Explore

Arts Features | Fiction | Nonfiction | Poetry

Emilie Collyer 20/3/25 Emilie Collyer 20/3/25

Lateral ambling gait – by Emilie Collyer

RUNNER-UP, GWEN HARWOOD POETRY PRIZE 2024

Square grey city apartment
Hindley Street Adelaide
with my siblings & mother
for a family funeral.

My bone density report
shows further deterioration
AP spine Osteopenia
& I’m losing height.

Helen Jarvis 20/3/25 Helen Jarvis 20/3/25

and – by Helen Jarvis

RUNNER-UP, GWEN HARWOOD POETRY PRIZE 2024

today I drove into a rainbow, its half-arch

picked clean and landing in the rubble beside

the new McDonald’s, and the wet road shone in my wake

Toby Fitch 11/3/25 Toby Fitch 11/3/25

Pedder Galaxias Pantoum – by Toby Fitch

Locked in your Lutruwita lake

Surrounded by sandy white beach

In search of invertebrates

Your galactic fins flit through tannins

Daniel Ray 27/2/25 Daniel Ray 27/2/25

Night Movements – by Daniel Ray

You twitch

on the boundary of sleep:

a fox

running on all fours

snouting the gold-stuff

of its dreams.

Xin Lee 19/2/25 Xin Lee 19/2/25

Chinese Funerals as Theatre – by Xin Lee

Five days have felt like forever,

which is how long a widow could spend

folding a kingdom of joss papers.

Luoyang Chen 5/2/25 Luoyang Chen 5/2/25

Love Poem – by Luoyang Chen

A mere glimpse

at its bitterest.

We sit with our legs crossed.

I grip your feet in white socks, then rub

them, feeling the tiles between my dialectics.

Helen Jarvis 18/12/24 Helen Jarvis 18/12/24

Washing my mother’s hair – by Helen Jarvis

My mother bends her head over the basin. Her skull is frail
as a scrap of bird’s egg, and I cover the tap with my hand to cushion it.
Hair spreads out red in the water: the red that was once the shade
of the carp in old Japanese woodblocks; the red that skipped me

Cameron Lowe 27/11/24 Cameron Lowe 27/11/24

Friesland Farm under red clouds – by Cameron Lowe

Curiously

it was

ships

on fire

Anna Kerdijk Nicholson 13/11/24 Anna Kerdijk Nicholson 13/11/24

Dementia – by Anna Kerdijk Nicholson

My friend again loses a word,

momentarily absents herself,

staring at her meaning as if struck

by holiness, by her gilded icons

Megan Cartwright 31/10/24 Megan Cartwright 31/10/24

Visitor Ghazal – by Megan Cartwright

In its practised temperance the monks’ routine compels sleep –

yet in this land I have no language; I cannot spell sleep.

Outsider – conspicuous. I imitate reverence.

I count sheep. In the dark my heart pounds like a death knell: sleep.

Bobby K 14/10/24 Bobby K 14/10/24

1. – by Bobby K

Jake and Sarah are crying

their chickens

are dying of heatstroke

but I don’t care about that

Sam Morley 22/8/24 Sam Morley 22/8/24

The Ascension on a MacBook Air – by Sam Morley

I come to the backlit blue

saying nothing

a silent sermon

with stinging eyes

asking:

is there something more than material things?

Michael Farrell 14/8/24 Michael Farrell 14/8/24

The Edit / An Edit – by Michael Farrell

Immanence redirected. The infrastructure of the edgelord and the snowflake are the same.

Can power be generally oppressive? Up in the trees, radically outside the gift economy, radically outside bricolage. Read this sentence. Read this sentence linguistically. Tampering mid-ride.