Dang, sorry. This is only available to a Meanjin subscriber. But we can fix that. It’s just $80 for print or $50 for digital. DIGITAL PRINT

Dang, sorry. This is only available to a Meanjin subscriber. But we can fix that. It’s just $80 for print or $50 for digital. DIGITAL PRINT

Our third date, at the same bar as our first, elbows edging across a cold, polished table top.   Our second date, an anomaly, at a Chinese restaurant, its patrons elbow-to-elbow. we were confused by ours so close to theirs, and by each other.   Forbes once said (in a poem): ‘continually disappoint the expectations of others, this way you will come to hate yourself & they will be charmed by your distress.’   As I wait for my hand to find yours, I chant it to myself, a mantra for our parting, our eyes spearing at the dark.   […]

The summer I turned seven my father went missing. The earth opened her mouth wider than before and we stopped at Jimmy’s for dinner. Dad ordered salt and pepper squid and a side of salad. I wanted a Bubble O’Bill but I got a slap on the back and cod with lemon.   The next morning the beach was open still but my father’s factory was closed. A paradox like the weather: it was hot, a real hot bastard of a day, Dad said hot as hell. But inside our house and in Glenelg it was cold.   In the […]

puffing durries in the lavender evening my ex-fiancée and i wander down the rd my wheelchair slanting by her swinging cripple swagger. she has that look she gets on the bad days like she’s fighting off a migraine by sheer will alone. in the fading half-light her eyes appear almost colourless underlined by deep grey she looks straight ahead jaw tense hands at her sides she is so beautiful that it hurts a little to look at her. when i turn away my vision is filled with whirling sunspots and my heart aches a little but in a good way […]

Slippery vinyl, cold glass,
the old smoke of your uncle’s embrace,
pulse flamenco dancing,
as streetlights smudge to neon
in the click and hiss of an aluminium can.

The day has been hot, the day has been too much. I stand outside the back door at dusk and call the dogs.  There are not many things in this world that glow, that are willing to hold the light.  These gardenias, ghostly against their dark green leaves; the waxing moon, a day more than half and heading for full.  They catch each other in the gloom, seem to be signalling something too subtle for my eyes.  Here I am. Here am I, too.  Roger that.  Beyond this faint recognition, I really don’t know. The horses’ tails mark out time, […]

My hands can recall the memory of your hands, holding as familiar as the turn of a doorknob, a kitchen knife clenched in a fist. When I unfetter, you’ll find someone new to run fingers over the framework of your ribs, cradle your calcaneus, read your scelestic liver and scrimshaw with twinned palms: my coiling tendons gone soft, wingspan of my phalanx bones woven to hold little birds in their nests.   Shastra Deo was born in Fiji and lives in Brisbane. Her first book, The Agonist (UQP, 2017), won the 2016 Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize and the 2018 ALS […]

The finch knows mainly one thing: its joy is full of it, body aquiver   with sensible fears of what today might slide shadowy over it.   The finch knows to keep each eye on each side of its world   as it splashes in a roadside puddle of light and sand and broken water.   The finch knows mainly this one thing. Its love is full of it. It fills trees   with twisting flight. The finch plays close to others out of fearful love   and disappears into leafy worlds when the near wind hisses   like a […]

A poem addressed to Edgar Allan Poe   I had been alive for 39 circumnavigations of the sun,   and I had stopped dreaming—it seemed once and for all. I had no desire for the terror of unreason, for those disturbances   in the dark that you lazily mistook for art. Sleep was a velvet sack. It blacked out the world, without help from the pharmaceutical. I counted myself cured. But then my husband went to hospital to bypass death, and I found myself  thrust back into nightmares of powerlessness. My father was waiting in my childhood home, stooped before […]

An edge cut between lawn and garden bed, dark and wet, pleases me. I scarce believe it exists, so virtual it’s been.   Dahlias turn to the sun, blaze. What is it to be stem, leaf, flower from spring through autumn, tuber all winter.   Alliums dip earthward, shower seeds from starry umbels. Onions in flower beds next season. Transgressions happen.   My feet sink into the lawn’s green sward. Each blade strains toward the lovely curve, the damp, bare earth, ready to cross   from the real to the real, underground and over, stitching cat mint, lamb’s ear, bee […]

O allegro, O accelerando, O vivacissimo, I call upon you now, thalamus and hypothalamus, stop drumming up your adrenalin when I love. My lover says if I can’t be with him now he’ll probably give himself to another, not for sex, but for maturity; no, not for maturity, for true love indeed—and he says he will never forget me too quickly. O allegro con spirito, O molto allegro, O allegretto maestoso! What a torrent in his mouth when he calls my forehead Suzuki and my nose Asashi! The identical beat hoofing on each vowel rushes me to love this, this, […]