It is now a hundred years since TS Eliot’s poem ‘The Wasteland’, appeared in The Dial. Numerous global  commemorations have taken place, both academic and popular, many of which have been uncritically hagiographic or, otherwise, laudatory.

To flip through the thick, matte pages of Theory of Colours is to wander around an abandoned theme park at dusk. Dimly, you can make out certain structures in the falling light: a hotel, a museum, a swimming pool, and various attractions harnessing the vertiginous interplay of height and depth, including mountains, valleys, towers and gaping chasms.

We were in a car, and the movement may have been particularly fast, or it might not have been, but those motifs remain, as in most memories, separate from finer feelings or the consequence of detail. As is only natural for that kind of brilliant day, we thought of that thing called ‘the beach’ and we were moving with the inevitability of numbers getting crunched.

Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow is a book that has remained an enigma since it was first published in a heavily censored form in 1947. Not only was it censored, but its publication was delayed due to wartime paper shortages, and one of the early uncensored manuscripts was lost between Adelaide and Melbourne.

We meet in the domestic terminal. A departure lounge cliché. You with your schooner of James Squire in the airport bar and me with a stale glass of sparkling, the last dregs of the bottle smelling a bit like feet. We sit at different tables. You take a photo of your beer, framed by the window, the wingtip of the aeroplane beyond. I scribble in my journal wingtip.

my daughter steals the papers every morning like she stole english. she chopped the language up and put it in her pocket. she’s a smart girl like that. knows how to survive like that. up in the trees, eating lagartas, she reads the papers aloud and slow, piecing together all the chopped-up sounds and vomiting them back out through her teeth.

On a sweltering summer day, a young man signs in at the front office and is guided through the building by a pleasant woman with purple hair. Brick peeks out of peeling paint like a snake shedding its skin and endlessly wide windows sit deep in the walls, hedges of flowering murrayas obscuring the view. […]

Quite informally, as if trying on new clothes in front of a friend, you tell me you love me. I was not expecting to hear these words on the phone, especially after you’ve driven for days across the flat expanse of our country. Western Australia to Queensland is some girth to cover in fifty-six hours.

If you saw me munging on a hypertrophied human arm in the wee hours behind a sand dune, no you didn’t. The itch is hereditary. If you like this, you might also like the headache from eating ice cream too fast. What of the muted sun inherited? The hour dispenses its smallest trifles to its biggest minutes. The troubles accumulate. Bin night eve. Thursday. Late night shopping. The night is but a kitten. Meow. See also: meow. A collision in kahoots.

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.

This issue goes to print shortly after the fiftieth anniversary of the victory of the Whitlam government, a moment in Australian history that increasingly resembles a fragment from another political reality. But then, there’s an extent to which progress always does; there’s a moment to which radical positive change first manifests itself, to paraphrase Jameson, like a utopian spark cast by a passing comet.