After careful consideration, judges Karen Wyld and Eugenia Flynn have selected first place and two runners-up to form the final results of this year’s Nakata Brophy Prize!

Days pinch and lately I’ve noticed every time I look in the mirror I’m squinting—maybe it’s a grimace. Without trying I’ve mastered the façade of a Besser block threatened by a mallet, by which I mean maybe the world won’t kill me but it’ll definitely hurt and I’ve got to be ready.

Futurity begins now with leftovers sunglasses trying too hard along with cheapskates a kind of pink plastic essence * Destiny stinks! * What if we went crazy in the carpark a scuffle on the grease The green bag is torn beside it, a line of ants working hidden in the glare * What now! The […]

she existed in masks: lorikeets loudest in the mornings, leaves deliberating on a breezy day, blinds fluttering against the sill, the hum of conversation on the footpath by her window, Fleetwood Mac, her fingers on the keyboard (tippity-tap), her anxious dog’s paws pattering on the floorboards, her husband’s snoring at 3am, the off-and-on whir of […]

You have to do it badly. If it is poetry, even more so, because there is no because. If you write like you were the best in the world, you are the worst because you pretend too hard. Too harsh, too. Why do you want to be the best? Is that because you are a lack or there is a lack in you that you feel like filling up all the time? Even when you are named the best, does that mean anything?

Mparntwe | Alice Springs claypans Each time you walk take a bag for the rubbish, for the weeds. Stride out then confuse the dog as you stop over and over, like you are picking at treasure. You dig with the heel of your boot at the sea of three-corner-jack prickles and remind yourself next time to bring gloves.

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.