Poems
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Unhooking the Lip
By Sean Westfor Courtney Sina Meredith
She cups my name in her hands
like an undersized fish, unhooks -
Magnifications
By Anne ShenfieldBefore she connected the headphones
to the tree she said
I’ve been told that ice cracking
sounds like a child screaming -
Barrier Reef
By JV Birch(formerly Great)
The map is neatly new. The paper, parchment. An artist’s impression. Picture book perfect. Not to be used as a navigational aid. I travel the length of Queensland in seconds. Swathes of thick green meet powder blue. A ribbon of colour ghosts its edge with bursts of pink and yellow, orange and purple. Coral before the climate effec… -
answer
By Eunice Andradaduring the crescendo of the blaze
the sky is a memory of water
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what school never taught me
By Shona Hawkeshow long it takes to heal a barren riverbank
how to keep the faith that the water birds will return
how to train your eyes to see a flash of platypus
hoarding is a crime, not a conquest -
The Story of the Flood
By Anastasia RadievskaSitting in the wet garden you smashed the land like a cup
– your legs were moving
over a patch of firmament – chant-drying
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Left brain in a bind
By Margaret Owen Ruckert‘A four-year-old in Australia has witnessed on media over 10 deaths by drowning.’
Statistics don’t lie around like sunbathers
but in a healthy respect for the call of water -
Pellucid dreaming
By Anne CaseyI
To be as complete as the greater part of your self
composed -
Rainclouds are capricious
By Magdalena BallThis is the last love song, I swear
watching your slow demise
on someone else’s television.
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Above The Twilight Zone
By Sara MorgilloThe surface rises
slowly
Creeps up shoreline, as we beckon it closer behind our backs
Spreads oil floats bags and bottles -
Submerged
By Jane GibianSlips of fish like smears of transparence:
the lagoon shallow and humming
where paperbark branches scrape -
Birrarung Billabong
By Tony BirchSitting with your open coffin thinking and not thinking I want to be with the world and you. I knock against the grain of wood and want to know if you remember the day we took the bikes to the river and rode along the bank against a current willing us home to safety. At the billabong we circled sacred water, threw away our shoes and socks and spla… -
From Initiation to Ideation
By Luke DaviesBonfire as initiation. Nothing, not even
meaning, was ever not metaphor. Try
as I might I could not experience the slow
degranulation of sandstone into sand -
Satellite view downwards
By Raynen Bajette O'Keefebread under ocean
scarfs under ocean
prams under ocean
spatula under ocean -
Memoir of water
By Esther OttawayFrom toddlerhood: a memory of careful bending
and plashing my baby hand in the Huon’s edge.
My childhood learning held in a saltwater brain;
my solitary mother walking her babies by the river. -
PYROCENE TRIPTYCH
By Luke DaviesI: MAHOUT, YELLING
Waking up to still the wind was basic
narcissism and yet the same might be said -
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Calling it by another name - Easter Sunday, 8am
By Jenny PollakHow cool the sea looks
all those blue miles to itself
the sun on the estuary. -
Coastal
By Brooke ScobieSalt crusted.
Ever lingering
Remnants of my ancestors.
I allowed them to settle and fall away,
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