Category: Past issues

1 | 2 Another Family Photo   ‘Nola! Here, take a snap of us with Mum.’ Frank, Nola’s younger brother, hands her the Box Brownie. The southerly whips around the station and in and out between the people on the platform, throwing dust into eyes, forcing those who were keeping…

1 | 2 The First Family Photograph   The photograph was Ralph’s idea. He had saved for months to buy himself a camera. ‘You’ll see, I’m going to be famous for my photography,’ he said. Not short on dreams, your brother,’ said Ed to May. But he did agree to…

Love Is a Rose?   We swung off the tarseal and crunched down the drive, loaded with camping gear and Coronas. I braked hard at the shed door and laid on the horn. I sat, stilling myself in a deep breath and let my sister jump out ahead of me.…

Junk Mail   Angie’s hand hovered over the letterboxes of the Crystal Lake Apartments, as she looked through the French doors into the living room of a unit on the ground floor. This apartment, which faced a tiny paved patio adjoining the street, was now furnished; someone had moved in.…

1 | 2 | 3 Mary in the colonies The hills bother me, until I notice the quarry, and Mary poking up like a tadpole totem, a white telegraph waisted in trees praying to a radiata hillside being scoured of topsoil by a yellow grader, the black mud. What kind…

1 | 2 | 3 Red Squirrel (Lesvós)   In the house you have rented the bathroom faces the valley, you open the window wide when showering, light on the hills, a daily iridescence. It is good to scan the long field of figs, the trees warped with age, the…

1 | 2 | 3 Between Tzidrá and Hídera (Lesvós) April sweats in the olive groves their deceptive flowers as camouflaged as the trunks’ true fruit grey backed basin of leaf (black of fall nets just memory) peasant feet packed in stone. Donkeys vanish in dappling shadows thin and bracketed by…

1 | 2 Excerpt from Waiata of waiting ono we forget the beds where we were smacked to life we sleep with a velvet body beneath our feet to energise our knees, and we know to fold them up rising out of the real; as we entered all spirits separated; it…

1 | 2 Polar drift We flew south, as far south as possible over virgin paper snow, time’s blank to a region where every point leads north and peering through obscurity in that eternity between Oh and Look! a three-headed dog appeared; all the snakes of his perfect tail undulated,…

the night is steel blue   the night is steel blue wind-wild, unquiet i turn my face to you there are hundreds of ways to show mercy       relinquish light the night is steel blue if i could surrender too one thread as gracefully as day pranams to…