The Suburban Review • #40: UNTRUE

EDITORIAL

Editorial #40 UNTRUE

Sarah Pearce

Get ready for barefaced lies, subterfuge, untrustworthy memories, and alternate realities desired and undesired.

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POETRY

Peeled

Barrina South

front teeth pierce ice / lick sugar off wrists / a piece of sun detaches / voices flicker through the half light / unpinned hair / head on her fist

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I keep introducing myself to people I’ve already met. I’m not good with faces / or names or small talk. I would feel bad but I don’t bc people mistake me / for any other wheelchair user in the street. Once my therapist said oh / I saw you at the rally & I…

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So What If I Don’t Exist?

Brooke Scobie

Only dingoes now / The trees don’t weep here / it never got so hot their children kept dying / The rivers don’t dry up and wither to nothing / And I don’t exist / But so what?

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in dog years. A real story

SR Ekstein

A prettier beast: I am vanishing behind the hinge on a crystal blueglass lid. Anything can be smeared with silver. Assisted discovery; the mouth of an alien spaceship.

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FICTION

False Positive

Anwita D Pillai

He was born, I remember, during a thunder-pause (the moment when the sky sucks its breath back). His mother named him after the prophet who never died, only rose in a rust-red chariot. At four, he climbed inside the neighbour’s discarded piano and pressed the flats until they lulled him…

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After Hours

Sofi Woolwich

You squint as the device interface lights up, tap an icon, type some vague notion into the search engine, choose the first result: a hypnotist with a German accent drawling on about how you’re walking through a forest, and then you’re floating in a lagoon, taking meaningful, measured breaths, over…

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Catching Impossible Things

Erin Ritchie

It was then that she looked at me, her face fresh and unburdened by the last two decades—illuminated by the light, the soft coins of the poplars falling around us—and asked if I had ever caught a falling leaf. I told her I hadn’t ever tried and she seemed surprised,…

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NON-FICTION

I Am Not Lu Xun’s Descendant

Chunxiao Qu

I do not write in service of nation, family, or progress. I do not believe in lineage, revolution, or the moral hygiene of literature. What I believe in is fracture. The crack between a sentence and its translation. The glitch between a story and its structure. The betrayal between a…

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ART & COMICS

Image depicts land on fire during a controlled burn. A cat sits on the left side in the foreground, half of its face visible. Its eye is glowing orange, flames visible in the reflection. Behind it, the fire blazes, with flames being pulled into the background. The frantic silhouettes of mice and birds are seen in the flames, while various other animals such as field mice, lizards, and birds lay helpless in the heat. The land has an orange glow to it, so it is almost the same colour as the flames in the background, as if it has already been burned. There are a couple of tufts of buffel grass drawn in red, as though hot from being burned. The sky is a dark brown, with grey smoke billowing out from the burned land and sparks spattering from the fire. In the sky, a wedgetail eagle flies above carrying a burning stick.

Cover Art – Stick Mob

Stick Mob Studio

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Image is a blue-toned sketched image of Spencer Hill Atnellkertyarliweke, Alice Springs. The image is separated into two sections on the page horizontally: the top half of the image depicting above ground and the lower half depicting underground. A text panel in the top left of the page reads, ‘In Central Australia, every hill holds a story’. A text panel in the middle of the page reads, ‘This is Spencer Hill Atnellkertyarliweke’. A tree stands in the foreground of the top half of the picture, with sprawling Australian bushland behind it. On the left-hand side is a post with markings on it. Two figures walk across the land with a long red serpent’s tail weaving between them and through the grass. The tail is a solid red. A white dog stands at an opening in the ground that leads to the serpent in the foreground of the bottom half of the image. The serpent’s body is red and textured with scales, wrapping around the left-hand side of the picture, with its head on the right. It appears to be slithering through the underworld as it engulfs a somewhat indistinct scene of people gathered around someone holding a stick that is on fire. The earth around the serpent has markings in white, including images of skulls and bones and wavy lines. Markings above the people gathered together resemble the markings on the post in the top image. There is a feeling of the land holding memory.

Comic by Stick Mob

Stick Mob Studio

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