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Xiaole Zhan 15/5/24 Xiaole Zhan 15/5/24

Its bowl of red blooms out of sheer love of me – by Xiaole Zhan

I’ve had a recurring scene scorched in my mind since mid-winter 2020. I’m unsure whether the image emerged from a dream or if it grew from someplace in the dark wet of my brain like a tumour. The scene is of two people, each wearing a surgical mask. They have some kind of intimate relationship that cannot be entirely discerned, only there is a power imbalance – this is for sure – and while they attempt to speak to one another through their masks, the figure with less power suffers a nosebleed which slowly seeps through the blue cloth like a Rorschach moth.

Orlando Silver 15/5/24 Orlando Silver 15/5/24

bodytruth – by Orlando Silver

My therapist says, why not try finding ordinary love // less like an avalanche

I want to say, why not try shutting the fuck up // but instead I say, yes, I guess love can be that way but where’s the power in that, the majesty, the learning // where’s the bonfire of wonderment // where’s the story of carnage and release and healing

I know everything about love leads to loss // but it’s the price I paid

Even though // I knew // I would never recover from you

Linden Hyatt 15/5/24 Linden Hyatt 15/5/24

Lux – by Linden Hyatt

The last rays of daylight pulse in cloud as a memory of sun, faintly lighting turrets and flutes of silvered dolerite, turning rock to castles, which, to the seven-year-old gazing skyward seem as if they are falling. She reaches for her father’s hand to steady herself, but, distracted, he doesn’t take it. Nightfall will soon come, with colder air in grounded cloud, and devils and possums will snarl in hunger out there, but now in this clear space, watched by his daughter, with a little old camera from his boyhood, he tries to capture an elusive light.

Jade Doyle 15/5/24 Jade Doyle 15/5/24

Gristle and bone – by Jade Doyle

Here is how Jack’s story begins: once upon a time there suffered a family of four. They lived in an old weatherboard house with floorboards that creaked and a tin roof that sounded like gunfire in the pressing heat. The ever-stretching landscape was doused in red dirt and brown grass, the earth cracked and veined. And perhaps you’ve heard all of this before, a child’s life turned to darkness before the age of 15, but here it is again in the shape of a father with a failing cattle business, a large man who finds ghosts and fists in the bottom of brown bottles; the shape of a mother turned quiet and rake-like by a bellowing voice; the shape of a baby sister, cause of death undetermined.

Sarah Langfield 18/4/24 Sarah Langfield 18/4/24

Kevin – by Sarah Langfield

Eulogies are exceptionally difficult to write.

They aren’t like narratives, with fanciful characters that only exist in Times New Roman (sometimes Calibri, never Courier). Stories are easier. So, when tasked with writing a eulogy, I wrote a story instead.

This one.

It isn’t very good.

David Thomas Henry Wright 18/4/24 David Thomas Henry Wright 18/4/24

Laptop death – by David Thomas Henry Wright

I carry the silver block tenderly, like a sick infant. I carry it onto the bus, onto the subway, across town, to the imposing glass temple. It is a characteristic of major cities of the 21st century. If your city has one, your city matters; if it doesn’t, you don’t. I am talking, of course, about the Apple Store.

Upon entering I am greeted with warmth. I inform, ‘Yesterday, my computer crashed. I can restart it, but I can’t log in. It just freezes.’ My host realises I will not be buying anything today. Warmth swiftly turns to disappointment masquerading as concern. He informs, ‘We are at capacity. Would you like to book a time for another day?’ I plead, pray, beg that I be seen today. It is a matter of utmost importance. ‘No, it is not possible,’ my host replies. The Apple Store, it seems, has no emergency room.

Jenny Sinclair 18/4/24 Jenny Sinclair 18/4/24

Start where you are – by Jenny Sinclair

Start where you are, Uncle Vance says. Said.

The which I never, you know, got before, even though I’d heard it seven thousand, nine hundred and fifty-two times.

Start where you are, he said, when I had to change schools that time because of nothing I did wrong. It was Luke and his fighting, but Mum couldn’t do two schools in opposite directions, could she? So I started – all over again.

Suyanti Winoto-Lewin 18/4/24 Suyanti Winoto-Lewin 18/4/24

The goose of granite islands – by Suyanti Winoto-Lewin

Forty million years ago a great rift was opening across the remains of the supercontinent Gondwana. Australia and Antarctica had snuggled together for more than a billion years, but now they slowly cleaved apart. Ocean rushed in to sizzle over the hot, fresh scars, but the break was not clean. One band of granite, old and insistent, stretched between the parting continents. As Australia drifted north, the granite arm held fast to a corner of Antarctica, pulling a piece free and dragging it behind.

Sophie Overett 9/4/24 Sophie Overett 9/4/24

Light hazard – by Sophie Overett

When he asks Miss Pris what it’s like, she tells him it’s strange. Like someone’s pulled the back of her head off and is messing about with her wiring, trying to fix a computer that was never broken in the first place. An itch turned a discomfort turned a sharp, relentless pain. A cable grabbed, yanked, and finally pulled loose – its casing peeled off to leave the tender thing inside exposed. ‘Gnarly,’ Matt replies, because it is. He dumps a bundle of weeds – nutgrass and lamb’s tongue – into one of the tubs Kevin had put out, and Miss Pris laughs. It makes the crow’s feet by her eyes stark, like corvid talons kneading in the softer flesh of her.

Svetlana Sterlin 9/4/24 Svetlana Sterlin 9/4/24

If Movement Were a Language: Triptych – by Svetlana Sterlin

no one would be as fluent as us / swimmers. gliding through what we know as air

density augmented. our shoulders feel / brunt of gym tiles Dad and i flipped /

onto faded patchwork carpet. i still remember / miniature brick pattern of black

and grey. now hidden beneath those tiles / does our presence haunt them, woven

Niki Bañados 2/4/24 Niki Bañados 2/4/24

The perfect human – by Niki Bañados

It took me nine months to assemble the perfect human.

He is plopped screaming, slimy, squirming on my chest.

He is streaked with red. He is loud.

He causes destruction immediately upon arrival.

Perfect.

Megan Clement 1/4/24 Megan Clement 1/4/24

In Quarantine – by Megan Clement

WINNER , ISLAND NONFICTION PRIZE 2021

… The neon green BP sign across the road means the opposite of what it used to. It means I am stuck in this liminal space, with a guard at my door 24/7, squirrelled away to protect the health of Australians everywhere. This would be fine except for the fact that I’m here for 14 days and my father is dying and I don’t know if he has 14 days left …

Megan Coupland 31/3/24 Megan Coupland 31/3/24

This Moon – by Megan Coupland

It’s the tail end of 1873, November, and a clergyman is rugged up against a sluggish dusk. Along a Newfoundland coastline, Reverend Moses Harvey makes his way towards a fishing boat on the shore; he’s approaching the knot of fishermen who summoned him. The men, just in from the sea, are clustered around the carcass they’ve surfaced, a creature dredged inadvertently from the depths of Logy Bay, tangled in their herring nets. Harvey’s not there on church business. Instead, he’s made a name for himself locally as a collector of curiosities and the fishermen have offered him their haul: a giant squid, dead on arrival …

Jo Ward 20/3/24 Jo Ward 20/3/24

Posture – by Jo Ward

I mean I’m clearly not disabled,

I tell my doctor, smiling. It’s true

I haven’t washed my own hair

in nearly a year, but I am well.

Anna Jacobson 20/3/24 Anna Jacobson 20/3/24

23 vignettes on the rental crisis – by Anna Jacobson

1. When I move in, the manager stands in my room. He says it’s important for me to be quiet. His gaze fixes on the wall, trying to appease whoever is on the other side.

2. Someone told me that people go missing here – that my street is the Bermuda Triangle of Brisbane. Today was the first day my lips started tasting like metal. I think it’s stress.