So, shiftless summer’s advance stills everything.
It’s the new normal. The effect of the heat the wind twists through
is like Link Wray’s slow drag of chords with his right
right across ‘Rumble’, only played through an amplified hairdryer.

A reworking of Ezra Pound’s ‘Salutation’ for the 21st Century
O generation of the absolutely online
And absolutely connected,
I have seen fisherpeople on YouTube,
I have seen them with their unreliable internet,

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

The word we used was mellowed   and maybe he really had towards the end— but Victor took the jug cord   to the boys for years. For half a life he whirred like a rowing machine. Barb said she heard the grunts of effort between the strokes from her yard   across the creek; and that her bloke, Steady Brad, as he was known before the brainbleed, once wondered   why that effing forklift driver couldn’t just unload, until he clocked the ruckus was coming from inside the mullet-stinking, guano-spattered   weatherboard, two or three abandoned Holdens further up […]

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

I was two days old when my mother left me in a pram outside Stammers & went home. She said she felt oddly lighter though it took a while to realise what was missing. Nobody noticed me. I might have been a window. For those twenty minutes the separation slipped by me. Mum was on her knees scrubbing floors in a convent by age seven. Her mother had been left in an orphanage & so it goes. Back to coda. You left a daughter with nuns & sailed away on your violin. So many women with habits that would never […]

1892–1938   The sadness in a single poem has kept me half-awake all night— Cesár Vallejo’s To My Brother   Miguel, in memoriam. For many years I offered it to college students via translations,   rickety but adequate, and every time it left them silent, shocked amid their efflorescence.   Two little boys play hide-and-seek up and down the house, Cesár Vallejo and his brother,   their mama calling out to quiet them. At times they make each other cry by hiding irretrievably   in all those corridors and shadows. Then one night, nor far from dawn, Miguel hides away […]

In the crumbling church there’s a bone of a saint the Romans boiled in olive oil.   A coat hanger is a deformed cross that has outlived the golden vestments of the priests.   In her office on the hill the virgin’s ears intact in fake fur. She’ll stare forever at the very same stars that wheel above the world of the true night.   A forgotten swamp’s refilled to the level of the recalled banks and the swifts return each dusk to the paper map spread out candlelit, and illumined as their valley.   Adam Aitken’s memoir One Hundred […]