

EDITORIAL
#29 Editorial
Earlier this year I received the news that an old friend of mine had passed away. He’d gone at New Years—unable to bear, I guess, the symbolic turn into yet another year, yet another cycle. I spent two months not feeling this, keeping it tight under my skin; not realising how the grief was itching at me.
POETRY
Evening Anecdote
I tried / to settle into space without being in the way. With my back to history / the poetry came in through my right ear. When I smiled I smiled / to the right.
Filaments and Firmaments
Oh my God! Did we pass / through a space-time rift or cross an Einstein- / Rosen bridge? How long have we been stuck / here? Am I even the same person who arrived?
A Day at Thomas Hardy’s House
Dead leaves are liquid; wring them / drown Wessex in brackish milk. / The cottage is still like a mosquito in amber / sheltering dinosaur blood. Yes he was / born here, Dorset let him never get / over it.
Heels
My feet hurt then / in a new way / but I felt it sharply from the ground up / in everything that dropped down / from the trees onto the dead.
FICTION
Body Parts
Once I read in a girl’s magazine that all women should familiarise themselves with their vulvas, for situations exactly like this. I never did. If anyone else did, no one talked about it.
Velvet
They sit together in school. They ride their bikes towards the hills and watch them smoulder. The Stepfather cooks boiled eggs for breakfast and Velvet sticks them in her pocket to feed to the birds.
Road Movie Sequel
How can water be so clear. She reaches down to feel it and the cold is so shocking it is almost sexual. Drinking water after chewing gum so it aches
ART & COMICS
This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the Arts, its arts funding and advisory body.


