he asks to see each pill I take, a catalogue blue|green and yellow|pink|tangerine each one a promise, a spell: make my mother well we lie on my bed and watch the birds, eyes leaf-green somewhere between autumn and spring

ok, let’s get rid of everything. let’s just have, i just, i just want plumbing, art a steady stream a community and Lucy and i suppose modern medicine…… and a big mac and a decent rosé               i want death to all Apps except clock and notes and voice […]

1911 / governor of istanbul orders stray dogs to be rounded up and exiled to the island of sivriada / hunger and thirst / they eat one another / 80,000 dogs perish / some drown at sea trying to escape / a severe earthquake follows / a punishment from god / the island is now aka hayırsızada / the inauspicious island / 2022 / now the accountant tells me hes reading moby dick / tells me i should try to increase my income this year / tells me it hasnt quite grabbed him yet but his son loves it /

From a field of many hundreds and a remarkable shortlist of nine poems, the judges of the Overland Judith Wright Poetry Prize for New and Emerging Poets 2021—Keri Glastonbury, Grace Yee and Toby Fitch—have selected these three poems as the winners

this is the poem from my dream I say / office hours are a myth / publishing poems is money for nothing / the supermarket is both under and over policed / today the first thing I said was ‘shut up’ (cat) / possible upsides to a pandemic include the death of musicals / possible downsides include the personal essay / publishing poems is printing money but the money is bad /

i pick an apple from the orchard at Seacliff. it is small & too green. imagine it growing                 under my own bent            thumb as i wander the lawns. afoot grass less dewy than in pictures. high summer & it’s yellow-grey like kōwhai    […]

The smell of Jasmine Through white fibro walls Hiding Dad’s double brick Dreaming Pedestal fans wearing dust cardigans Click click click behind Mum’s door Moaning aircons in lounge room windows With frames painted shut

Some of the questions two young soldiers asked me at the King Hussein border crossing checkpoint... Were you born on a Thursday in Cleopatra Hospital? Did you come out silently, as day-break smudged the night sky?

From a record number of entries, the judges of the Overland Judith Wright Poetry Prize for New and Emerging Poets 2020—Bonny Cassidy, Bella Li, Anne-Marie Te Whiu, and Toby Fitch—selected these four poems as the winner.

  it starts                       with smoke it always starts             with smoke mothers burred at the belly                    swollen as the great trees come to                  this place         painted and slow           with a gasping gift […]

Here sits an edifice; a pulpit raised of shears rumbarrels chains ships bullets theft and bloodred death book-lined, velvet-curtained veneered in an unctuous justice samely coating all the lives adjoined.

Black child — born deviant from norms of western culture. Dispossessed like a refugee in a sea of white divisiveness where cognitive capabilities are measured on a colour scale according to my phenotypic reality.

when the black curtain drops in a back room at the airport. solo desk in the corner: union jack + southern cross + lipstick holder. white man drags a beat up fairlane, parks so close our mirrors touch.

The young sit eir fresia in bottom yard where it bloom best. Feline in mangifera where e move best. So much living in pastime, riverbank where kindred set it down best.

Give the brigalows time to impersonate metal. Fold the final reminders like bed sheets. Ignore the echoes. Are you revolted the right way? Mosquito into the tidiest corruptions. Zap. Soak the stains. Ear against the wall, diagnose water hammer.