Vinita Agrawal

Author of four books of poetry, Two Full Moons (Bombaykala Books), Words Not Spoken (Brown Critique), The Longest Pleasure (Finishing Line Press) and The Silk Of Hunger (AuthorsPress), Vinita is an award winning poet, editor, translator and curator. Joint recipient of the Rabindranath Tagore Literary Prize 2018 and winner of the Gayatri GaMarsh Memorial Award for Literary Excellence USA 2015. She is Poetry Editor with Usawa Literary Review. Her work has been widely published and anthologised. Her poem won a prize for the Moon Anthology on the Moon by TallGrass Writers Guild, Chicago 2017. More recently her poem won a special mention in the Hawker Prize for best South Asian poetry. She has contributed a monthly column on Asian Poets on the literary blog of the Hamline University, Saint Paul USA in 2016-17. In September 2020, she edited an anthology on climate change titled Open Your Eyes (pub. Hawakal). Most recently she co-edited the Yearbook of Indian Poetry in English 2020-21 (Hawakal). She judged the RLFPA poetry contest (International Prize) in 2016 and co judged the Asian Cha’s poetry contest on The Other Side in 2015. She was featured in a documentary on twenty women poets from Asia, produced in Taiwan. She has read at the FILEY Book Fair, Merida, Mexico, Kala Ghoda Arts Festival among others. She is on the Advisory Board of the Tagore Literary Prize. She has curated literary events for PEN Mumbai. Read more about her at www.vinitawords.com

 

Splendid Poison Frog

Was it a cold December Wednesday
when you left?
A frosty, flinty, pin-point moment
that seals most pull-outs.
Silent like a hushed Mayday signal
reverberating in the ripples of a pond.
What time exactly
did you hop over
to where nowhere exists?
Did the sun flicker
at your vanishing act?
The way yellow convulses on a color palette
when mixed with green
before turning blue.
Was it the hour of dusk,
your favorite hour,
when you looked your dashing, heart-throb best
skin, brilliant coral, eyes, kohl black.
A fungus with a long name
colonized your body.
A local phenomena, some said.
Like a cloud breaking-up
a balmy summer’s evening.
Did the next morning feel
like a fine after-showers morning?
*********
Estimated Extinction date: 2020
Cause: Chytrid Fungus (Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis)

Tim Loveday

Tim Loveday is a poet, a writer, and an editor. As the recipient of a 2020 Next Chapter Wheeler Centre Fellowship and a 2021 Varuna Residential Fellowship, his work aims to challenge toxic masculinity in Australia. His poetry/prose has appeared in Meanjin, Cordite, The Big Issue, Babyteeth, Meniscus, Text Journal, and The Big Smoke, among others. A Neurodivergent dog parent, he is the verse editor for XR’s Creative Hub. Tim currently resides in North Melbourne, the traditional land of the Wurundjeri people.

 

at the end of the rail

in the morning when the sun peels
back like a paper cut and the blue
metal is thunder under our feet
i see shadow-diamonds spread
across the train yard and i feel
as small as a bird and as wide
as a sail

//

last night i listened to your two way radio
i pulled the blanket up to my ears and shaped
myself into a satellite    its static jargon a dialogue
with god or grease or grit i heard the miracle of
boom boom boom
                                                      we were the
new age of romans with a thousand outposts
we were cowboys riding iron centipedes

//

before dawn i threw off my blankets
like old ghosts             sprang from my bed
like new smoke           heard your voice
in the walls                  as you swept
me up                          in your wings
took me           to your shoulders

atlas or he-man or rambo
on the rails       duke on the frontier
you smelt of oil aftershave radio waves
you whispered to me in the language
of future and the earth

fell away

//

i had barely seen the blue streets
how the stars grew hazy in the steam
how horizon bled the false border of morning

­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ we lived before the aftermath
i am a fault-line across your chest
liquid gold sprung from your veins
i fill the cavity where your heart should be
i am young country
boom boom boom

//

at the station the rails rattle
in the flyscreen and the man with
the corkboard halo is chequered
like a topographic map
­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ when he grins he shucks open
a territory calls you by
our last name
­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­  i hear
a town or a street or a mountain
or the origin of a valley

//

in the office you say
wives and work as if they
tighten bolts avenge crimes
on your holsters there are radios the size
of guns            you are blue men with
un-dreams as big as china
under your eyes

everyone is envious    

go ahead the man says into his radio
laying the rail with his words

//

at the terminal box you teach
me to splice the rails   my body
a limp flag made of flesh
­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­  i hang from the lever
asking for islands to swell
on my biceps

birds turn into reverse silhouettes

it’s excalibur you exclaim
stick your foot down like
sinking a spade

boom boom boom

//

when we walk the rails we tell history
this parallel never met by our shadow
i swim onto your shoulders as day
breaks egg-shells
­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­  i am the new
collar ironed by my mother
and the space above your
head is a frontier

//

from here the world is flat
borders white lines in the dirt
you can feel a train coming
in the shake of the earth

we are going to be giants you say
gripping my shins
­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­  i roll up my
sleeves and flex my arms
giving you horns

//

at the door meccano in full-scale
you swing me into the carriage

­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ the child who is flightless
climbs on the back of the
wind    held up a hurt bird

//

in the cabin men breathe planets
onto perspex    they hark like myna birds
rooted bitou bush hunched like cane toads
­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­  they claim to live at
these gears      they’ve got
tickets to show it

they’ve crossed this country
ten times over              sleepless
they’ve seen land where water
is foreign         where open cuts
are oasis

­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ i sit back and watch you
walk ahead on the rails

//

trees white-paper in the train’s blared
whiteness        shape themselves into
memories         call themselves footprints

­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ they’re roped to fence posts

this is morning            not mourning

my breath leaves my mouth
­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ like a greenhouse
boom boom boom      

//

up ahead on the rail you dance
with your arms of red light
and i wonder what it means
to write history with your
body
­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ your blood let
disfiguring the open
cut of morning

//

whatcha think of your dad one of the men
asks     his cadence forty packs of imported
cigarettes         in his fist is a gear that i know
lights up streets turns show houses into
nuclear families
­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ he’s a hero i say but
the word feels tiny      when i’ve seen maps
that lay across this country like a bandage

­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ you’re the beginning
­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ and the end of
­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ of the world

­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ you’re the answer
to everything

//

way off the plant blinks like
a child-killer    a christmas in morse code
­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ spaghetti pipes spewing
white venom
ethanol bruising the sky purple
everything       screams

the horizon quivers     the drivers pull the horn

birds rush to their nests in the clouds
fall through invisible floor boards
­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ burn up on re-entry

//

sometimes i wonder
if you ever stopped in those
towns where you once said
the waters ran like blood

­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ did you own a skeleton key

did you ever peel back
excalibur feel the weight
of the blade in your hands
alter the course of this
track

//

in my ears our heart
boom boom boom

my eyes mirror
the blood-shot sky
­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ the thrum of the engine
­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ rattles through my bones

­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ all my ancestors are ghosts
­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ all my ancestors cling
to the atmosphere

as you walk the rails
fade into morning        settle into history

men talk talk talk

we have learnt distance
in this country

we have learnt to never
look back

 

Sonnet Mondal

Sonnet Mondal writes from Kolkata and is the author of An Afternoon in My Mind (Copper Coin, 2021)Karmic Chanting (Copper Coin, 2018), Ink and Line (Dhauli Books, 2018), and five other books of poetry. He serves as the director of Chair Poetry Evenings-Kolkata’s International Poetry Festival and managing editor of Verseville.

 

If I Could 

If I were a travelling air
without any bony cage,
moral circuits and routes

blowing to the will of paddy fields
smelling the sexual union
of grass roots with wet soil

I would swoop and lift the infant souls
of dead harvested crops

fetching them to their seeds
and allow them to breathe me again.

Rachael Mead

Rachael Mead is a novelist and award-winning poet and short story writer, with her creative work appearing widely in Australia and internationally. She’s the author of the novel The Application of Pressure (Affirm Press 2020) and four collections of poetry including The Flaw in the Pattern (UWAP 2018). In 2019, she spent a month in the Taleggio Valley in Northern Italy on an eco-poetry residency awarded by Australian Poetry.

 

It takes a mountain to raise a cheese 
A golden shovel of Terrance Hayes’ ‘Lighthead’s Guide to the Galaxy’

You want answers, so immediately I’m in a panicked state.
What is a regenerative economy, anyway? I’m a writer. My time
is spent exploring on foot, trying to see things differently to others
like the way the piode is a jigsaw from below but from above is a roof.
That’s a bit simplistic. Trying to give you answers is making me careless,
the way I get back to the room, pull off my boots and sling my bra
not even looking to see where it falls. Some think nature is all about sex
but I’m leaning in another direction. I’m missing the moonlight.
All this walking has me in bed with the sun, weighing the valley’s life
and trying to piece it together with words. You want me to show my thinking
but resisting the seduction of witness and metaphor is not easy to overcome.
It’s as if you’ve offered the finest single malt whiskey but refused me the ice.
I’m trying to be critical and speculative but I’m just grinding out the syllables,
constructing poems from form, allusion and a well-thumbed catalogue of words.
I’m great at questions, seeing how problems connect, replicate themselves —
but critical speculation? I’m a dog yapping at unseen dangers. I can’t say
what should happen here, the possibilities clamouring so I can’t tell prank calls
from those with something important to say. The word on the street
is it’s better to ignore what you see. Go with what you perceive.
My bedroom window is black with possibility. This arrangement
feels impossible. What can I offer? I walk. I watch. I make poetry.
If only I was more original, walking around like a pregnant woman
confident in the form of her creation, her offspring welcome among us.
I’m not used to being so beyond my depth. As a wife
I can fake it, clean the house before guests arrive. (Don’t think about that.)
But here, all the surfaces are peeled away, lack of faith in myself
laid bare in these echoing lines. I scratch pen on pages to start fires.
The answers are needed, the world staring down its own destruction
and here I sit twiddling around with rhythm and the fall of a word.
Beyond my window, the darkness resolves into birdsong and branches.
Grass will grow. Cheese will be eaten. These futures are not empty yet.
But I’m not so deaf that I can’t hear this valley whimper.
It’s just that I’ve no particular claim to wisdom –
only the ability to watch, witness and fill with the pities
of someone gifted in seeing backwards. It’s a leash,
the tug of it jerking my head as I peer into the night’s
potential – ghostly, nebulous and keeping me from sleep.

OJO Taiye

Ojo Taiye is a young Nigerian poet who uses poetry as a handy tool to hide his frustration with society. He also makes use of collage and sample technique. He is the winner of many prestigious awards including the 2021 Hay Writer’s Circle Poetry Competition, 2021 Cathalbui Poetry Competition, Ireland.

 

 

All quiet on the fire front 

What is it that makes me see myself
more loving than the capitalist world?
Every time I watch the news my heart
goes out to the lonely orphan bear.

Look: there, as when a cone explodes
during a flare, another dog lay lifeless
on the charred ground, staring at a falling
pylon—the quieting chorus of ruin. Nothing

is blooming today & a man in my mother’s
village is breathing and asking— will the
water be gentle with me as it rises? I’m long
past hopeful and yes, beyond upset, I wish I

could say they’re just animals and my mother
is not sick. Still everything that is burning has
a name. Always something fragile and my father
looks up at me and sighs. We’ve lived in many

shelters. Even after the mud slide, a river slopes
along my heart to forget, for a second, the volume
of destruction. The thing about summer is: it doesn’t
come as joyful as it did once. If we are talking a-

bout a feverish planet, a thick pall of smoke still
hangs over my country’s green lungs. There is a
premonition before a ruin. Every herder I have
ever met said something about drought. More

drought. Or maybe to ruin the moment of camping,
a thousand heat-strokes & oh, there is famine too—

Monique Lyle

Monique Lyle is a DCA candidate with the writing centre at Western Sydney University. She is currently completing her first manuscript, The Park, which explores her experiences growing up in Sydney Housing Commission in the 90’s. Recently her work has appeared in Overland, Flash Cove, Otoliths, Plumwood Mountain and also Dance Research.

 

a shark

when
i
found am
out
in the garden half
dead
in the weeds
half
floating
in
a pond you
think
of pigeons
and flutter
bies in
over grown grass
field you
think of a
fly
landing on damp.

if a
little
girl is
all alone left
there
will be no
eat there will be
no
sucksuck
there
won’t be any water melon. there
only
will be
tiny hand tiny
arm
tiny
cock roach crawling. by time the
mary
there get
it
will be late too—
eve taken will
have
already
apple cleaned
pinstripe
suit even gorgeous
lips.

when you are
in
an
over grown field with a
bee
on your
knee
and stinging nettle. when
a
purple flutter
bye
lands on a
yellow
dandelion
flower another
bug will
be
there with it
when a
root pushes
into
wet
brown mud, a
small green leaf
lives under
water.
when a small
green
ball
attaches itself
to
underwater, a blue
fish
lands on a
shark
flattening itself
out onto it when a red
critter
scurries through the ocean.
i
her
saw
jagged in the
garden an
out
distance coming one
zig
zag
arm another
zig
zag
leg another
coming
close
in
swimming
zone
i
a shark and
you here
no

Lisa Nan Joo

Lisa Nan Joo lives on Gadigal land and is an emerging writer of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. Her work has previously appeared in Kill Your Darlings, Strange Horizons, Meniscus, Seizure Online and Spineless Wonders.

 

 

Plastic Nation

In the end, it feels inevitable. The floating island of plastic is declared a new nation, and becomes the world’s foremost thalassocracy. Ambassadors of PVC and polyethylene squabble over the borders, and stake claims for distinct nation-states among the sea-drift. New language emerges from the percussion of waste: the voice of the sea, but woven into a tapestry of six-pack rings and fishing nets. It sounds like a wave trapped in a torn plastic bag. The new nation sends out armies: swift, many-limbed proxies that surround and submerge their landed enemies, until the old borders mean nothing. The nation buries itself in the skin of the ocean, stretching until it’s fit to burst, and then it purges itself on the shores of the new world, and buries itself here, too, leaving no survivors, implanting itself into the canopy, the humus, the bedrock, the fossil record. Accelerating towards the erasure of organic materiality. The earth is an endling. The last of its species, abandoned to deep time.

Lawdenmarc Decamora

Lawdenmarc Decamora is a Best of the Net and Pushcart Prize-nominated writer with work published in 23 countries around the world. He is the author of three book-length poetry collections, Love, Air (Atmosphere Press, 2021), TUNNELS (Ukiyoto Publishing, 2021), and Handsome Hope which is forthcoming from Yorkshire Publishing in 2022. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in places like The Common, The Seattle Review, Columbia Review, North Dakota Quarterly, California Quarterly, Cordite Poetry Review, AAWW’s The Margins, and elsewhere. His poetry will be anthologized in The Best Asian Poetry 2021 and had recently appeared in the best-selling Meridian: The APWT Drunken Boat Anthology of New Writing. In the UK, Lawdenmarc’s poetry was long-listed for The Alpine Fellowship Writing Prize 2021 and shortlisted for Aesthetica Creative Writing Award 2021 (Aesthetica Magazine). He was an August 2021 alumnus of the Tupelo Press 30/30 Project of the US-based Tupelo Press, and is also a member of the Asia Pacific Writers & Translators (APWT). He lives in the Philippines where he teaches literature at the oldest existing Catholic university in Asia, the University of Santo Tomas (UST).

 

A Love Story

A kind of relationship developed between C and D.
The former was from a sacred temple, the latter
in an abandoned carnival park. One day a silvery
slope of tiny metal was found packed in an aluminum
foil paper. Glimmering in the glue of sunset
was curiosity. D thought it was chocolate;
C cherished it and both became friends. Soon,
lovers. There’s however a potential health risk
in chocolates, experts said. The two paid no attention
and their cadmium addiction soared 10, 000 feet
into the sky. They wrestled with toxicity, a sex
of pain and smoke parachuting. Earlier C saw D
hiding from tubes among books, hallucinating.
C’s worried face triply glowed. D handed the latter
a transcript underlining a note that read: “Cadmium
is thought to cause anxiety in monkeys.” Their eyes
paused, murmuring, But we are lovers made of chocolate.
Night entered. And for the last time, the two macaques
pleasured themselves in the chaos of ambulance
lights, right before the next laboratory experiment.

Jennifer Compton

Jennifer Compton lives in Melbourne and is a poet and playwright who also writes prose. Her 11th book of poetry, the moment, taken was published by Recent Work Press in 2021.

 

An Abandonment

I had done everything I could do within reason
­  ­   ­  ­   for the ragged rows of broad beans,
their juices were often thick on my fingers

­  ­   ­  ­   from their first unfurling in mid winter
to the pinching out of the growing tips,
­  ­   ­  ­   their binding to a stake in late spring.

And then the harvest, soon the harvest done,
­  ­   ­  ­   and I had brushed through their ranks,
turned hands of leaves upside down,

­  ­   ­  ­   bent for a better view of their private quarters,
against the sun, the way it is when picking,
­  ­   ­  ­   nobody likes the low sun full in their eyes.

Their business at an end, I wrenched them from the earth,
­  ­   ­  ­   laid their lanky stems one upon another,
did not regret their wilting sigh, their quick dying breath.

­  ­   ­  ­   And clouds and clouds and clouds of ladybirds
crept out from the interstices, showed themselves, and flew.
­  ­   ­  ­   It was the very opposite of a plague,

because ladybirds do good work, no doubt about it,
­  ­   ­  ­   but it was very like that sort of thing.
And more and more and more, and then more, a wonder.

­  ­   ­  ­   They had kept themselves to themselves until
an acrid scent, or an orientation to the sun, or a sudden
­  ­   ­  ­   knowledge underfoot of sap not rising,

lifted them into an urgency of leaving.

Greg Page

Greg Page is a Koori Poet from the La Perouse community at Kamay (Botany Bay). He holds an M.A. in Creative Writing from UTS in Sydney and has been published in the Australian Poetry Journal and the Koori Mail. He lives on unceded Bidjigal land. Dox him at linktr.ee/boypage.

 

 

Barbed Wire

Earlier poems on barbed wire have proved unsatisfactory
Not that I know any, but if they were worthwhile I probably would
There’s no bigger symbol of the invasion
And the continent is still covered in the stuff

It might be offensive to talk about barbed wire
Perhaps not as plain rude as asking someone’s salary
A wealthy person’s salary that is
I’ll quite naturally admit my $16k annual jobseeker rate

Rust has a kind of beauty to it
Did they think through what happens to discarded industrial metal items?
‘We all have to go so we may as well go down the gurgler with microplastics’
Perhaps edible plastics might solve all our problems

There’s nothing hidden about the violence of barbed wire
That’s the thing I like most about it
It’s honest truth telling — a voice to Parliament
The ongoing mesh network communicating terror on the frontier

At the speed of light your sadnesses prove ineffective
Good intentions and Koalas are no match for intentional bulldozers
There’s a lot of uncertainty on the land these days
Good labour is so difficult to find even at $16k