EDITORIAL
Editorial #39 CLIMATE
Issue #39 takes us up to the skies, down into the soil, through blood and water streams, and along tidelines. We watch the poetic stagnation of parliamentary inaction, hear the resonance of forebears and take in the revolution of birth. Through fire danger, dwindling water supplies and the swift creep of heat, the weather of CLIMATE reveals its tangled systems.
POETRY
seeing, standing
short health / short wealth / short grief / long time / short time / long weep / short friend / slow leap
Willing Everything
Say, the wallabies—flaxen dawn ephemera—and the fire danger always sitting in the low-end red. Acacia silent & yolky, lighting up gold in the margins. / Kelpie soft-jawed and slack in sleep. First bike—training wheels and the rest—rusting red dust / brief-like / tin ripple water tanks and this heat. The kind…
take a picture
Bones of peculiar creatures / that once roamed the earth / lie deep deep underground / Listen to their cautionary tales / if giants can fall, so could humankind
Elegy for the Southern Beaches
To be added…lose an ocean—she’s / still there: the water, the salt / the slime, the rocks / washed / latte scum / in a rockpool fish / or bits of bio-compostable / red-dyed takeaway cup gull / ravaged and left to rot
Beginnings and Endings
Shut my eyes in hope I might see them, / red gold, pray my imagination might / summon them, collude with my / daughter to plant new seeds, grow new / forests, water them with our tears. / Dream a new beginning, one for our / descendants. A cedar renaissance….
Cline of the Anthropocene
No coffee. No beans. No buzz. / Only lukewarm comfort / in bamboo tumblers. / These chickens still march / hollow-chested, led by a duck in disguise.
FICTION
Recommendations for Integrating Protoplasmic Networks
I distracted myself during the procedure by finding details in the nurse’s office to focus on. Fading diagrams of a human body in the supine position illuminated the complex system of roads hidden underneath our skin. Vials of other patients’ blood sat upright in a yellow container, awaiting collection. A…
NON-FICTION
Illusions of Solidity
A four-year-old girl is kissed good night by her mother. When she wakes up in the dark that same night, her mother is gone. There is a neighbour’s house on the corner where she and her siblings are taken. There is the yeasty smell of pizza and cool sweetness of…
Humidity Index: Tracking Queer Desire in a Tropical City
September starts, and the air pretends to cool. The trees still drip. The electricity still sulks mid-evening. But the breeze feels flirtier, the clouds softer. On the roof, clotheslines sway like drunk limbs. I meet a boy named Ritwik at a friend’s house. He says his favourite smell is camphor…