Poems
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Dragon Fruit
By Xiaole ZhanWe didn’t see the dragon fruit lights
arriving late as we did, thinking of
Popo and Gong Gong’s graves
which we would visit the next day. If only -
Richmond
By Nam LeSurely now, that sense of crow’s nest sway will ease
now we are brought down
first me, then my brother — my mum now —
and our memories -
Born to Fight
By Kaitlen WellingtonBlak curly hair
Brown skin
Brown eyes
Broad shoulders -
There are Rivers Underneath the Sea
By Dženana VucicEverything begins like this: with a shipwreck;
one body rent against another,
salt and silt,
waves lapping at the crest of another world. -
Vroom Vroom Plays In The Background
By Madison GodfreyBehind the wheel, I press the ball of my bare foot against the worn ridges of the accelerator. The road opens into a series of soft curves without speed signs. Each bend feels as though it was drawn by someone practicing the letter s in cursive.
I grin at paddocks of cows, imagine the taste of grass. Picture cartoon cowboys with frayed yellow wheat… -
Bees of the Antipodes
By Shaine MelroseI water my vegetables, fill bird bath, collect myself from doubt,
human, flood, drought. I watch two bees working the same pollen-
less flower, fly east, then west, north-south, their sacks empty.
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Circular Breathing
By Gabrielle Journey JonesBreathe in truth.
Simultaneously
Breathe out loss.
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This is Wrong Way by Lore
By Kerry Bulloojeeno Archibald MoranShe white fella wanted to take me
To jaagi maam sacred site's on wajaarr country
A place of muluurr blood, galaagarrbili sweat and budii tears
This invitation I did not mangga-bayila plan -
Takayna; Milaythina Ningi
By Theresa SaintyTAKAYNA; MILAYTHINA NINGI
(Takayna; Mother Country)
Nara Takayna; ngini paywuta
Wurangkili mulapana-nara nuritinga tunapri -
Elegy at 18
By Aloma DavisIf you take an object from a scale, it is lighter.
How, then, can an absence be so heavy?
Your loss is stony ballast dragging me under.
From now on I will shoulder a calendar of days -
Bread: A Fifteener
By Natalie Damjanovich-NapoleonAfter Dumina Frzop’s story
In the homeland we had to struggle for a piece of bread.
Slept in one room on the floor, cooked in a komin, -
For Grandad
By Phoebe GrainerOld cowboy hat.
We were laughing
Us mob
You telling us story. -
Developments
By Ella JefferyThat summer everything smacked
of tax write-off—men came to unslump
the sunstruck fence, rolled tarp-grey
carpet down the hall, but left -
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But It’s Not Just When Your Period Stops
By Heather Taylor-Johnson(These words – clipped, rearranged and formed anew – are the testimonies of ten women.
Only tenses and pronouns have been changed.)
There is this profound physical and emotional thing that happens -
Betrothal
By Audrey MolloyI could start at the end, where I wave
my legs in the air and say,
you can fuck me now, if you want to, -
Transplantations
By Audrey MolloyCamellia japonica
Like a shrub,
you can kill a woman -
At Bottle and Glass Point
By Audrey MolloyWhere the water is brackish,
not one thing nor another—the émigré’s curse—
neither salt nor fresh, but varnish
clear, these low-tide pools, embossed -
Float (A Love Poem)
By Scott-Patrick MitchellDid you know coral keep an archive
inside their skeletons, something
to do with boron isotopes, calcium carbonate,
a crystal coat of aragonite, sewn together. -
