Roundtable Readings 2.0 Suburbia


 

Roundtable Readings presents a collection of writings on:



‘Suburbia’


Curated by Lili Ward









The Jig Is Up

Jebediah Costin


After all, who am i to decide which impulse is pure or impure,

clean    clean     or unclean? When the jig is up, after all,

it isn't always a matter of cleanliness. Sometimes it's only war.


After all, the blossoms are turning rancid. How am I expected

to find love in a place like this?            Guitars, moons

gone rancid, ignored for too long, and the jig is up. The suburbs

are burning,             a pool of dirty blood, it isn't war anymore,

he couldn't convince a bird to leave a tree.



After all is said and done, who'll be left to pack it all down? The

poets’re dead, they will be      surely     and punk rock’s

 dead,    we used to stack fucks like you five-feet high in Korea, 

                        and it's a war, whether you like it or not, confused,

auto -predators    plugging death back into death, meltdowns.

Like angels.      What did we do about Rwanda? What did

we do about France?  God hates the terrible,    &    after all, when

the noise dies down,    what was it all about?


After all, the sun sings slightly, it aches, and pain’s not unlike 

hunger,    but hunger dies on a different island,    sparse, cold, 

balaclavas, guns, clean, pure, its over  

















Puppies 

Maggie Church Kopp



All puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies yuppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies 

                                  On Whose Place?

puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies yuppies yuppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies yuppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies vpuppies puppies 

Grids 

And grids and grids and grids and grids and grids of burning weeds.











‘Better to be strange?’

Nancy Curtis


The dress don’t sit right.

Why put up a fight

For something so slight?

Nothing to do,

With you.

I cannot tie pony tails

And I guess I do not look like you

Talk like

Move like

Dance like you

You make me spew

You make me spew

You make me spew!

Are you my crew?

I like my wave

The one I paved

Does it eat away

At your fence and sunny days?

When you say

My wave

My ways–

Destruct your empty homes

Empty spaces that repeat your neighbours

Tie your laces.

Tie your laces.

Win the races.

She’s vivacious!

I hope to hear


One day

Someday

Monday.

Afraid.





LYNCH ST

Viva Wilton


One of my dad’s long-time friends was an Artist who wrote a play called “Desire Lines”. 

I remember moving out of our house in Seddon to a two-room bungalow beside the community

housing blocks in Footscray. The Artist lived about three houses down, and the house next door

on the other side held two young girls about the same age as my brother and me.

The house one further down from The Artist belonged to a family with two older kids, the girl was

really into running and we’d practise up and down the street all the way to the edge of the park

and back towards the truck road. “From your hip to your lip”, she would say, referring to how your

arms should move when you’re zooming. The two young girls next door, Claire and Rachel, had

a mother that was very shy and never really spoke, and I don’t remember the father. I was 8

years old and my brother 5, him and I would sneak through the hole in the fence that separated

our two houses to play doctor and patient. There was one time Claire was the doctor and I was

the patient; I was so sick, she said, feeding me crackers off a yellow plastic plate. Their house

smelled weird, the kind that you notice when you walk in, but you never really get used to. We

would rollerblade round the block and play soccer with dad at “The Green” which was a patch of

grass, like a communal garden block in the centre of all the government houses, they’d back onto

the soccer pitch. There was a woman who had a little white dog called Noodles, my youngest

brother could barely walk but would crawl down to outside her fence and wait for them to come

out. She talked about how dogs can bite the faces off kids. I remember her being the nicest

woman I’d ever met, but mum said about a decade later that she was actually very strange, just

not the kind of strange that kids ever notice.

Marly and I were making a secret hideout at The Green one afternoon and it started to get dark –

we’d been making six course meals served on the big leaves that grew over us. We decided to

take the shortcut through Dog Lady’s back garden, and she caught us and invited us to come

through her house – an even better detour. Her house was carpeted in every room and the walls

were hidden by glass cabinets, filled to the very front with porcelain figurines. Horses with little

boys straddled, children with baskets of wheat, two people getting married. Both the carpet and

the couches were cream coloured, so you could spot the stains more clearly. She led us through

to the front door after a while, shuffling on one foot at a time across the padded hallway. We ran

home the last couple house-fronts and never told mum.

The Artist’s house perpetually smelled like cigarettes and had old CDs and records lying around

amongst wooden carvings from Papua New Guinea or someplace. He lived with a man called

Hardy, which I thought was super cool as they must have been best friends or something. Dad


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would always refer to him as The Artist’s partner, but I never knew that was a way of saying they

were together. Hardy had HIV. He had a long face and looked sort of like Steven Fry, although

that’s my memory of him, I could be completely off. There’s not much to say about his disease

really because that’s all I ever knew about it. None of us have heard from him for a long time.

The Artist loved Yahtzee and the game where you throw a fistful of tiny little pigs onto a table and

the amount of points you get depends on how the pigs land.

Their bed was very high off the ground, I remember that, and the dog would piss in their bed

sometimes. Their back garden had a table and two chairs for smoking and drinking wine, and a

bucket in the corner of the courtyard that was swimming with mosquito larvae. I remember

thinking I’d discovered a new species.

The Artist and Hardy would host Melbourne Cup days at their house, serving charcuterie boards

and drinks for all the art-scene adults they knew from the area, standing tall and laughing around

the living room and the courtyard. After some time, they would all venture down to the big hill at

Footscray Park, where you could see the horses running from the top. It was a brilliant cheap

skate idea, until the council built a stone wall along the outskirts of the racecourse, to break the

eyeline of Footscray Park onlookers like us. The Artist complained a lot about that wall after it

happened, and the Melbourne Cup Day parties were never the same. 

The Artist was an alcoholic, walked around in his dressing gown sometimes in the mid-afternoon.

He had to stop drinking because the doctors said if he ever drank again he would die. I think he

kept doing it though, I don’t know how long for but one day dad said he was dead. I think I cried,

I’m not sure. I asked what was going to happen to Hardy and dad said he didn’t know; The Artist

and Hardy fought a lot. Years later we were all sitting on camp chairs in the middle of nowhere

and I asked dad about him. He told me what happened – that The Artist had kept on keeping on

drinking and his liver had failed very fast. He was put in the hospital and dad went to go see him.

He spoke about the death rattle. The way he told it that day made me cry.

There was one morning mum came into the room that Marly and I shared - me in the loft bed that

creaked under every movement, and Marly on an air mattress on the floor. She said The Artist

and Hardy had just bought a kitten and that we should go and see it – I remember it was early in

the morning and she told us to be quick about it before it got late enough for The Artist to start

drinking – she didn’t want us around that I imagine. We threw our dressing gowns on that were

both way too small for us, I remember that, and ran down the street barefoot to their tall gate, the

blue pickets. We ran inside to find the smallest baby cat, orange and white striped, stumbling

around on the couch. They called him Eddie, like the whirlpool, The Artist said. Eddie grew up

super fast and I can measure time that way. People are strange and sad and lonely and happy

and stupid. I wonder if the desire lines he wrote about led him down the wrong path. I wonder

about his desire.


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I told him he should stop smoking many times, as an annoying young girl who thinks she’s got

the whole world in front of her and a brilliant set of morals. The Artist got angry at me for saying it

one time when my dad wasn’t there.

We would dance on milk crates in the living room with canvases draped over them – I loved The

Corrs, ABBA, Baby by Justin Bieber and Downtown by Petula Clark. I borrowed a 2009 So Fresh

Nickelodeon Hits CD from the library and would beg my mum to keep re-borrowing it. I collected

bottle tops from the alleyway on our block – it was the best collection to start because there were

so many new ones every morning. I remember wanting to start a collection because I’d heard

that was a thing people could do, I can remember wanting to be interesting. When we moved

house again, my collection conveniently went missing and dad always claimed he didn’t know

where it went. He knows I know he threw it out, I think it was a reminder of sad things and bad

habits and neither of my parents drink – the jars of lids smelt like booze. The house we moved

into belonged to one of the other mums from school that our mum knew: the family was on

holiday so we stayed there for a while. The daughter asked me to make sure her Orbeez didn’t

dry out but I put too much water on them so they split down the middle. I stole one of her DS

game cards from her room and never gave it back. She confronted me about it at school and I

pretended I didn’t know what she was talking about.

The park down the street was always super dodgy but had a really tall swing I would test my

nerves and stomach on, there was a day I decided I didn’t like the feeling anymore. A boy who

went to our school who always yelled and threw things lived in a house that looked out onto the

park. Sometimes he’d come out to us on the playground, but we never much wanted him to play

with us, he would say weird things. His mum and brother came out too one day and said they

had heaps of lollies in the house if we wanted to come in and check it out, they were insistent

that we did. I remember looking at his brother’s face and feeling weird inside, his eyes were like

a shark. We were tempted as most children would be when offered lollies but mum had said not

to go inside anywhere, so we went home for dinner. That boy’s brother died a couple weeks later.

I don’t want to say we had it hard, because we didn’t, at least not in my childhood experience.

We got piano lessons further up the road from a lady called Judith who had a life size sculpture

of Jesus in her hallway and a cat called Sooty who was 18 human years old. She had a drawer

under her coffee table that was dedicated to little squares of cloth to wipe the drool from Sooty’s

mouth. I remember sitting next to Sooty on the couch while I waited for Marly to finish his lesson

and thinking about how much older this animal was than me, and what she would say if we

spoke the same language. Sooty died, of course, and Judith buried her in the back garden. We

would have piano concerts in her house with all her other students and there was never enough

room. Her husband died by suicide at that time and Marly and I were very upset. Judith played a

song on the piano accordion at one of the concerts to commemorate him.


4

Our whole world was on that block, we had the best time without realising the seriousness of

anything, like the black mould that infested that place and made my brother sick, or the washing

machine in the kitchen that exploded all over the floor once a week. We would put towels down

and walk all over them making dinner. There was a spot in the park where the path dipped lower

and would fill up when it rained. The puddle was really wide and deep, and we would swim in it

whenever it formed, despite the dangers of needles and sickness and dog poo. It’s so funny that

those times were the best, and in retrospect I can understand it but can’t help but laugh at our

eagerness to run and slide and get dirty all the time. We’d find drugs sometimes on our

adventures and discussed together whether we should eat it, thinking it was sherbet or popping

candy or whatever. Safe to say we never did, never told mum either. 

I think we were aware of particular dangers, categorised by the things that were never mentioned

to our parents when we were asked about our travels that felt very real, and we knew we could

see a big chunk of the world in our way. I remember wanting to be a boy so I could pee

anywhere, sometimes we would have to cut our ventures short to go home and use the

bathroom.

In thinking about it all, there were a lot of people who were sick and a lot of people that died and I

knew them in real life. It is strange to think about the fact that you met them, spoke with them,

looked in their shark eyes, declined lollies from them, met their cat, played piano in their house. I

don’t remember Claire’s last name, nor does that house look the same anymore. I might not even

be able to spot it if I rode my bike that way to the station.











It Is Not To Be Crushed By An Other

Justine L Walsh

carrying gently all that history cardboard box hollow and a stacking that is unnecessary

unfold and unpack the layered remembered
in order to burn and cleanse

I am in a letting-go
it hurts a bit there are some joints and junctures that do not wish to relinquish
So,

splits and bridges, floodwaters and musty sacrifice
scarified in the mud clay slippage and sundered
healing up that damp song inspiration dripping out pulp on the wet grass

concrete if it comes to that

You remember that big pile of junk? How much dumping until the boot sunk quicksand by the new-old riverbank
and a bridge you didn't cross

A real big pond

and little shards of softly collapsed cardboard box filled with smoke and cornflour paste shit

that dream you left home for underneath the mouldy carpet for a solid decade spilt the bong water babe thats a baccy cone punishment cough ya lungs up and pass out in the post-rape shame

whodunnit I mean this mystery novella is still a young one unknown unremitting unreminding

was it you or me or both of us and
did I hurt you in the same way I hurt me years later when I chose to pair with the parings and take em on to my own dismemberment?
to my own disgust, locked long internal could they be even buried under the floorboards now who lives and dies in that tiny chamber blood oozing out?
mystery mystery I'll tell myself out of fear of being free

at some point it became a wet sock nightmare on the merry-go-round and I was just nailed full of clippings, fragments, grippings, ragged hope
locked up in the base meant numb out the lower half and take it babe

store it there for the next time you forget how to hide and remember how to see and summon the anamnesis of the dying dead shadow hunter kid who saw the kingdom split a sundering a summer recklessly wondering a holiday with the family a touristing uncanny widow

next chapter

I dreamt I was pregnant this time last year
my timelines splitscatter and the tangles pulled through make a fine temporal tapestry entwining
ddddddd does it matter I mean hhhhhhhh hey I feel fatter than ever before I have more matter do I matter more? shame on you sickness on you pain on you which tells me that you can slough it off honey get in the bath please

I guess a day bath is a good thing

I guess a light-filled lounge and a womb room is for silent solitude resting

if only the fire could crackle in the hearth literally,
but I am learning to be patient
follow the winding path
I know how much life has entered into me I can see it in navy blue grey sky ocean eyes

Gently slowly choosing to rewind threads and selective relinquishing through steady breath moving
Rocking
Reading

Walking around the humming vessel and gently climbing inside
into the hollow space
kissing, touching lightly, caressing this room,
It Is Not To Be Crushed By An Other

Love   me




The Limbal Line

Cat Bampton


Floating along in lichen white.

Always - I collide with this dense, spherical wall.

It is dark, in its hues of foliage, but the feel is of tissue.

The encircled, hum with the sound of sight; wet and mechanical and vibrant.

I crouch curious by the limbal line, and tear time passing at the strange bark

from the nail-made tigery stripes sight begins to seep

and as if I had been thirsty, I bend with lips open

the metallic sheen sap drips down my front to the ground and with it the ants begin to make a trail

one of vision pendants, as they step in iris and track droplets through the white with their feet

making an opaline tassology, word inventions, with all the light and dark and the space between

as dusk comes

The iris’s hurried depth overcomes the line and outbursts.

Thick ribbons of rammed grey earth trip the light fantastic. Pale silver curved furrow lines – writhe around.

The iris consumes with crypts of black diamond and with a great maw of loud living twilight.






Three Stunning Townhomes in a Prime Location

Fergus Menner


The sign remained the same throughout his adolescence, so Louis noticed the change immediately.He was drawn to it, just as the eye is drawn to an expletive in a page of text. In black spray paint,violently stood—and it was violent—a defacement of the words.“TOWNHOMES” had been crossed out. Below it, there was a sort of juvenile correction; it read simply, “GIRLS”. Just then, he thought,predictably, about girls. He supposed, after that thought, that the sign had intended to make the reader think about girls. Stunning girls, he supposed. He had always been susceptible to suggestion,especially regarding signage. He had a compulsion to read it. He also had a compulsion for reading girls. Well, not reading them literally; more that he compulsively, almost obsessively looked at them. All the time, he stared, he leered, he ogled. In objection to his own perverse eyeballing he had often found himself staring at this very sign. It was boring enough for his purposes because he used it to prevent himself from lingering too long on the girls. They were everywhere. So often he found himself staring at this sign to keep his eye from wandering; only today it had the opposite effect. Today the sign was redolent of girls—stunning girls at that. He looked away from the sign. Unfortunately, there were girls everywhere. It was Monday morning, and they were all waiting for a bus to go to school. All of those girls. He resolved to open his phone, but there were girls in there too. I want your lunchbox to be completely empty by the time you get home. At school, there were more girls, and at home, there was another girl, the big one—his mother. And don’t forget, you have tennis practice tonight. It seemed that they were inescapable.

At the beginning of the week, he played tennis. His mother drove him; she had an annoying habit of prohibiting music in the car, only audiobooks. Embarrassingly, his parents still used cassette tapes as a result of the antiquated but still-functioning hi-fi system in their nineties Subaru. Louis watched as the tape revolved, gurgling out Alain de Botton. He stood in the dry of the winter afternoon as it faded too quickly into dusk. His limp legs shivered and knocked in the cold, two bone-white protuberances extending from green mesh shorts. Wish I could see u play mate. The game began but was already gone. How and why did they make them like that? He darted left and right to nip the ball; he tried lobbing a shady underarm; and every now and then he’d give her a real left-hook winger. He could hardly look at her long enough to catch a serve. He couldn’t even remember her name. All sprightly and limber, legs like long branches, chest pillowing with short, cute breaths, smoking out into the cold night air. Her ponytail ticked back and forth like a metronome. Each tap of the ball hammered his eyes closed. His play style had once been called crass. This was the opinion of his long-suffering tennis coach. ‘A real tennis vernacular, a stroke of the people.’ He would say, stressing the vowels, as he stood enormously over him. ‘Here comes trouble.’ He was wont to say, as Louis entered the courts. He exited, not unembarrassed, beaten, and ran within an inch of his life, chest heaving, unsatisfied. She drank sexily from her water bottle. He beat his retreat hastily because now burgeoning under the soft armour of his greenish shorts was an unwanted member—his pimpled prince.


Midweek now. The ringing of the school bell. It was only a short walk to the library, where the chess club was held. He could have easily wagged—he’d done so in the summer—but his mother quickly found out and made it a point to pick him up promptly after the club adjourned. ‘Your dishonesty has forced me to give up the last fifteen minutes of my pilates class.’ She reminded him each time he climbed into the sullen Subaru. I’ll be parked in the teacher's car park at exactly 6:30. That afternoon, they drew straws, and he drew her. The game began blandly, as chess games do, until she really got to him. Just as the first trade was being made, She happened to brush Louis’s finger as they swapped pieces. Demurely, she took his pawn, her—with the great grey eyes. And Louis was gone again, just as he made eye contact. The prickling of his neck and the blushing of his face made a confession of his gauche desires. She smiled, looked up at the ceiling, and tapped the clock. Tick, tick, went the clock. He was hard again, this time through the grey wool of his school shorts. Nominally more robust than the tennis shorts, unmeshed though they were, they were no match for his teenaged inflammation. He gratefully bumped against the cool wood of the chess table, love concealed, if only for now. As the game drew on, however, he found himself increasingly distracted, his problem only becoming more prominent. As she took piece after piece from him, creeping her white army towards his, he found himself giddy. Suddenly, the game seemed elsewhere, and his moves grew increasingly flippant. It was only shame, deep and rending, that accompanied his defeat. She enclosed his king, and on and on he throbbed beneath the board. The triumphant climax was his own; at first red-cheeked and rash. Then came that sallow epiphany that he always seemed to glean, the information that he didn’t want, thrust upon him regardless. If you want your clothes to be washed, they need to be put in the hamper before Friday. She stood up to shake his hand. He coughed, returning the gesture, but did not rise.

The end of the week was dinner, duly undulated in the pot before being transferred to the table by his unflagging mother. Then a movie, once out, now at home, times were tough, so intoned his father. The weekends he could keep to himself, he was told. It rarely turned out to be true. His father had a habit of waking him up in a flurry of domestic activity. The vacuum cleaner, sneaking under his door if he dared stay in bed after nine, poked its head through the crack. Some sort of dust vampire, sucking at the carpet, waking him. That or the lawnmower, gorging itself on the grass outside his window. He hated how these household appliances seemed to take on some kind of life in the hands of his father. The way that the vacuum seemed to stare longingly under the door frame as if to complain it was overworked. The way the lawnmower seemed to howl at its engorgement, the way the lawnmower had a grass-eating disorder. He could see how the plastic belly would eventually grow turgid and would need to be eviscerated and emptied. He often forgot that his father even operated these machines. He felt he knew and saw the vacuum and the lawnmower more frequently than his father. They were like strange, electrified effigies that served to represent him. It was his mother that he saw too much. Dinner frequently overwhelmed him. It was a complex game of dodging. He fielded concerned looks from his mother, as she glanced from him to her phone, to increasingly apologetic texts from his father, which only engendered further questioning from his mother. As he ate, he responded monosyllabically to her questions. Like inquiring satellites, the questions swung low into his atmosphere, probing at the deep reaches of his mind. ‘You seemed distracted at tennis practice. You haven’t been playing as well recently. What is it? Is something wrong?’ She asked. His father interjected, with an electric buzz: Running late at work b home soon. Sorry dad x. His father’s phone was a sight more interesting than his mother’s. Julia WORK, Lauren, Maddy XOX. His father’s phone was prone to interruptions, text messages from these contacts. I want to see you tonight. Louis first suspected his father’s dalliances in year eight, when the family iCloud was linked to his phone. I need to make u cum. He’d never seen a woman’s nipples before.


The scrape of the fork against the plate could only conceal the swelling silence for so long. He tried, as much as he could, to transfer the food into his mouth as fast as possible, to return the cutlery to the crockery, and to break the silence. It proved too little too late, however, and his mother sought to interject in the next available gap while he chewed glumly. ‘I’m worried about you, Louis. Jake from tennis says that you’ve been going backwards a bit. He says you seem distracted. And now I’m hearing the same from Mr. Lardon; he says you can hardly make it through a class without going to the bathroom. Why are you going to the bathroom all the time, Louis? If there’s something wrong with you, you need to tell me. Have you been eating anything different? Have you been buying junk instead of your lunch? I’ve told you again and again that I’m not going to waste food on you.’ He weathered the questioning, fielded the volley, and answered just enough to be satisfactory. Traffics fucked love. ‘Can I be excused?’ B there in 15 promise. He was excused with a wave and a sigh. In the bathroom, on the way to his bedroom, he unzipped his pants and began to pee. After the last few drops had fallen away, he held his dick tightly, feeling it react to his touch. Like a fleshy ermine, caught by the hunter—it quivered in his grip. He moved his hand up and down, considering himself for a moment, but grew distracted. He moved to open the door and pressed it, but found it would not give. His mother stood behind, her ear pressed against the particle board. ‘If you’re sick Louis, you need to tell me.’ I'll pick up ice creams from the servo on my way. Later, as he lay awake in bed, scrolling through his phone, he heard the sound of his father coming in downstairs. He crashed into the quiet of the house, like the quiet was a secret and he was yet to find it out. He heard them fighting often. The crinkle of individually wrapped ice creams in his hands. Talk tomorrow mate. Louis’ phone buzzed. He swiped the text away, returning to his website. His parents began shouting at each other downstairs. He paddled endlessly through a storm of videos and photos. He felt the stir in his pyjama pants. He could hear his mother crying. He reached downward with one hand, while the other browsed the videos. He was looking for the best one.




































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These Wide Streets

 Lia Mills


We had a bunny. Actually 2. I don’t like… or I don’t think to the past too much. We had two white bunnies one after the other. One was called Snowflake, the other Snowball. I can't remember which one was first.

They both hated my sisters and I. They had white fur and red eyes and squirmed furiously when we tried to pick them up. I was scared they were going to get bitten by mosquitos and die — I heard on the news that it can happen to bunnies. Their red eyes would glaze over, pink and smooth like a stone. I would pick it up, soft and heavy, and wonder why it didn’t squirm.

But that’s not how the bunnies died. They hated us. They ran away. Any chance they had. Ran away come back and away and back to their pellets and celery and carrots we were nice to them. Maybe too nice. We would trap them into corners groping with our small sticky hands until they darted away the first chance they got.

Jumping on the trampoline in the front garden, the parents inside talking before dinner. The neighbour across the road approaches. “Your bunny’s dead on our driveway.” Our dad went over with a shovel and buried it in our front yard. Or maybe he put Snowball in the bin. Or Snowflake, I can’t remember.

My cousin had a theory based on my family’s pet history: if you name a white bunny with red eyes “Snow—” it will be evil. If you name a dog by something that suggests a sparkle, it will be rabid.

In South Africa we needed a big dog to protect our nice white house and our nice white things. Star would bound on my sisters and I when we arrived home, knocking us on to our backs with his big brown paws. Tears would ensue, then a scold and a confused dog. He had just learned the effects of loving too hard.

I'm not sure what happened to Star — maybe he went to live with our nanny, maybe to the pound. He was replaced with a tiny, fluffy pomeranian. Much more child appropriate, however my parents failed to consider the sparkly name curse.

Twinkle was a non-stop yapper, running psychotic laps around the garden, an abominable amount of energy, verging on satanic, a caramel brown blur behind the trees. Where I felt affection for Star I felt nothing for Twinkle, that satanic lump of fluff.

Now, in Australia, we named our dog Bella. Despite being irritating and smelling of rotten fish, she is sweet natured and slowly going blind. She trots around our street without a care in the world, like my sisters and I do on this big safe island, with wide roads and health care and parents that love us.

Our neighbours always return her in a panic — is this your dog?? This is your dog, yes? (they know her from her constant barking at nothingness, disturbing the inner west suburban tranquillity) Oh dear, she got out again. My mum shakes her head with a slight grin of feigned guilt; I’m being told off by the neighbour.

She shrugs, what could go wrong, dogs don’t get run over in Yarraville. We try to keep Bella in, she escapes, I’m running down the pavement in my pyjama pants and socks. She looks at me with a similar feigned guilt as my mum, head down, tail wagging loosely.

What could possibly go wrong on these wide streets. With constant runners and renovations, wide green belts and Teslas, a free Palestine sticker.

My dads BMW was stolen from our front driveway, driven away on these wide streets. The police found it in Sunshine the next day, with a huge UE Boom in the boot that we got to keep. The police took away the machete and the sticky gunk that covered the surface.

My dads car got replaced by his work; another Beemer, this time electric and white, with red eyes. He puts it on charge every night with a brace on the steering wheel. What could possibly go wrong in these wide streets?

John comes into my work at the bakery. Maybe he’s homeless or maybe he just seems that way. I work with a John. The two Johns have a conversation: 

How much you got today John my man?

$5 

Oh alright then mate. A coffee?

Yeh. and can I have a cookie?

A cookie! Oh you pushing it today johnny boy. Yeh alright then.

John gives John his discounted latte and choc chip cookie but not without a show. He speaks loudly in front of his captive audience of business people and gym goers, making sure everyone is aware of what a good deed he's doing. He feels like a real good samaritan.

So now I live in this world where homeless people get free cookies, beemers get returned by police, I walk home from the station at night along these wide, quiet streets.

Cross-bow incident in Seddon

Lia Mills

At the bakery we’re bored out of our brains and end up saying things like: “Today was such a non-quiche day” and “wow the fruit loaf really just shoots through the bread slicer doesn't it!”.

When the bar is that low everything becomes exciting. Until something really exciting did happen. A man fired a crossbow in the chemist around the corner, narrowly grazing the underside of the pharmacist's upper-arm, just below the armpit. 

The shooter fled the scene and ran around the corner, past the bakery and into a house on the main strip. According to the manager of the organic grocer next door, the pharmacist was shot while buying a vape at the smoke shop, he should've known better, being a pharmacist and all. 

The police took control of the situation quickly with their stern looks and steady hand gestures, redirecting the traffic as they put up police tape. It wasn't long until the SWAT team showed up, any excuse, graciously protecting us with their machine guns, solid bodies dressed in black.

Peaceful Seddon was in disarray. The residents hovered watching for hours with a morbid curiosity that we all like to deny until it's our own neighbour hiding out with a crossbow. “So what's happening over there?” Asks just about every customer since the beginning of the siege. “Oh a crossbow? Strange. I heard it was a stabbing, or a hostage situation. Yeh wow. Yeah, just an oat flat white thanks.” 

Another customer claimed she didn't care and was just glad it wasn't getting in the way of her takeaway coffee. “I know, I'm terrible!”. One of our regulars, a tall woman with a husky voice and aviators, was telling everyone around her the details in a hushed way, knowing the value of her information. When a 7 news reporter asked her to speak on camera, she waved him away: “Na mate I couldn't do that you know, people know me round here.”

By the time I left work, the crowd was just as big, but had organised themselves into a neat membrane bordering the police tape. I saw later on the news that the man was coaxed out by police and arrested so he could no longer disturb the residents. It was only revealed at the end of the report that the weapon in question was nothing more than a “modified slingshot”. 













like socks

daniel ward


at the coin laundry a man on grindr asks if he can do my

chores

i consider if

i would give him this precious wonderment of


                                                                                                   daze


the laundry costs

                                              20 dollars:

6 dollars to wash colours

               6 dollars to wash whites

                                 5 dollars to dry everything

                                                  2 dollars to get a can of vanilla coke

                                                                   1 dollar to misplace somehow like socks


the heaviest price of course the allegiance

of my coke can toward palestinian genocide

hence

forgotten details of the can ensure

                                                                            guilt arrives

                                                                                                        then is let go


perhaps the chore i would like the man on grindr to do is

formulate a convincing argument

to persuade the business of earth governments

to prioritise life and it’s abundance over say

20 dollars




i let go of my 20 dollars today and finish a week with $3.47

there is a great peace here that relies on a redirected violence (fire)

in opposition to

the dizzying shared delusion of exponential progress

a laundromat sits stubborn like me

like the whole suburb stubborn suburb stubborn

timid in it’s apparition

holding desperate onto its days

which like my manhood or 20 dollars can be let go

america let go

israel let go

germany let go

australia let go

australia let go

of australia let go

































On Barkindji Country

daniel ward


distant horizon trees

standing as cities

for years

actual tumbleweeds

stopped by

invisible fences

knees hot for the dish

shrubs mating with

the wind and

each other

the dotted hill

regenerates


























3 girls

daniel ward


the phonebooth in just years

from:                     ubiquitous

to:                           desperate

all the drama

happens

                                      there

                                      in the

cool anonymous

but today for us

it is shelter from

unseasonable rain

sub

urban satellite

dish with moon communications

and a country says               the

                      same thing again

headstrong to torturing ourselves

in trade for brief pleasure




















3 signs

daniel ward


my burning heart

near mercy hub

then

the fitness centre

3 signs:

       ---------------------------

                   lost key

                 found on

                 the floor

            please come in

                   to collect

         ---------------------------


                                              ---------------------------

                                                        Smile

                                                           on

                                                         entry

                                               ---------------------------


---------------------------

---------------------------
















I Am Five.

Jasmine Harris


Waiting at the bus stop i’d routinely sat at from the age fourteen and up. An outline of

someone from my last years of school. Scratching obscene words into the lower half of tables,

now has a badly shaded block letter graffiti tattoo on the back of his left calf and nike shoxs

whiter than the kids of the cohort we shared. I wonder about what the word stencilled to him

means. He doesn’t remember who I am.

The bus takes me to my family doctor I've visited since I was five. In commute I pass

headstones of places I had already long buried. The house of my first boyfriend followed by

the park where he was no longer my boyfriend but had craved something that his right hand

supposedly couldn’t give him; but I, in the public cubicles behind the children’s playground

reluctantly could.

On the way to the doctors, I’ve visited since I was five, the one that prescribed me birth

control to regulate my untimely periods. I am fifteen and training more days a week than I am

at school. this ministers that I do not love him; he relents and has sex with different girls

when I am not there.

I am fifteen and I cry on the phone, and I love him until I develop a headache and fall asleep,

reperform tomorrow.

I love him and he has me by the nape of my neck, my great grandmother's pearl linked

necklace like an aggravated jack russell's collar. He has me looped to a pole, tied a little too

tightly and when the chain finally cleaves and is left in two, he stops corrading my barking.

He’ll get it fixed he says. I am five and he leaves a kiss in place of where I feared a bruise

might have been instead. I am fifteen and on birth control and he loves me.

I am twenty-one and walking through the doctor’s office again. It reads the same grey and I

sit waiting to be called in. It's a quick visit and a waste of time. The doctor who’s seen me

since I was five, having perpetual dancing injuries, contraception methods and asthma

medication now scribbles in a refill for my Lexapro prescription. I travel an hour and a half for

the piece of paper he couldn’t administer over the phone. It had been too long since i’d last

been in and so he asks how I am going, do I still need these meds and that there’s five repeats

left.

Does the transmogrify of the patient he’s seen since a child translate to him at all? He would

have a hundred visitors come through and somehow I think I would remember them all and

each of their problems. I pay forty dollars for my piece of paper that now correctly balances

my brain chemistry and leave.


I am twenty-one and I don’t drive so it takes me almost three hours by tram, train and finally

bus to reach my parent’s. It smells of salt and fresh mud and my dog licks my hand on arrival.

My mum cries every time I walk the driveway to the house, leaving or arriving. She holds me

and asks when we’ll see each other next. I reply I'm not sure and promise to call. Call her.

Call her back.

I am twenty-one and I come home to my flat behind the laundromat that charges me eleven

dollars to wash and dry my clothes. The air feels manufactured, warmer and a lot staler. Full of

concrete and smoke and obnoxious tradie music from the construction site next door.


I am twenty-one and my hair is black, but it was blonde when I was five.



































Sublime point 

Audrey Pfister


You want to go down, down, the escarpment

Sublime point

Dharawal, Wodi Wodi land, Thirroul

To the valley of the leeches


Or, the valley of a swampland,

sea-green, an indeterminate boundary,

the pressure of your boot on the ground giving way to a mote of water

You see the diamond python up the hill, but down in the marsh

you see a half eaten box of chips

You see your old friend, who you used to eat chips with, now unrecognisable and dazed on lithium


The escarpment face, is curved sharp, hip-bone thinspo, the earth juts out and curves downwards

The valley of the leeches, like a mountain caved in, half-pipe down to meet the ocean

The place where D.H. Lawrence wrote ‘Kangaroo’ (never read)

and a famous artist died in a motel

And a Japanese man floated out on a surfboard 6kms into the ocean one night just to watch the moon, only to be plucked up by a container ship, intact

A place that tried to rebrand as the valley of the cabbage tree palms


The Valley of the Leeches, Thirroul, used to be a cheap, desolate suburb, further away from working hubs and town centre – the Steel city

now the valley is exclusive

in between these suburbs (steel & valley) stood the inbetween, the bodgies, where your dad grew up, a place infamous for a small segment of road,

a cartoon shaped bridge

so curved it makes your stomach jump

your first love also lived here too, in commission flats atop a hill, and a room that he never left but chain smoked and watched the birds from


It’s a place of steel – the gong – former working class town, port city, a place where your great-grandfather unionised as a wharfie

and your other granddad bludged on the boss’s dime and made pipe bombs in the steelworks

only to blow a hole in the side of his leg

And still continued to go on get a promotion

while the women of the 80s were denied the right to work here

organising a class action taken to the High Court


Coastal city of coal and steel, and stolen coast

Marked by the machinery of colonial extraction


Connection of metal and the human labouring body

this week the community will picket Bisalloy a steel fabricator down the road

a supplier of steel to trade with the fascist, genocidal IOF

valley of the leeches


Not far from here is a small point, a jut in the coast

Hill 60

Both a lookout point

and a sewerage treatment plant

One day you take friend/teacher Uncle Vic Chapman here to see a sea wall artwork by Coomaditchie artists, and to film a video for our friend Tess

Uncle Vic stops to talk to another old guy on the sea wall fishing

asking whether he’d caught anything yet

The two men laugh together and say it’s not about the catch

it's about the day.

we see the steelworks pipes over the horizon

thick smoke billowing

Combustions of man-made cloud


Three types of seaweed fall out from your hair when you shower

You’re half embraced by the escarpment

you pluck – unplug – a leech from your ankle

And watch the blood ooze

i keep dreaming of embers falling from the sky

feeling biblical (biting an apple)



















Untitled

Alanna Baxter


I’m so  

a frame breaking exercise  

born again! 

Shoes in plastic bags and hair in the kitchen sink. 

ham and honey sandwiches  

make me do this make me do that  

the feeling of sticky love inside  

precious people  

what it is I value of what I own 

I’ve been reading and being read. 

We’ve been telling ourselves stories in order to live.





House Paint 

Eric Della Bosca


For the last few weeks I’ve been painting the house I grew up in. I needed money and I’m lucky enough that my dad could give me some to paint his house. 


I should have started painting it in the summer, or autumn at least. When the weather was suit for it. I procrastinated too long and still kept the money dad gave me without following through.


I finally started though, in the winter, trying to live up to my side of the deal. He still acts so grateful that I’m doing it, my dad who paid me money for this job. 


Whenever I come over to work on the house we always start with a cup of tea. The staple ritual in our family. We never stock tea bags because the whole point is the process of it all. Brewing in the teapot, sharing from the same vessel. 


The first sip of tea is always the best. It’s like that first drag of a cigarette after you’ve been drinking. Hitting some abstract spot in my body that releases the feeling of satisfaction. It’s a sort of momentary relief. I’m always chasing that feeling.


The conversations we have over tea deepen when we start painting the house together. He’s painting the house with me by the way. Paid me to do it then helps me get it done.


From our conversations, I’m coming to understand the deep wounds my dad carries. How the traumas of his life have taken effect. The wound his mother left when she passed, and the wound of mum. 


We always go back to politics though after we weather that place in our conversation. It’s always good to be pragmatic after sharing emotions. And thank god because I need that too.


The front and side of the house have now been finished. It’s really given a vibrant burst to the old Californian bungalow. 


Houses often carry history of the people who live inside them. I saw the wounds my dad carries reflected in the peeling paint of the house. And I saw our conversations acting like a fresh coat, for both of us.


We always end the day with another cup of tea after painting together. A marker of finished work. The final sip of tea always hits pretty hard too. I take it like a quick shot as I get up to leave. Dad walks me out and we say our goodbyes with a deep sense of gratitude for each other. I always feel like crying when I drive away.







































Sydenham

Liana Prosia


Self -sacrificing mothers and money loving wog fathers. Silence at the dinner table, low ceilings. Loneliness. Slow, deep, crumbling. TV. Jumping out a window. 15. Slow suicide alcoholism. Commercial endorsements. A long stare in the eyes. Wet benches. Delirium on the bus. Same route every day. Sidewalks. Overgrown weeds. Covid 19. Neighbourhood surveillance. Cops in your living room. Psychosis. Holding on so tightly to the past, it’s all memory. Rewrite but surrender. An empty plot in Footscray looks the same as an empty plot in Pascoe Vale South. Waking up at 5 am to clock on at McDonalds. Guilt. Church every Tuesday and Sunday. Keilor Downs. Swaying back and forth when standing for the hymns because you’re not eating properly. A huge sculpture of Jesus on the cross hangs from the ceiling by thick chains. Every time you sit on a pew beneath it, you imagine the chains snapping from the weight of it all and crushing you to death. It's praying that doesn’t happen. Praying every day. Every walk to school. Every night before bed. Before each meal. You believe in God so wholeheartedly it makes you equally joyous as miserable. Religious wars at school. Catholics hate Catholics. Race wars, quietly. Keilor downs mc mansions. Getting vaccinated and regretting it. Body Aches from a  labour job. Paranoia about everyone. Children afraid by the sound of helicopters above head and motorbikes revving street level. Hearing voices in your bedroom. Being followed by dark energies. Creaking wardrobe. Espresso after dinner. Getting finger banged in the local park. Shopping centre as a hub. Watergardens. Debt. Gorgeous boyfriends. Friends who make you belly laugh. Louie V bag and matching Adidas trackies. Primary school best friend who will love you forever. Taking a vow of silence. Footscray as a freedom suburb. Deliberation. “The devil bites dirty, we wax and wane”. Talking to angels between sobs before a dream and them talking back. Undiagnosed schizophrenic. Not wanting to be home. Curious about parties. Sober arms in a hug. Soccer hierarchies. Wog men ruining things. Teased, prodded, fucked raw. Tailor ciggies to look sexy. That one friend with a pool in Williamstown. Class wars. Never going to Toorak until you’re 20 and being like what the fuck, who’s your therapist? Crying over money. Crying over not being a man. Crying on the swing set down the road. Cursing femininity again and again. Hoarders with OCD. Old women in bright red lipstick and deep rosy blush. Getting rubber necked. Car crashes. Scabbed knees and elbows. Sunshine hospital emergency department. Closing your eyes on a familiar car ride home and imagining which turn you are at. Overachieving so your parents show love to you. Hyper vigilant aunties. Hip Hop machine. Fake eyelashes. Open heart surgery. Practical marriages. Pictures of the motherland in the kitchen. Knick knacks. Stealing. Getting pity fucked. Braiding hair. Drying your wet face with the back of the hand towel, not the popular part. Smoking bongs and listening to Solange. Nocturnal synchronicities. Yearning. 50-dollar psychic readings from a man down the road, who spends the half an hour hitting on you between describing you’re cursed fortune. You won’t find love until your 40 and you have a dark energy inside of you, so you must come back for three more sessions so I can exorcise it out of you baby.

SUBURBIA

Viv Baker


I grew up on the Gold Coast, Yugambeh country; a city but only technically. In reality,

it is more like a forced open fern head, or a string of fairy lights, or one big infinite

unspooling beach. Instead of a dense hot centre from which energy and people spill

out and form suburbs and enclaves, it is a long stretch of coastline beginning around

Coomera and ending in Coolangatta, at the Queensland/New South Wales border.

Coomera is named after the Coomera River, which is named after the Yugambeh

word for local wattle. The name Coolangatta comes from the Jerrinja word

Cullunghutti, meaning ‘splendid place’ or ‘splendid view’. You may know Coolangatta

from the 1953 Gwen Ryan jingle It’s Hot In Brisbane But It’s Coolangatta, or from a

humid family holiday taken circa 2008 involving an ear infection from the pool water

at Dreamworld.

The centre is relative I guess. I left the suburbs for the city because the city felt like

the centre of the fringe. And the suburbs felt like a bad place to be just about

anything. Country folk come to the city and maybe they put down roots but the

system fights back against the concrete, and they’re always flinching a little when

they find themselves in a crowded train carriage. I have friends who might as well

have slipped right out onto Bourke Street Mall, who spent their teens dancing

between derelict car parks and the undersides of bridges. These people are always

bored, always hungry for a bigger centre, or to escape entirely.

I came to the city from the suburbs only to find myself back in the suburbs because

the centre charges entry at a price point most cannot afford. I don’t mind because it

still feels different, which is all I really wanted to begin with. I go to the market, I go to

the gym, I jump inside dumpsters, I stand on the picket line because what else is

there to do and as it turns out the suburbs are mostly a place where violence goes to

hide. The suburbs are a post-industrial idea, like teenagers or weekends. It’s a

storage facility for factories and the people who keep them running. Infrastructure is

a membrane we are passing through, always, all the time.

Tucked behind the highway between the mattress factory and the ute repair shop we

are standing in the cold and maybe a truck full of weapons parts, parts for drones

and fighter jets, will come barrelling towards the driveway and maybe the man

behind the wheel will see us and make a u-turn. Inside the factory, surface treatment

equipment makes each part weather-proof, aerodynamic, agile. Ready to be

assembled like an IKEA bar stool, shipped across the sea, and released from the

bosom of the sky and onto buildings, tents, men, women, children. People who could

be eating breakfast, sleeping, praying, remembering the morning light from their

kitchen when a kitchen is a thing they still had.

Last week, across the city to the West, a factory caught fire entirely. The explosion is

here now. Toxic smoke engulfs neighbouring suburbs. Who is breathing the poisoned

air? Or maybe the more important question:


Who isn’t?

Here is what I know about dying:

Even when it is sudden, it is slow. The days reveal secret accordion folds, and

everything swells as if the entire world has become the cabin of a plane.

The women cook and the men go drinking. The children watch more television than

they are usually allowed to. If you’re small, it’s all a big sleepover. If you’re grown up,

it’s hell except tepid. You never ask for that Tupperware back. It feels inappropriate.

Nothing is appropriate. You bicker about which picture to use on the funeral invites.

Nothing is appropriate.

Much like birth, marriage, owning a car, raising a child, selling a car, committing a

crime, witnessing a crime, using water, using electricity, using gas, or taking

prescription dexamphetamines through an international airport, death is paperwork.

There is death as in dying, and then there is death as in business.

Death is catering, cups of tea, sleepwalking through a desolate mall in search of

black trousers.

Infrastructure is a membrane, which is to say that death passes through it, and then

we experience it. Loss is as impressionable as every other thing. It is shaped by the

same systems and buildings and roads and grasses and cups and bowls. What

happens to death when the membrane crumbles? Or when the membrane is

systematically obliterated?

Death without infrastructure. Without a barrier to cushion the all-consuming elbow

deep pain of it. This is what I think about as I watch Israel’s relentless assault on

Palestine. Everything I know about dying is being run at 10x speed. It is so fast and

so violent that to remember what I’ve seen (which is an incomparably tiny fraction of

it) fills my throat with bile. I feel soldiers in my body like they’re pins. There is an

army in my gut and they’re dropping missiles filled with rotating blades.

Everything is a blade, including you and me. Nothing soft left. Nothing slow. No

funeral invitations, no sandwiches, no full kettles whistling over the sound of metal

and screaming.

When there are more crumpled bodies than buildings. What then? You cannot take

the train. You cannot put the kettle on. You cannot cry in the cereal aisle. The barren-

ness is vast and breathtaking.

I wonder how long it takes for urban sprawl to bake itself into the ancestral memory

of the animals in our cities. Have the magpies, rosellas, fairy wrens learnt to see the

city as a grid from above? Or are they reading off an ancient map not meant for us?



A DRAWING OF A HOUSE

Pearl Salmon-Watson


I remember we were asked to draw what our house looked like. There was recession pop

playing on the radio, censored so incessantly that it became like an intake of breath; like a

machine begging to live.

The speaker was a creature, with its thin mesh skin gorged over a hard-set speaker mouth, its

faux leather hide quivering viciously at the thrumb of some chuegy david Guetta swish and spit,

picked over and chewed, slick with drum tracks pulled from instruments made of that real

leather, from the cows in mountain towns licking placenta from their babies eyes.

I drew a long line to separate the page, the pen leaving livers of ink increments in a small stripe

across the table. There was the ground, and there was the sky.

I knew what the house looked like, I knew what a house looked like. A bubbling temptation

threw its cold body at the walls of my head; A drawing of the house or a drawing of a house or, a

drawing of a drawing of a house.

And what was worse; I knew more than the crude drawing could justify. I knew my house’s

skeleton, I knew when it was sleeping; when plumes of old smells would wake in the walls and

floorboards would settle like they ached to be touched.

I would watch the caves created by new paint sinking into poorly hidden holes, it’s pores pouting

and puckered, capacious pockets of pus. And I would wonder, if only to upset myself, did the

house think our landlord was its father?

I watched the boy next to me fasten the hinge of his compact ruler and draw the wooden

detailing of a weatherboard, careful to leave space at the bottom to draw six five petaled flowers

and a headstone for Daisy, a regarded cat or a disregarded grandmother.

He looked over at me and saw me looking, to which he retracted the ruler and hid it back in his

bag. He would become bald at 27, but his partner would tell him that it sharpened his features.

I suddenly wanted to break his ruler so badly that I imagined my teeth latched onto the grates in

the between the measurements of 4.10 centimeters and 10.20 centimeters, my bite reaching the

little laminated name tag with the corners peeling up.

I looked back at my page, at the simulacrum of paper white sky and paper white ground, at the

thumb smudge of ink in the far right corner and at simply nothing else, for there was nothing

else, not even a contrived four panel window. Maybe I was being too lateral - maybe what the question meant, what our house looked like, was a trick.


My teacher bit skin from her bottom lip and ate it as she printed out enigmatic questionnaires.

The music had slowed to something soulful and royalty free, and the censoring had stopped

altogether. I swore I could hear the speaker breathing.

When I looked back at my line, at the empty page craving cruel corners and cross hatched

crucifixes, crime free streets, cracked roads catching cold fronts in wind tunnels, crossings, cul

de sac sticklers sermonizing saguin and summarizing sick synecdoche about some

‘interminable gears’, the inner workings of his sons forte into local politics, and when the

speaker stutters something lurid and unconsolable, when it whines weak buzzwords, wishing

that it could roam the fields and wishing its wires were a womb, wishing its babe would wean

from its usb outlet, I stare at my pencil until it disappears, until the boy next to me disappears,

toward the vacuous betwixt where the moment turns into a memory.

Can things that weren’t living be dead? Where will I rest when this is all over. Miss it. Miss it

now, I told her, ugly girl with crooked teeth, strange, fat and ludicrous, Miss it or I’ll take it from

you, and it will be so small when I take it, because it is only a drawing, that neither of us can fit,

and neither of us can have it.

He takes the house from you. It will be a strange day. You will be older than then and younger

than now, you will be thinner than both of us and unfair to your mother. He will lift it up, paper

house, and shake it until your grip loosens and you're falling into another memory, this one, the

one that still gets to be now for a moment longer.

The calf steps toward its mother. She is a strange baby, with thin mesh skin, a faux leather hide.

It will be summer soon, she thinks, although she doesn’t know what that means. I am warm

now.

























The Spare Room 

Ruben Gonzalez


I remember every footpath when walking around, I could be plopped anywhere and I’d

still be able to find my way home. I can remember every asphalt emulsion line on the

road, thick long black veins trickling down my avenue.  

My bedroom is now called the spare room. Sentimentality was now confined into a small

box of curios that acted as talismans from my past; small notebooks with drawings I was

proud of at the time, shells, a napkin from a restaurant I enjoyed, pressed flowers from

an old friend. 

I had packed most of my possessions into those large plaid laundry bags; the kind you

can buy from the two-dollar shops near the cinemas. 

I loved the idea of running away. I wanted to be the one to leave, and not the one left.

But mainly I think I was just excited about the freedom of privacy, coming and going

without explanation.

I think also I had created too many memories in this place, everywhere I looked I could

remember a moment that had happened there. I didn’t know what to do with him, my

teenage self following me around. 

I’m reminded of what it’s like to share a space so closely with my parents. 

Mainly my Dad. 

I’ve been thinking about him recently, I think only the bad features of my personality

come from his line of genetics. He always looks like he just walked into a bad hotel

room.

My parents are just as hot-headed as one another, having arguments over the fact that

there’s too much cheese in my Dad’s sandwich and such. 

Sometimes they argue over which Italian and Spanish words sound nicer, and how the

‘ch’ noise in Italian is stupid or that Spanish sounds less melodic. 

Everyone claims to hate the place I grew up, but then nobody ever leaves. 

I hate zebra crossings, the chances of knowing somebody who’s sitting in the car waiting

for me to hurry along are too high.

I remember the first time I had to do my reconciliation in church, I had to lie to Father

Dennis because I couldn’t think of a sin I’d committed. I didn’t know how to be conniving

or bitchy yet, I’d only just stopped using floaties in the pool. 

I recently went back to my school’s church on my own when I was heading down to see

my family. I stepped in and dipped my finger into the bowl of holy water and marked a

small cross on my forehead. I knelt in the pews of which I remember being so bored in

and prayed. I felt embarrassed. 

It looked the exact same, though Father Dennis had passed away. 

I think about all the Mum’s who’d be standing and waiting for their children. Most of them

didn’t work and probably judged my Mum for being the last to arrive. 

Something strange had happened to the way a particular group of Mum’s used

language. They said words that were childlike but not as interesting as the words that

children make up. Words like veggie, cheery, chilly, smiley, fabby or moany. And they

made an uneasy distance between themselves and the working class mothers they

called bogans. The bogans had less money, less education and ate more chocolate and

chips and other nice things. They said words like ‘Oh my God!’ and ‘Fuck!’. In the


balance I thought these were the more exciting words. The Oh my God’s were human

skeletons wearing tracksuits, and the veggie and cheery’s were skeletons wearing

expensive puffer jackets. It was a system I studied while waiting for Mum that divided

people into rich and poor skeletons. 

As I sat in the spare room, I remembered that I once kept a nugget of weed in the top

right drawer of my tall boy.




























Ceremony

Mia Thom


My cousin finds our ancestors’ dreams/ words/ whispers/ languages

sleeping in monash library

collecting dust – forgotten

our words relegated to basements

cardboard prisons

silenced on cassette tapes their

umbilical cords to Country stretched

across the settler cartography of nation state borders


My cousin liberates our ancestors on a tuesday and gifts them to mum

at the Yothu Yindi concert in Bulleke-bek (brunny west)


Mum returns to Bundjalung Country on a jetstar flight

our ancestors’ voices wrapped in an Aboriginal flag cradled in her purse
























WW

Charlie Lee


Heading home I become less real.

My present collapses with my past in head on collision.

My present, my past, my future kiss and tumble into each other.

Heading home I become,

Fascination of what is to come,

A becoming without destination

The not yet

But will be

My future body, decomposing, also inside my body

So my past, my present, and my future are rubbing up against each other.

Rubbing into friction, into heat, edging action,

Engine revving, edging acceleration, burning into the concrete.

Friction digs a hole and

A hole is a void, but a void is not empty.

In this hole is a field of wild activity

Endless rubbing, touching, edging indeterminacy infinite

So, in heading home I become less real,

Or the less real becomes less seen,

The less seen becomes a tucked behind

Bushes and holes,

In holes making homes

In heading home, the suburbs feel flat, hills regardless.

I’ve been looking from much too far away it seems.

Time here travels horizontal, so

If a hole is below this horizontal,

This hole negates travel and in its negation becomes a home, hole

w whole

In the w whole, the weight eats away, this letter dips,

a duo of downward arrows, but mostly we glaze across horizontal

so, let us make real in the hole and make eachother material

holding the weight of each other, we dig further down

making this hole home

this hole is the place where I can call myself w whole

so, if in heading home I become less real

let me instead be real in the hole

in the home I dig for myself with my loves

and the weight of this realness makes the ground give way and

my loves, my loves and I make world

for in this world is a scene of wild activity

activity in alternative axis,

activity in this void,

in this void is an opening, an opening in tucked away,

in beyond seeing, a realness that beyond vision rubs away at the very matter of ground


friction into heat into action, acceleration edging concrete, grounds

to give way, into caving, into w whole, homes, holes
































Man Eating Plants Die of Food Poisoning

Asha-Mae Chapman Ralph


Two rotund budgies unfettered by manspeaking insinuate lavish green onto the front garden

The innervation of moonland

Tipple on fortitudinous lip I masturbate a lot and leave a singular lamp portable record player

the warm Schoenberg chatter.

Nobody listens to me if I slip cello clatter under the traffic noise.

Junk pass-times in the churn-factory, we lie on our backs on the old greyhound track and

sing a song which goes ‘once i was meal and once i was rock and once i was real and once i

was not’

Childish slingings we say and part in separate beds to lurk on each other’s streets and wait

to be caught

Really it’s lies all the way down the snapped shit tube in this fish-stink prefecture. We reject

time-keeping-time-keeping-time-keeping-time.

Once i see the coke-flash go off behind the bowls club and suddenly it’s a very old look and i

place my hands up to the faces of the birds trapped on hypoxic amber,

A pre-dawn star-lily in the Border Cave, yet a small part sour.

Are we affording the mall living or does it afford us a small notional moment.

The Science of Self-Realisation.

I am playing the violin on the roof of the housing unit and throwing spit onto the developers

signs, and letting the piss run down my legs into the bath-clog water in hopes of reinfesting

the bloodstream beneath the deep scoured patch where I cannot stop scratching in the

night.

Sup-eye-n s-eye-n the sk-eye I-eye-ght handst-eye-I s-eye-lo, trickle toxic flows on the

mushroom bloom, all five smoking through bronchitis and dreading the hot sun hangovers.

Could or not articulate day-backwash. I was at the stop, sharing transported fruit with

strangers,

Sitting in our own puddles, when a magic grit began to produce itself upon me like proning

leg on the examination table,

Not the lenience of pre-moxibustion lung when the dawn pops the eardrums of the

yester-transgression.

As I was sleeping so then I discovered that the forgiven make little mark on the birthing.

Everything taking holiday is such a handicap, a notion that eventually there’ll be a fantastic

whipping back and somewhere hands from eyes will occur.

As we pass the station, which is akin to when one pupil passes another through the

earthquake at its centre for the first time, it starts to become evident that it is not the two

pains which matter, for the divorce between them is much too great to make the other mean.

Because time holds no meaning out here - being welfare line - eye, which is not the self but

rather the post-human glance at the wistful layers of spire which spurt up from the ribs when

th anaesthetist finally forces the tube past the tongue to release the trapped gurgle, am

beginning to come to with the notion that there is little which could prevent

Becoming adept of its own swiftness and finally buckling itself into a theory of place which

holds no greater than tectonic motion.

What can’t be chopped up or parsed or chopped out are the high acoustic transients of

acoustic phonetics.

In spite of this we continue to speak to one another as though our lips act as little more than

doors to the holy factory cunt which feeds the great mall.


It's very asymptomatic of us to pretend that we work as normal when our frenulums are split

and our tongues unmoored from their casings. Its unrooted to continue as though we do not

torch everything when the other’s back is untamed,

Don’t lose ourselves, sick in the schizophrenic dream cycle of pursuit.

It's ungainly, and unbecoming, sick with air and speed.

It's no more entwined than animals in breach wrapped in their own chords, slowly slowly

swimming in beast mother viscera. You shit yourself when you die, unfortunately, and so

mourn the shit on the sidewalk as a little death after the fluros have shucked away the

orgasm shell.

Double organ failure in the pando-hospital, functionally illiterate and kept like dogs, dying

with no sense or where you’re going or who might be waiting for you in the end,

But really waiting, waiting like the check or the clock


I exist on heaven time, what is long for you is

nothing for me, i abreast myself of it like a long swallow, I'm not scared to hold it in, it means

nothing like the flame.
















Toys and Tag 

Cody McCracken


I close my eyes and picture a myriad of toys, splayed out over the carpet. 

There’s a small train, a teddy bear with sewn eyes, and Jenga blocks.

Above them, two siblings tower and stare, their eyes glazed over listlessly.

Bored of these toys, they transcend from material play, 

To start a game of tag; running around the house,

Tearing the Indian rug, spilling drinks,

Finding many different ways to get the parents riled up. 

This vicious back-and-forth will persist, 

Endlessly, riotously,

While the household crumbles under their feet,

Creaking, groaning and splitting as they grow,

While the backyard tree falls,

And the swing-set is gone. 

As teenagers they’ll not even notice, with their brains on gossip and their heads in books,

To keep up with the competition, and see who’s ‘it’. 


They’ll keep playing till 25, 42, and eventually 80.

They’ll move out, but continue this game of tag, 

Through their separate lives and enduring conversations,  

As if it is all they have. 


But the toys are passed on to another family down the road,

In small, strained cardboard boxes barely kept together by sticky tape.

‘They’re an embarrassment to keep’ you tell your sibling, 

Because you knew it was never really about the toys, and were they ever really needed?

Yet you imagine the teddy bear with sewn eyes waving goodbye in that distant car, ready to greet new friends,

And you realise you’ve been too harsh. 

 

Separation meets independence,

And the bed is now made 

By the one who once waited to sleep.

Who closed his eyes, and imagined 

A myriad of stars above the roof,

While parents disagreed under lampshade,

While crickets made their voices known,

And the comforting babble of midnight TV passed through the wall, soft and low.

When stillness would set in, this child would sit up in bed, eyes wide, 

Then roam around to craft a new kind of chaos,

Peeking out at the manicured lawn and the sharp headlights,

Imagining a world beyond, 

Till muscles ached and sleep clawed desperately, and to the bed, unmade, you would yield. 

Then the morning sun would pour in, and you’d be ready to start again, 

To jump around like a Saturday cartoon character,

See the postboxes all lined up and find more paradise in this small reality. 

Nowadays you’re tired in the morning, 

After nights of counting coins, waiting in lines, and heading home to creaking doors, 

At a crumby share-house with floors that now remind you of that razed residence, 

Six blocks down from the city. 

You cling to it, a privilege, a sanctuary, or simply just a memory,

Nestled in the hedges of suburbia. 


Other tokens of the past emerge, like flickering flames,

Lit up by the pillars of faded friends and family road trips. 

They remind you of a harsher future,

So you sit in the present, reminding yourself that yesterday’s vacuity, 

And an inconsistent clarity, 

Is now all you have.

But don’t be too sad, 

Something else will persist; 

That endless little game of tag. 

















There Is Something

Zarzokimi Moss


There is something

in my mouth

yesterday’s cum

today’s hair

wet from shower

porous from bleach

there is something

in the water

wade in the water

children, wait

for me. I am your

mother

and I said so

there is something

inside me

a tampon

a finger

a finger lime

citronella pussy spritz

frangipani car air freshener

dangling

off my mirror

like tampon string

off my Suez Canal

the world’s greatest trade route

people have fought and died

over this

blood rushes

there is something

the word of God

whispering sweet nothings

in my ear

brushing peach fuzz

raising neck hairs

dropping necklines

blood rushes

there is something

eating her

what’s eating her

they postulate

I think it’s the BPA

in all the receipts

she handles all day

working at Mecca Cosmetica

or perhaps

merely


a gentle rage

blood rushes

there is something

under

my fingernails

slicing my skin

cutting into nail beds

a single blonde hair























Tuesday

Zarzokimi Moss


The curdling grit of loose grout

under chlorinated water

dripped off countless bodies

unidentified

I don’t think of the pool, our multiverse

or know when to slide in and then

I see they’ve stepped off the edge in unison

I follow and sink floor wide to the slick ground

In the tepid cauldron the others are talking

about going to Darwin in April and I’m not going with them and I feel my

eyes sting

emotion disguised by the bubbling warmth in the small waves

in the small world, I look over and your eyes are shining too

Is the chlorine really potent today?

Oh! Yeah, do you want my water bottle?

flushing with spit addled water like bucketing from a sinking vessel


Searing heat from beneath the pews where we sit

in two rows

heads bent over between wide knees resting on hands resting

on elbows resting on wide knees

we heave steam and our torsos up to chat

a drop from the ceiling falls to my forehead

warm

Heat rises and

we’re getting high just from the heat

and you’re getting high from the drugs you took last weekend

resting in your liver

now rising to the surface of you

expunged through sweat and lilting capillaries

They look funny in my blue costume with white polka dots

its neckline swings low on a chest that sits

neither protruding nor concave nor flat

merely perched

you laugh at your passing reflection

I look


hilarious

I say no, it suits you but Rosa laughs out loud

when we emerge from the changeroom

you look at me as if to say, uh huh

synthetic indigo’s chemical constitution was achieved in the late

nineteenth century and popularised in the twentieth

dykes, Indigofera, Egyptian blue

synthetic navy home birthed with white spots that have creased into the

fabric

I might be bleeding, you warn

I imagine blood seeping into the costume’s disintegrated brown lining

I don’t know how long it existed before I went to the op shop in 2011

But you find a tampon from someone wearing red

in the changeroom

whose voice is also cracked from yelling over music and dust and smoke

on Labour Day weekend

On the concrete, dripping

French pedicure toes with small hairs edging from having been

underwater

When Sivan’s mum found out he couldn’t eat gluten she said,

It’ll be easier if we all just go gluten free

And now, here, on the concrete, they say

It would be easier if we were all just they, with arms and

laughter and synthetic indigo

just the generation that came of age alongside the digital age’s

pubescence

who did growing pains together

but who flows into the wet dreams of chatgpt

whose water whets the edge of their inkbeds

whose bodily fluids seep into their chlorinated waters

chlorinated waters that disrupt our endocrine production

a yellow line, a small fleck of mucus on your face

disrupt the scene

I pick at you, and you don’t mind







Our Last Maccas Run

Ben Muster


We brake right at the speaker box thingo and the recoil nearly makes me spew. I

groan. Ollie leans over and winds the window for me. I’m the drunkest so I’m doing the

ordering.

I recite the standard: our four meals. I’ve got it by heart now. The worker dude tells

us to drive to the waiting area. The Triton rumbles, there’s the glare of my phone. I check it

like a reflex, scrolling through this one convo.

“Campbell.”

I could pretend I’m texting a friend, except they’re all here in the car with me, they’re

all ogling me like I’ve started undressing.

“Huh?”

Ollie sneers. “Who’s the lucky man?”

“No one.”

“That Naracoora bloke? He hittin’ you up?”

I switch the screen off, then I’m dizzy. “Different one,” I admit. They had me figured

out, anyway. They expected it.

Our driver, Arlo, sparks our attention. “Oi, check it out.” Real confident, he’s grabbed

hold of the gear selector, firm. “This is how guys from Naracoora suck dick.”

Then he goes for it, gobs the knob of the stick then guzzles the remainder. Really

commits. Jerking, slobbing, repeating. It’s a pretty impressive blowie, to be fair.

Mitch rides passenger. “Can you confirm, Campbell?”

“Yeah, fuck, it’s crazy. So similar, it’s like I’m there. I’m hard right now, honestly.”

The vehicular fellatio progresses, my friend gets sort of blurry, with how much premix

is in me, with how much I’m cracking up. The exit of the drive-thru is mostly darkness,

profiles with unsure outlines, so it’s like we’re alone together. I forget we’re even there, for a

second.

Brisk rapping on the glass; there’s this figure in red uniform with our food ready.

Arlo gags. Straightens. Right as he got his momentum, too.

“Oh, cheers.”

Spare him the flack ‘til we’re skidding onto the road again.

I’m stifling a smirk, “He was interested. Trust, he was into it, you had him hooked.

Could feel the heat coming off him, jeez.”

Car rips along Barton, ignoring the lines, revving then counting to the higher gear.

There’s no traffic to throw us off. Take on the roundabout when the chorus of Don’t Change

arrives and I swear we’re shaving the tyres, that we’ll have made a mark or a graze there.

The Centro car park is totally vacant in the early AM. There’s this spot Arlo’s drawn to,

maybe coz it’s familiar. It’s summer, it’s warm. The open tray of the Triton supports the four

of us, connected by our touching shoulders, I pass the boys their fried goods then chomp

into mine. More of that comfort. It could be the food but I dunno.

“What time you need to be up tomorrow?”

I don’t realise it’s me Ollie’s addressing; I’m tracing the pole of the streetlight over us.

I catch on. “Oh, like…” I gulp batter. “Fuck, I’ll have to check my ticket.”

Spring off the car, I think coz I’m restless. I stretch like I’m planning on running,

following the main road. Scorching it, trail of fire with how fucking quick I’m going.

“Melbourne’ll be alright.”

Arlo posits this then scrunches up his burger wrapper. He’s got weird shadows on

him.

I agree with him, “I reckon so.” Everything’s losing its centre, glimmering. The drinks

work their charm. “I’ll still come visit, though. I’ve got no fuckin’ friends there.”

They’re grinning at me, the three of them. Reminds me of when I came out to them.

“Why you lookin’ at me like that?”

I’m fairly certain it’s Arlo who goes: “You’ll be right, mate. We love you.”



























Carpg English

Amanda Negrin Sadka


I really loved him. It was one of the few things I learned to say in English.

But, he only loved his car. When we went out, it was in the car. If we

didn't go out because of his lack of money, it was to fix the car. When he

wasn’t with me, he was with the car. The only dates he took me on were

around town. I got so jealous I started comparing myself to it. I imagined

myself inside, taking control, crashing it and ruining it and breaking it into

pieces. And when he went looking for another one, I would be the best.

The best car. I often masturbated to the idea of him inside me, all of him.


If I slipped into metal, I wouldn't see or feel, but my existence would be

complete. Circulating nights on his street, with a large docking area, with

powerful stop capacity. If I were a Toyota or a Subaru, or if I could be

anything with four seats and bright lights where my eyes used to be, I

would feel better in my steel body. I could move my spine and close my

mouth forever. My legs would turn black and calloused. My joint

mechanisms could be my arms, where my knees would flatten under the

weight of my engine. There wouldn't be any food or perfume left to try.

There would be no one to talk to. How would I pass my time? Can a car

be erotic? Can a car want? Where would I feel stimulated? Stroking my

side and my bumper, and over my console, where my gums used to be;

would it feel good? If he played music, would it sound in me? Would I

feel his hand through my window? Would I feel him behind my wheel?


My inventions never ran out, and when I cut it short, there was a

miserable emptiness where I often imagined. That was unique to the

relationship. I had never thought so much about a vehicle. I never saw it

as magical nor did I see it again, but it had been. It was my creations

that motivated me to pursue him, and when he no longer loved me,

when he walked away from my life, I obsessed for months. If I were his

car, he wouldn't have left me.

I found out two years later that he had sold his Toyota for a Buick

Lucerne. He had abandoned it too. I felt so discouraged. Long after the

fact, he became another simple man to me, incapable of love. I still

believe that without his decision, I wouldn’t have left. I would have dated

him forever. That doesn't seem so miserable anymore. Nor did it years

later, when I bought the same model as his original. It was sitting in the

passenger seat, that I would be reminded of my metallic disorder and his

silver car, and the horrible things we did to each other.








































Sick Leave From Architecture School

Yasmin Wallace


A Design Week walk through Footscray with a zany Italian theorist, accumulating phone pics and faint academic bonds.


A young studio called Bland God where students sign up for the ‘vibes’.


Divinity (immaterial), Suburbia (material) – I need to read the essay question again


A guest lecture from a seated tutor, speaking cooly about their intimate relationships with council standard details. Did you know about this hidden depot where defunct urban infrastructure piles up, iconic industrial design sitting around in limbo? Yeah, it’s pretty secret. Powerful, really. So let’s mine the mined - it’s fun when it works out. Digital sculptures from an architecture school verging on obnoxious ironic reuse imagery. Turns out aestheticising local circularity is not the answer to fetishising the banal. Critical Regionalism, more like Creative Recycling. I’m not sold but I’m not even in the market.


At least when we fail it’s proper and in print, because don’t forget: exhibitions and their documentation override history books, so may as well make a statement. Do what you like. Do what you like even more, please. Okok


The real projects are clusters of failure to eat up and metabolise


But what about all that actual metal, those former fixtures, rich, partially tamed, dragged and dropped irl. Deleuze and Guatteri have it that the ‘matter-flow of the subsoil’ extracted and processed is the ultimate example of ‘the imminent power of corporeality in all matter’ and ‘the esprit de corps accompanying it.’ Silly spiritual underdog. But how else to explain loving the hard, industrial, shiny, boss. Metal heads, punk dreams. We want the laser cut bin surround and the embossed manhole cover. Galvanized, anodized, stainless. Firmness, commodity and delight sell the justness of colony. It seems that cover-ups and stand-ins are a big part of the job, and I actually really love it sometimes.


I have visited our site in different moods and weather. I’ve modelled it economically, stupidly, and starkly. Now I’m standing in the virtual scrapyard inside the screen. The words sit to the side, patiently.


No atmosphere here


Not until the text whips velvet thru the afternoon


You message me


Like


This


At home here


Spiraling jaggedly out of our respective burbs, assumptions glinting


Gone are my wishes to move the country here





























Tug of war

Lani Knezevic


Right before the storm, a sailboat hides in a cove. The front of the boat is tied to a

buoy. The boat is turned 180 degrees, and the back of the boat is tied to two spots

on the shore, one from the right side of the boat and one from the left. This ensures

the boat’s stability, so it won’t rock as much, drift away, or crash against the shore.

Before the storm, should I find not one, but three anchor points? Suppose that my

feet on the ground count as one. What should my hands hold onto?

Unlike a sailboat, I don’t need an anchor. I can afford to stay afloat, with no

direction home. Like a complete unknown, like a rolling stone. Like a compass with

an oscillating arrowhead. A compass that doesn’t point north.

What’s the point? Pointing north, pointing home. Where’s north? Where’s home?

There's a game I used to play as a kid. That game where two groups pull the ends of

a rope until a handkerchief hanging from the rope’s middle is overthrown to either

side. For one brief moment, where everyone falls to the ground, trying to catch

their breath after exerting their whole-body weight on winning the game,

the handkerchief is grounded.

This momentary lapse of stability is what I’ve been searching for my whole life. Yet

I can’t seem to grasp it. My life froze to this one feeling. That feeling you get in

your stomach when you’re swimming and your feet reach for the ground but

you’re in deep waters. Or when you’re on a plane and there’s turbulence and you

fear that everyone’s about to go down so you have to remind yourself of the jelly

theory. It’s just jelly. You’ll be fine.

I’m playing a game of tug of war. I’m jumping from one end of the planet to the

other. Drawn by a gravitational pull towards what’s distant and out of reach. Out

of sight but not out of mind. I’m ripped apart and stretched between dichotomous

collages of my hometown and the town I inhabit today. My sense of identity, of

place and belonging exist in a perpetual dance of separate togetherness. Like dirt

that lightly dances on the earth’s crust right before an earthquake.

I’m playing truth or dare, only asking for truth. I carry with me my innate sense of

gravity. My acquired sense of belonging. The belief that physical distance

constitutes an emotional distance. Sometimes a long-lasting lie can become truth

itself.







Cul-de-sac

Reba Nelson


In military parlance, a ‘cul-de-sac’ refers to when an army is hemmed in on all sides excluding

the behind. In Greek Mythology, Scylla and Charybdis are the two monsters Odysseus must

choose between in attempting to return to his beloved Penelope. In Theology, a cul-de-sac is

what the Trinity does to make sure no stragglers get into Heaven. In medicine, there is the

recto-uterine pouch, which is the deepest point of the female peritoneal cavity. Seeing my

analyst, I become incredibly concerned with the notion of kicking endings further down the line

as opposed to simply giving them a good thwack. In thinking,cul-de-sac can refer to a line of

thought or action that leads nowhere. Outside my house, there is a cul-de-sac. Outside my

house, I sit in idle cars begging to be hit and get asked to leave. In my dreams, Janus asks which

way I‘d like to enter. In life, it is often assumed you are connected with a tether. In Christ, I will

return home in December. When in strife, wander around a cul-de-sac. What’s life? Eternal

culdysacks. 


Sitsin’ in de middle of a cul-de-sac, yiew can stick coins down yer’ pants and fish for freebies out

the local pond. Yiew aint fuhm round here - unused to a strong middle class stenching. Jam jar

rubbing out in fluoride sink water. Possum fallen! From the tree in the middle of the night - 

Father picks it up with a shovel….


Stop! With your aching,

Neither farsighted nor

Molting. To be atop


A waited drop is to find

My home again.


If you are hemmed in on all sides, might I suggest lifting ones trousers to give a cheeky nod to

the all-seeing God who sits up high over social unrest. That leather starfish will breathe better

once you accept you’re in purgatory.


Every woman I ever knew growing up on a cul-de-sac was a bitch. The men would not touch

Me.






The Sub-Urban

Jack Keenan


Etymologically speaking, the suburban is the sub-urban. “Urban” comes from the

Latin urbanus: “of or pertaining to a city or city life; in Rome”. The first cities -- particularly

Roman ones -- were walled. The sub-urban thus quite literally denominates the area below,

outside or beyond the walled city. It is the sub to the urban’s dom. 

This subjection to the urban: is it dystopian or utopian? The suburban permits after all

of a declension that English does not permit the urban: Suburb-ia. Is Suburbia a Utopia or a

Dystopia? Is its space, its topos, good or bad? Straightforwardly it is neither, for nothing is

ever simply good or simply bad. Nonetheless we can study the Suburban by attending to its

utopian and dystopian aspects.

Take “Suburbia”. This formation itself already tells us something: it is a vulgarity. It is

what in linguistics is called a back formation. So too with the “suburbs”, which turns the

uncountable already plural suburban into a countable noun. “Burbs” gives us the -urbs from

Urbanus fronted by a residual “B” from the sub. These vulgarisations of the word suburban’s

declensions function as evidence of the suburban situation. Which we might broadly

characterise as thematized by a forgetting that is strategically enforced from above.

The suburban is thus positioned as a place of vulgarisation, of bastardisation. To

characterise it this way might sound like a condemnation. It is not. Being a bastard after all

can only be qualified as good or bad thing if you are able to answer one question: who’s your

daddy? To be cast out from the walled city is a dystopian fate only if the city from which one

is cast out is a utopia. Yet such a scene rarely if ever takes place. It is only the reverse

setting that history can claim concrete acquaintance — in so far as there has as yet never

been a utopian city — that is, with an individual being cast from a walled dystopia to find

some subaltern “good place”. 

The utopian aspect of the suburban is thus broadly speaking the fact that daddy’s not

around. The sovereign does not leave the city limits. Thus, the suburban permits and is

indeed constituted by a certain margin of lawlessness. In this light we can make sense of the

emerging consensus that one can live more freely in the West of Melbourne than in the

inner-north. What is tough and gnarly about Brunswick’s flat open expanses and baneful

nature strips is its suburban quality. There is thus in Brunswick, through a kind of de-facto

ugliness, a resistance to the tides of gentrification that have mostly swamped the rest of the

inner north. Gentrification is simply the becoming-urban of a place: it is the expansion of the

city limits. The urban is where the Sovereign steps foot. If his limousine was to stop in Narre

Warren he would wait in the car. But in Northcote he would get out and pop into Terra

Madre. 

The glamour of the inner-north betrays its sycophantic fervour. Everyone wants

daddy. Which is to say, crudely, that everyone wants money, fitness, and fame. There is now

even a certain narcissistic posture adopted by insta girlies and fame-hungry twinks alike that

resembles the bratty insolence of spoilt royalty, too sure of its eventual ascent to the throne

to bother with virtue. Thrones can be found only in urban settings: the sub-urban as such is a

district that is under, subject to, a throne. In the city, one can aspire to lordship: graff-lord,

queer-lord, edge-lord and land-lord alike. 

Lordship sets up an end, an ideal pole, for a culture to strive towards. Yet lordship is

never unproblematically achieved: one’s status as a lord will always be contested and

subject to derision. Lordship is a position that is at once (ostensibly) desired by all and

prohibited for all. This does not prevent the dream of being a lord from turning everyone

busy. The lure of lordship thus bonds us to timetables and schedules that in their making-us-

busy divide and desynchronise us from one another. We are all duped by the city into

playing the part of conquerors pining for a crown. The city thus, despite the trade and bustle

which lumps so many together, is powered by an industry that feeds upon division,

antagonism, disharmony, and injustice. 

The urban can precipitate a certain inhuman becoming of its inhabitants. An inhuman

becoming in which the exertion of immense systematic pressure makes a kind of pearl of out

the human being. The pearls of the city —— occasionally and fortuitously encountered ——


are attended by the magic that surrounds any double or fake: they are the snatched among

us. Which is to say their souls have been snatched in exchange for a pearlescent-becoming

that grants them, among other things, the familiar sex appeal of the snatched.

The systematic pressure that precipitates these urban pearls is the tandem work of

the clock, the crowd and the calendar. The co-ordinated effort of the clock, crowd and

calendar form a kind of pinball machine which entraps these pearls such that they find false

freedom in the thrill of being pushed, assigned and entrapped by a system whose limits and

mechanics have already been decided in advance. The demand of urban industry to

become busy is thus a demand that the human being adopt the adaptive strategies of a

pearl or pin-ball. One seeks to develop a shiny outer coat that once affixed to the skin starts

to seep inward such that all is gradually enveloped in a silver tear-drop. The confines of

one’s inner cavities thereby join with one’s skin to become a single silver mass. What is

yielded is a pearlescent or metallic density for whom the difference between surface and

depth has been erased. 

Busy-ness invites pearlescent bodies to become bullets. Which is to say something

that can travel at an immense velocity yet only at the cost of having its innards and pores

removed. A bullet, pin-ball or ball-bearing cannot, does not, absorb its environment. Its

interactions with the others around it are limited to the superficial reflections which

interminably tremble like an incantation on its metal surface. If pinned down, one can see

that the reflections which flash and glide across a ball-bearing’s surface skin are warped and

distorted by the carnivalesque form of its sphere. These pearls reflect you back with

charming glints when they are at flight but when held still, they turn back your face in frightful

distortion: their mirrored form is made not for truth but for speed.  

They are designed, destined, to be “shot to the top” and tear through everything

between them and a “high score”. Thus, a pin-ball hungers for the speed that will allow them

to take the drag of any collateral damage in step. Those who seek the throne and its crown

come to resemble the metals which shape the riches they are after. Throne seekers are

often, like the coins one slots into a pin-ball machine, glimmering, precious and two-faced.




























Clay Smith Rude asf  in Maccas Drive-thru

Lily Arapera Gentile



Clay Smith kicked four goals in the prelim final against GWS in 2016.

He came through the drive thru at the Maccas I worked at and was really rude because he was

trying to redeem 3 vouchers for the 30 day 30 deal thing. I was trying to tell him I couldn’t even put it through the till, plus it was in the drive-thru and I wasn’t about to do 3 multi-

orders for one car, eff that.


Last night there was someone freestyling on my train home. It was good. We both got off at

the same stop, and he was surprisingly older than I thought. Much older than me, maybe even

close to my dad’s age. He still had his speaker on and playing. I told him it sounded good. He

seemed a little on edge, but he said thanks mate.


There used to be this old rap this kid made called The Bont by Reflex Rapper on Facebook

circa 2016. Just about how good Marcus Bontempelli is.


Mum and Dad didn’t really want kids at first. They moved from Richmond to Footscray in

the late 90s just before we were all born. They had a brown Mazda that didn’t lock that

people would shoot up in overnight. Mum says it was gold not brown. We lived on Parker

Street and then Adelaide Street.


Charlie Curnow came into the pub I work at on the off-season. I told my nonno, thinking he

would be excited to hear about our conversation. He asked me what he was eating, I said I

couldn’t remember. Didn’t he want to hear what our conversation was like? He said not

really and asked me if he was drinking lots.


He was one of the earliest Carlton social club members. It was good because him and my dad

would drive from Doncaster later than most people and still find a spot to stand and watch. In

1982 he said he was going to Princes Park to get tickets for the final. He was supposed to get

first access or something. He was explaining this to me after we had a few glasses of Averna

after lunch. They slammed the ticket door shut in his face. He called up the next day and

cancelled his membership. The other week I texted him saying Carlton had a good win. He

said bad umpiring, okay result.


My friend says he can’t believe dad and nonno let me go for the dogs instead of Carlton. I

said at least Bont is Italian. Probably fake he says.


There is a new Alfa in Whitten Oval - post renovations. My sister works there and says

Marcus Bontempelli orders an oat flat white and is very nice.


She also says he drives a big ute but like a merc ute. It probably locks.





























Untitled

Lola Hewison


A polished figure in black ripples behind the nebulous frame,

He’s 50 something and gaudy.

He enters, holding unholy wine to his chest,

The decaying man sits valiantly on horseback

Fixed to the fridge hold,

Revealing 50 something’s silent brevity.


Usually, mornings are mute

And the kitchen is his galaxy.


She looks like a child on his 50 something birthday

Fingering the peppered chicken

And composed of yesterday’s soignee scent.

Coils of hot dust swell at the sight of her new mini skirt,

Gifted by a fake friend's mother in law.


People roll in over whistling tea —

So I’d better rush to the orange stool I’m married to.

Family number one is distraught over spilt cabbage on the back car seat,

And child number three clutches 3 phallic dinosaur miniatures in dispute.


A decade of cigarette butts smirk beneath the polished deck,

Sitting comfortably beside trees that wink toward the past.


I’m swinging on the horizontal trunk

That cradled me at 5

I’m 5

And the dinosaur sits aptly within its crevice.

He smiles and I laugh because I know awkward love.

She roams from the kitchen,

There's sweat behind her eyes and crystal in complexion

Floating behind, he holds her secrets.


The house is boasting with guests.

And the gust of light yanks the drunken man’s focus.

It’s all

Broken tampons and shared rain with my brother under twilight on the roof.

Our skin eats pigeon plumes that bud beneath the racks

All the while he scratches at her secrets

And a beer bellied man breaks the muffled lull

Empty platters with splattered batter


Bruised by the sound of blue evening

In the pool with old mate and old mate tickling tales between water breaks.


No trees breathe alone

They inhale the dangling halos that hold

My swinging contraption.

And the tissues tongue smiles back at me

As I notice the dancing woman is a child

She is a child,

She’s a child

As 16 years later our fingers fuse in the heat of surrender.


An iranian woman tangles her beads between my fingers,

And she is a child,

She’s a child with a dog.

And all I want is to tuck that stray hair beneath her collar bone

To plait it tightly through his tail.

Shaking my head as the king of the table because im 5 and exhausted with experience

Grasping at tips of conversation im able to mimic

“Ah yes you’re brutal, he is the innocence”

I guess so, yes.

I don’t know, I guess so yes

The day before I knew an awkward love

And all I can relate is the static horse that rattles between fridge vibrations

Nodding toward the disproportionate man

3 unholy wines across from me

Ever so slightly

To relay my powdered invitation.

The bald head squints

Lending itself back to the wisdom

Held between the teeth

Of surrendered child

Wise and ungroomed

Woken by

The washing machine that drowns the bug-eyed mans gloat

like stubborn pikes

We sit here again







































Fannie Bay

By Charlie Gill


Dear Louis,

Do you remember those afternoons in Darwin, lying on our lilos in that one-bedroom apartment? Windows open to yellow-green late afternoon light, cool air trickling with vestiges of midday swelter. We’d watch reruns of A Current Affair; its smug journalists loitering outside brick-walled homes to confront “the country’s most contemptible characters”: conmen, hoarders, addicts, bludgers and battlers and thugs. When the door swung open, they’d come out and spit gems of wild junkie abuse, and we’d burst out laughing. Neither of us could sleep, so our eyes were fixed on the screen deep into the night like pokies fiends, staring at the endless production line of carnival freaks: toothless men tattooed with video game characters, dead- eyed women breastfeeding with blunts between their teeth. You told me you identified with them. I thought that was ridiculous; we were two unburdened young men who’d go home that summer to decadent Christmas lunches. But there was something about that period—jobless, reckless, open to everything and answerable to no-one—that made me feel like an honorary member of the nation’s despicable underclass: drifters, hooligans, artful dodgers.


That makes me nauseous now. And I’m careful not to get sentimental, or give you a chance to slip on your doe-eyed glasses: how many times have you escaped blame? I’m not here to thrust it upon you, though—I just can’t sleep, like always, and thought you might be wondering why I left, or if I’ve told anybody what you did. I haven’t, so you’ve got no reason to get upset. Either way, I’m sure you’ll hijack my sentiment and blow this all up into something it's not. You can pretend to be hurt, but it’s such a pity about emails, isn’t it? You can force a tear out, but it won’t make a stain on the page. That’s your double-edged sword: so skilled at feigning sensitivity but so bad at actually feeling it. So its pointless to pull my punches. Louis, you are such a fucking idiot.


Seriously, the time we spent together in Darwin was the most frustrating of my life: following you to Fannie Bay because that’s all you wanted to do, soothing your temper when the wrong horses won. Whenever I dragged you to the war museum, or to see the old Indonesian fishing boats painted with flowers, you trudged along in indignation like a little kid—but one of those terrible ones with no sense of wonder.


I had high expectations for Darwin, and it met them at first: a sunlit waystation nudged up against the Pacific, some kind of supercharged cultural multiplex. Just think about the markets! Asian matriarchs running smoothie stands, flamboyant old white men selling kangaroo hide whips, young African preachers presiding over scales with Good-or-Evil-Meter written above them. Language clanged over a constant hum of heat, ringing out across the flat expanse and laying a wet gauze over everything—except you. You didn’t care about any of it. When we did the customary trips to waterfalls on thirty-five degree days, speeding along in the battered blue Nissan Pulsar, I wanted to feel the heat. I wanted to experience this great new world, harshly-lit and brightly-coloured: spirits lurking in the long-grass and dancing in the distant wobble of warm air. You were just hot, and complaining about it.


So I tempered my idealism to match your lack of it. I accepted that the glories of the world would always escape you, and if you ever tried to grasp them, they wouldn’t fit in your palms: like watching a dog pawing at a puzzle it can never complete. But seeing you at Fannie Bay, animatedly speaking to bookies and trainers as I lay wasted on the grass, made me realise that, really, you aren’t a fucking idiot. You do lack some essential human instinct, but also possess some unexplainable animal one. No ear for melody but always clued into life’s basest rhythms: knowing when to hold eye contact, flash a smile, put your hand on a man’s shoulder and really talk. Ears twitching at sentences you weren’t meant to hear, eyes scanning for movement in the foreground—like a dingo tracking a rabbit darting through the scrub. And I don’t blame you for having a gambling addiction, but I do blame your gambling for ruining Darwin for me. At first, I felt part of something wonderfully unpredictable and new. On Mitchell Street - jostling for drinks amongst the other sweat-stained rascals—we were like strange antiques on the shelf in an op-shop, sitting amongst the glittering, tarnished jumble: racist, barrel-chested jackaroos between jobs, jovial Indian security guards, elderly Aboriginal tour guides, sex-obsessed American teenagers stationed at the army base, and baby-faced Thai masseurs. We made friends with all of them. It was like we belonged to some grand capital for an empire of dusty misfits: sunset lighting up a makeshift city, black silhouettes forming happy throngs.


But when you took me to Fannie Bay, Darwin felt off to me, like I knew it did for some: a sweltering bush purgatory crammed with lost souls, clambering over the guardrail and laughing at animals getting whipped to death. While you moved about and made your calculations, I sat on a lawn chair and took it all in: the handsome horses, fine black sand of the tracks and vacant, wind-whipped faces of the old jockeys. Clouded in mists of cheap perfume and sweat, I dreamt about the endless land stretching south from the city, once loved and cared for and now used by governments for war games. I heard jets in the sky and felt the murmurs of a military junta rumbling underground. I watched termite mounds on the side of the highway fly past like shrines to ancient soldiers. I thought of the rock art destroyed by European wasps who’d snuck in at port, and the asylum seekers sitting imprisoned in islands a couple stone’s throws away. 


But then the announcer’s voice would softly stir me awake and I’d see a thousand bare red legs stream closer to the track. I’d hear the call for race four, or five or fifteen and make you out somewhere in the hazy distance. You’re wearing a light blue button up and torn-up cap. Your arms are slung around a fat man’s shoulders, spitting happy clichés at each other because you’re backing the same horse. And then, smack: Gates open, we’re racing, My Fair Lady jostling with Nowhere Near It, Helsinki Boy on the inside of Mrs Believable... The crowd was too loud to actually hear the commentator, but I could imagine his manic voice: high-pitched, full-tilt and unhinged, like all our old favourites on A Current Affair. But then you’d turn manic, too. You’re gesturing wildly and slurring slurs at the horses. You’re craning your neck and stomping your feet and edging closer to orgasm and she’s got it, she’s won, My Fair Lady! You’re shaking with

adrenaline and pleasure. You take the sunburnt cherub next to you by his literally red neck and kiss him on his fleshy cheek. You praise God. And then, finally, you turn to smirk at me with eyes that are, undeniably, co-conspiratorial and loving and generous: here is my luck, here is my momentum, would you like some?


But you didn’t always win, did you? Which is why your old friends started asking for new favours you had no choice but to accept. And even that didn’t seem to bother you! I think I can understand that, though, because in Darwin no one ever remembers anything. Absolution comes at sunrise. Insults are thrown, punches are landed and cries for help are screamed into the night, but they just drift to the edges of the city and echo off the rock. I always wondered, when we went out, about all the things the local, older crowd had seen and chosen to forget. I wondered about them: sun-kissed hair, snakeskin faces, white-hot smiles. Big- hearted and small-minded. Veteran drinkers and odd-job men. Enthusiastic backslappers with a thousand fucked-up stories: the lemon zest grime beneath the country’s fingernails. What had they done? Where would they fall on the Good-or-Evil meter? We both knew those types, but you knew them better. Some of them weren’t nice. Did they have something to do with it?


Forget that. Like I said, I’m not asking for an explanation and I haven’t told anybody. I cope with my secrets. They’re like knives I’m forced to keep up my sleeve that only ever nick my skin. As if I needed anything else to keep me up at night?


But sometimes I think that insomnia is just a failure of the imagination. Here’s the trick: you craft a world you can glide into, unguarded. You surf along the wind and land in some personal paradise: you grow the gardens and plan the streets of Utopia, its swirl of nooks and crannies as singular as your fingerprint. That’s where you sleep. You visit it in-between days, and maybe it’s where you retire to when you die.


I’ve been using this technique for a while now, and it’s working. So, now it’s time I make my grand reveal,and tell you I’m not writing this letter because I can’t sleep. Actually, Louis, I’m dozing off quickly and sleeping wonderfully. But here’s the awful part: when I lie awake at night, ticking off items of Genesis for my Shangri-La, and I say ‘let there be light’, the light is orange and hot. When I say ‘let there be land’, the land is a black strip pockmarked with hoof prints. When I say, ‘let there be life’, its you—jumping up and down, turning to smile at me, eyes wet from screaming. And I think: Really? Fannie Bay? That’s my private oasis?


But then I fall asleep, which I suppose makes sense—it’s what I used to do while I was actually there, lying drunk in the sun. Still, it surprises me. And anyway, I just thought you should know all this. I’m not sorry I left, and I’ll never, ever feel sorry for you. But I haven’t forgotten any of it and I suppose I don’t want to.

C




























Chapter One

Fionnuala Keith


I’ve hidden myself within suburbia. My belly seeping through mesh dresses and fingertips. I write a song for you but it’s really for me. Everything is really for me. The house next door is for me. It’s palm leaves and monstera against my brick. 


I’m holding it up. It prompts me to write, to sing, to draw, to move, to sweat, to bathe. Community snuggles into obligation and commitment. A high rise on a mountain, a bonfire in my backyard. 


To make up for it I invite you there. To take up space and take over responsibility. Suburbia is safety in numbers.


My neighbours knock on my door and tell me about the fresh graffiti on the wall. He wants to start a Go Fund Me. Or make a plaque. Get the council involved. 


I refuse the formality. Everybody has a story of grief. Vandals are no exception. 


I never used to feel like waking up from my dreams. They felt warm and safe. Now I feel as though I don't know where I am supposed to be or with who. None of the people in my dream are within arms reach anymore. The lighting here is lonely and dull, not colourful or cosy. I think right now, perhaps in my wrong frame of mind, everyone around me is becoming.


Vandals are no exception.

















Wrap a Rock in Copper, Call it a Crystal, Say it Heals.

Lili Ward


I saw a photo of Sarah Jessica Parker reading ‘The 120 days of Sodom’ and allowed myself to recall the time my friend confided in me that she recurrently dreamt of Sarah Jessica Parker eating her out in the front display of a mattress shop.

Fourty winks, fourty days and fourty nights. I didn't drink for 243 days, along with a still bloated gut and the body type of a hungry toddler, I am nursing the fear that all awaiting only makes it sweeter. I am drunk to fulfill the new holy trinity: 

Becoming the wife, the bitch and the keyboard warrior.

There comes a point in every young girl's life in which she must carve her own ladder of virtues in an arrowed heart onto local wood. Alongside his virtues, John wrote multiple works of wisdom to give instruction for his children and their  holy lives. So as a teenager I obsessively wrote in grey lead: my ladder of divine descent. These virtues consist of thirty one speeches (one more than john)

Each speech resembles a step toward the heavenly place, his virtues: like rungs of a ladder, mine: like the steps up to my sister's bunk bed. I am far enough up the steps to make out her scrawny shape under the floral doona cover, 16 virtues yet to fulfill and the plague seems to have softly begun. Chronology is forgotten and the locusts are the first.

I am finely chopping celery in the brandished sink at my local supermarket job, I am calculated and in my delusion I am far too invested in the well being of this gourmet produce store. I am day dreaming of the book of Deuteronomy, how applicable, that I will sow much more seed than I will ever be able to harvest. All that is plentiful will be eaten by the locusts.

It doesn't flinch as I lift its cardboard shelter, it is antisocial but unafraid. I, the social creature, joke with Tom and Andy from the produce department as we watch it jump, three grown ups laughing in matching aprons. I joke fluently with the boys but I am afraid. I turn the tap far left and watch its fluttering jig slow.

What is the karmic retribution for boiling a locust?

My boyfriend sent me a direct message at 10:03 pm, a conspiratorial video, i believe he is convinced the locusts are either 1). Extra terrestrial or 2). Related somehow to the pentagon. 

It is a starless night and I hear these are the perfect conditions to consume conspiracy theories via youtube. I emotively react to his message, I joke fluently with the boys but I am afraid. It is catholic guilt long after my faith resigned, it's the urge to collect your bloodied teeth and lick the pulpy divots they leave long after believing in the tooth fairy.

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