by Carl Walsh mountains hold names to themselves landscape borrowed transplanted in gardens that twist like lonely water pruned into shape hawk-eyed tombi adjusts air river flows backward caught between forces timbers cut path to near enlightenment feet long to…
by Les Wicks The tide isn’t waiting now, it never has. Sometimes that house down by the dock had hated certainties… children appeared then left for jobs in a city which made nothing except money. For the aged man resident…
by Doné de Beer In the crevice of my boot soles still lies dirt from the Blue Mountains we trekked last winter. I keep finding traces of you, even when I’ve scrubbed the wound raw. I can still taste the…
by Peter Roberts The initial shock is palpable – my feet like cowards wanting to run, yet in a minute, maybe two, they seem to meld with it and wake fully for the first time in a very long time.…
by Isi Unikowski An announcement that buses have replaced trains for the evening rush hour has become a soundtrack for the city’s growing pains. A guy in hi-viz redirects bewildered passengers decanted in the drizzle onto the pavement’s terra incognita:…
by Rodney Williams ‘I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be’ – T.S. Eliot, ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ It’s not my place to invent soliloquy Outside lines in a script, I don’t improvise Beneath stage lights I’m given…
by Rodney Williams 1. I turn to glimpse through glass one passing stream as a tram lurches around the bend across this bridge down at the bottom of High Street from Northcote heading south – if barely seeing the Merri…
by Jan O’Loughlin a long finger of suburbia pokes into an immensity of grey-green bush all the houses are clichés fibro cottages and red brick boxes facing the road and each other squarely my new house is a different cliché…
by Helen Genoni-Farnham He was a very old man by then, stooped, with a cane and ready smile. Said he’d found it on a railway station in Melbourne somewhere. “I’ll give it to you if you like it.” I took…
by Pauline Cleary Shadowy, cloudy day; sprawling trees mesh together in a canopy. I crouch amongst the sprawl of asparagus fern; sticky, invasive, conquering. On my knees, I slither into the undergrowth, seizing handfuls of weeds, ripping them from their…
