Three visual poems from Catherine Vidler's Chaingrass series.

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.

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.

I am a Kennedy says Eileen, blue black eyes gleaming. The homeless are raised up, the lonely head for shelter in a theatre basement with 1000 women and children. We are a security council and I am your President. They will break the mould after me.

When iso’s over I’m buying a coleslaw handfuls of nectarines, vanilla pudding to keep the lockdown woes at bay, I’m kinda worried not rly because I’ve got the spicy cough you know, I’m young – no underlying conditions but my brother has spent the past week in emergency

I wake up, standing to a horizontal glare in eyes I can’t remember shutting on a platform at a station of a line that must be elsewhere Where the night chill pricks like daybreak a helium confusion at being alive and born clothed

We wake by still water to what sounds like a large pearl dropped from a great height, it breaks the surface tension with a resonant nasal tock more than a splash. A lake is an inland expanse of standing water. This one is nine hundred and sixty-three metres above sea level.

Sara and I attend the opening night for the NGV’s QUEER exhibition. We were not invited and we did not buy tickets – in fact we did not even know it was on until stumbling upon it after watching the new Batman movie at the HOYTS in Melbourne Central and deciding to walk home south along the Yarra.

Zelda D’Aprano held onto the chain with the devotion of a worker who sifted through the words of bosses to find that reason to obey, she held the chain with the ease of a woman holding a handbag of unfair payslips, she held the chain with the strength of her father’s will to survive the Nazis and the drive of her mother’s hope to share our burdens.

ABC News Exchange is inviting you to a scheduled Zoom meeting. / Time: Jan 6, 2022 03:00 PM Canberra, Melbourne, Sydney / Interviewer: Why are you boycotting Sydney Festival? / [redacted]

Been watching women in romantic comedies toss tiny handbags over their shoulders, laugh without smudging their gloss. They suck lollipops noiselessly, as if silence is true seduction.

You’re asleep in the next room. I watch Genet’s Un Chant d’amour. A prisoner is in love with the murderer in the next cell. He kisses the concrete between them. The guard is jealous.

the ratings icons have vanished no one cares yes maybe no mostly no --- how’s it going bin night bin night bang bang bring out the dead --- & the mouse plague – how’s that going in the barren paddocks wheat &endless glare