i’d like to count two million freckles as a mindfulness exercise fat yellow moon slung low across the water jordan peterson says not beautiful rosewater spreads across the sunset sky brit mum still hopeful after four miscarriages, one in toilet morning sun glints fierce and wide from the ripples

The day I took my students to hear Question Time A Minister, Peter Dutton, said inhibited for inhabited but of course he's not in relation to Operation Overarch and seventeen of the two hundred islands between Australia and PNG that might harbour agents of the COVID disease

brick poems solid poems prick poems concrete poems keep out poems rest in peace cat of edward street mossy paperbark poems bluegum carpark poems sold gold fish with pond plants poems squished poems and tied-up poems ropes and boats poems

It begins for the same reasons: spark, air and ready material, grassless under conifer. You study a wax diorama of the soon-to-be Antarctic jungle, ornithischian dinosaurs—eating a plastic fern—named after Qantas; you’re exhuming the bones of an Airbus A330 beside the Pteranodons,

At night, the outline of the lake changes, the street hunches around the park as fruit bats click past like frenzied metronomes—most nights, I’m in Montmartre; the gully of your navel grazing above me, shadows collapsing, paint unpeeling.

call in sick, 6:06 ... a long cold walk in the dark body tense like the animal spirits the hand’s invisible twerk wrenching at all of it power lines and lit-up cranes liven the dock i feel old as filth.

You feel the ancient cobblestones under your work boots, steel toe for kicking evil away. In the dripping, humid passage, you see a flicker of red and white. A mushroom speaks, Thank you, Mario, but our princess is in another castle.

After Bruce Dawe Outside of work he enjoyed swimming and the stoic philosophers. He’d offered to help with my cover letter—Friday morning’s flurry of pre-Christmas discharges having found us feet-up in the registrar room—and I’d ribbed him for this detail from his.

I was assistant to his assistant and we were rented out to temps. Under the palms of perpetual summer: volleyballers and the topless towers of another pop-up city.

the courtyard rat squatting on an empire of pizza boxes rainsoaked piles of stewing cardboard flattened packaging from long covid's eager merchandise anything to transcend an unimagined plague rat traps line the walls like doctors' obsolete portmanteaux from a much earlier decade

History or myth—picture tulip bulbs, unburied like onions. An onion is the likeness Hepburn—in Gardens of the world—proffers in the purr & lilt of vowel, halt of consonant; annunciation that lifts ready from memory

To avoid treading on a snake, I stepped on a land mine. Did this really happen, in my dream? No. Is it a fiction, then? Yes and no. The time I spend looking for socks is insignificant: lie, irony, or philosophy? Wombats shit candy. Joke – hallucination? This is in fact a truth claim. My poems: litanies of truth claims.

This summer I can feel myself turning back into an animal. I wake up early and seek out trees, walking through the expansive quiet of the park until the heat starts feeling sharp on my skin. I leave the blinds closed, so when I return home the building is dark and familiar, and as I shut the door behind me I feel a satisfaction I can only describe as territorial.

Words collected from ‘It’s so hip to be black’ by Andrew Bolt, Herald Sun, 15 April 2009. Meet now Wiradjuri Country. Auburn and charmingly freckled Country. Fair open air and Swallow Country. Take-me-as-I-am naked Country.

They argued over the correct way to drain the sink. A chocolate cake buckled under the strain of their indifference to one another. To put it another way, my coffee came a little late—the kitchen was open and large slices of carrot toppled off the chopping board stopping-up doors that had yet to inherit knobs.