruised enough
for discipline, shallow enough for drowning.

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SOUNDTRACK

Posted on December 3, 2025 by Angela Gardner

Through pastel headphones
here’s my feed verified — life’s redeemable chit. I just want
something more human than persuasion-architecture.
The scanner slides over barcodes, crushes and spits
out choices and decisions that self-authenticate. I arrive
where content has so little to do with contentment
— welcome to life on the server farm.

There must be a map
or hidden river to fracture the systems that separates domains.
Others tell me contentment is a kind of surrender
and to steady myself against influencer sway.
I am searching for a reality that may not exist — fireflies
and cloud reflections. But really, why give up on the future
when the almost-urban non-spaces of another windswept plaza
already null and void us.

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Medical Espionage

Posted on December 3, 2025 by Angela Costi

I would have surrendered my blood
to quench three tubes
twenty years ago
but the results
cost two thousand dollars

a genetic test with surveillance
warrants investment

I ran out of that clinic
taking my blood with me

The same test is now free
for them to infiltrate
my blood, to spy on its motives
to circulate as if normal

The genetics panel
calls me in to relay the results,
I sit before Doctor J’s darting
eyes and Professor A
who remains standing
in a room conducive to grave
discussion with a tissue box
on standby

Three nerve-racking genes
militarise my sinews and sheaths
LZTR1 NF2 SMARCB1
Doctor J reveres their mysterious ways
while Professor A calls them strategic
and insubordinate

Your internal topography is akin
to that of monitored warfare

The Professor attempts a smile
meant to convey reassurance
while waiting for my acquiescence
for the deserters’ camp to settle
within my leg’s ravine

You’re fortunate, we know
where the landmines are laid

At night, in a neighbourhood of tendons
alleged to be at peace
LZTR1 scours for calcified twigs
NF2 sparks flame after flame
SMARCB1 gathers oxygen for flares
to burn
till dawn

I pretend to sleep
as nerves in foot, ankle and knee
are galvanised to revolt

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Proprioception

Posted on December 3, 2025 by S J Finn

I’ve imagined the body
confused.
Outside your apartment building,
feet on backwards, hands that don’t fit arms,
all wobble, no electromagnetic cable available,
antennae gummed and mental acuity
last seen leaping the fence.

There’s a peaceable backwards message.
Like semaphore left lying on the warm Earth.
Busted open, signalling for assistance,
folded in before finishing the letter.

I stood up from a dizzying height.
Looked into photo immersion,
pushed on the Panorama Stitching App.
Set a dial to stop the scramble entering my software.
Solutions found from the mouth of an AI executive,
rolled out options that scrolled into meanings;
set levels: everything from carotene limits
to hormone replacement.

Answers were pitched then from a search engine
spread out into the ecosphere
as if there’d been a leak in a subterranean sump.
Found the effect (all lubricant) in my hippocampus,
felt giddy in a whole new direction
even after they replaced my relocator
inserting it into one of my lobes.
Identification out of line,
sorted until I decided to step forward.
A sensation of wings beating the air
Trying to prevent me walking into a wall
and thinking it was the ground.

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Family

Posted on December 3, 2025 by Raidah Shah Idil

(Found poems)


1. Tectonic plate

the sub-layers of the family’s crust that move, float, and sometimes fracture and whose interaction causes continental drift, earthquakes, volcanoes, mountains, and oceanic trenches.

Remember to always pack cucumbers and cherry tomatoes. Diapers are a must. Food is the only way to stave off the inevitable meltdown. Even then, it may not work. Sometimes, all it takes is a good cry, a cuddle, and kisses. When you hit me, I get upset. Say sorry. Sayang mummy. It’s OK, sayang. I know you’re tired. I’m tired too. Come, lie down next to me. Story?


2. Plate tectonics

the lithosphere of the family is divided into a small number of plates which float on and travel independently over the mantle and much of the family’s seismic activity occurs at the boundaries of these plates

It feels like the longer I live abroad, the less I understand the family I left behind. We are all morphing. Hybrids. We take in the soil and air of where we live. Singapore, Malaysia, Australia, UK. So different. As I move closer and closer towards my roots – my loved ones move elsewhere, and reach far beyond me. There is growth, there is pain, there are misunderstandings. Wi-Fi lags during video calls. What did you say again? What connects us is blood, trauma, and our mother. And love. It is hidden beneath frustration and disappointment. But it’s there. Cup it carefully in your palms. Breathe gently. Be.


3. Continental drift

a slow movement of the family on a deep-seated viscous zone within the earth.

Traveling with small children is akin to pulling out rotten teeth without anesthesia. Painful, but necessary. I am 6 months pregnant and flying solo with my spirited toddler. I want her to have the roots that I did not. I want her to know, love and be with her grandmother, aunties, uncles and cousins. I want her to swim in the cold ocean water of the Northern beaches. I want her to run barefoot on different grass. I crave the kefta roll with extra garlic from Lakemba, the hot gozleme from Auburn, the lamb noodle soup from the city. Memories imprint in our cells.

I want my children to remember.

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Cassandra Dear

Posted on December 3, 2025 by Suphil Lee Park

The ashes belong to me.
Not what goes up in flames, but the soot.
The abacus of myrtle counting
down to droopage, ruin
in rain that bulbs all surface
tension with light–it’d be long
before any of that fits.
Salt of driftwood.
Not a mere pant.
Nor bodied.
Here comes the chant:
let your pain be
your prophet telling truths
no one wanted over
the cackle of children you don’t love
likely for none belongs to you.
How much life fits in one backpack.
The moon’s sooted forehead
I’m left writing into a stray
swarm of bees.
Snow marrow
inherited by blood.
Soothed right, left, then wrong.
Here: one of us, one of us.
What words to my name, what
world, if any.

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troilus & Cressida Cressida

Posted on December 3, 2025 by Harrison Abbott

we drive home from Coranderrk in a white mini-bus.

Clearwing swallowtail in the treadmarks of us.
kangaroo on the asphalt road home.
black-breasted buzzard above, inhaling fumes.
stars hidden by our Cigarettes and smog.

tragedy smells a lot like this.
night deepens into regret.
liquor tastes like answers.
whispers sound like people passed.

i walk back to Coranderrk bare-foot and stark naked.

stars twinkle ‘cause my lighter won’t hold its flame.
buzzard sleeps, her lungs full of my coping.
kangaroo changed position, spray-paint X blankets her.
holey swallowtail wings can’t fly when i find her.

but i carry the butterfly with me.
not home, but here.
where i can recall who i am.
am, and still am, without us.

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Hometown

Posted on December 3, 2025 by Tony Beyer

down lower Queen St
at the quarter century
a whole tribe of
Vladimirs and Estragons

who’ve given up on Godot
confront passersby
instead with their
incurable obduracy

drab garb leavened
by the occasional
windfall fluoro vest
or luminous shoes

shopping trolleys heaped
with sordid bedding
and the disjecta membra
of terminal capitalism

some are here by choice
others by destiny
where decisions not always
theirs have channelled them

in the larger scheme
their purpose is to warn
and steer everybody else
into mortgaged durance

sliding the lid back
off the abyss
one step outside the steady
course might land you in

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