Memoir

This Must Be Very Strange

Hila Shachar

One of the things about having synaesthesia that I’ve only become aware of in the past few years is that I smell certain music. There is a scene in Robert Guédiguian’s film L’Armée du crime (2009) that suddenly and loudly inserts klezmer music as it shows the actors throwing down a bright-red poster from a bridge.

How My Black and Indigenous Grandparents Remind Me of My White Privilege

Natalia Figueroa Barroso

Dang, sorry. This is only available to a Meanjin subscriber. But we can fix that. It’s just $100 for a print subscription, $5 for a monthly digital subscription, and $50 for an annual digital subscription. DIGITAL PRINT

Scripture of the Heaviest Kind

Madison Griffiths

‘History begins with someone else’s memory of you.’ This is how Julia Cohen opens her essay on abortion for the New England Review, and I know this because I have been relentlessly scouring the internet for essays on abortion and for poems, song lyrics and admissions of any kind. History begins with someone else’s memory of you, and my mother tells me that, as I pressed steadily on the fleshy walls of her womb 28 years ago while she lay in the rickety restored cubbyhouse she shared with my father, a home brief and unassuming, she knew me. She couldn’t […]

Gulp, Swallow

Brooke Boland

Leavings

Jessica L. Wilkinson

Meeting Selena

Sue Hall Pyke

Piscine Epiphanies

James Walton

I got a little pissed last evening. The label said ‘Vote Responsibly’, a fundraiser. The frozen fish and chips were cooking in the oven, yes, I know the contradiction there. Dancing to Nina Simone, in a way that disturbed the cat, unused to a show of less inhibition. Still, I sang along as best I could, a little hop here and there. I realised I don’t know any fish. A deep hypocrisy overcame me.

The Child in Me

Na'ama Carlin

The day Sydney’s COVID numbers broke 600, I booked in for a week-13 structural ultrasound. Becoming pregnant during New South Wales’s COVID-19 pandemic has been a struggle. Weeks on end of lockdown, without hope of seeing family or friends, removed from the world as much as possible. The heaviness of lockdown sits deep inside the body, a weight carried in the bones. Sitting also in my body is a strange, emerging life, one that I had never imagined hosting.

Exposure

Alexander Wells

When you play elite soccer, you have to be fast. At the youth state trials, the coach said, ‘You boys gotta believe in your potential. Anyone can be coached—anyone who isn’t slow, I mean.’ Did everyone look over at me? I probably imagined it. But my body remembers the shame, which came like goosebumps. I did not make the team. Now, a decade on, I would give anything for what speed I had back then. It is not just that I’m older. For almost four years I’ve been seriously ill with an unspecified condition whose main symptoms include weakness and […]

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