States of Poetry
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There’s two points of view about country, there’s a whitefella way of looking at country: seeing country as commodity, things they can take from the land and what they can make of it that can be useful. In my country there’s a lot of minerals. From diamond, gold, copper, oil, you name it. It’s all there for the taking. There is also uranium and gas. This country is very rich they say. B ...
Sleeping under a blanket, half asleep, I wrapped myself tightly, feeling the warmth after a cold night. I thought I was in a dream and wished it would be a good one. And as I spoke to myself about what this generation had to do with me, and the purpose in this life I’ve been given, all of a sudden I went into a deep dream. It happened so fast, it was like being sucked into a tunnel through a ...
It’s been years and it’s never been raining, a sign of weather patterns at work in the creamy blue skies. An elder looked up and noticed a single cloud formation appeared. It was going towards a significant place. The cloud was very small and very dark and yet it still didn’t rain.
On this earth we walk the grassy plains with sun bleached sensitive skin sucked up by the heat, and ...
Once upon a time the crocodile was a human being. And then one day, one particular day his heart became hard and when his heart became harder, his flesh became hard and when his flesh became harder his skin became hard, and when his skin became harder it transformed into the scales on his back, deeply cut wounds that have never been healed.
He developed a taste for blood, he ripped open ...
Poet and painter Edwin Lee Mulligan was born in Derby in 1980. He is also known by his traditional name, Warrda Lumbadij Bundajarrdi. He grew up in Yakanarra and now resides in Noonkanbah in the central Kimberley and in Broome. His grandfather Jimmy Pike is a well-known Walmajarri artist and is the reason why ...
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David Stavanger
...O Hail! to the days of wine and typhus,
the arrangements of battlefields in early spring,
the glory of a factory that rifts your body
before it wipes your mind, religions vivid
as blood sacrifice. Rise up King Pepe!
Pwn the noob descending the staircase,
these Chads will know the beta’s far cry.
PTSD was straightforward
when you could just belt your ...
Annamaria Weldon’s writing residency with Symbiotica UWA prompted the poems, essays, and photographs of Yalgorup National Park in her last book, The Lake’s Apprentice
the text read:
Kissing you under an umbrella in rain
makes my list of favourite things;
a lunch crowd streamed around us.
we, dry in a cylinder,
sealed with that old golf umbrella’s
nylon night sky far from city lights –
I don’t recall why I didn’t walk you.
maybe the rain put its hands in pockets,
whistled east on Murray St ...
you opt for form over colour
makeup smudged lenses
pale bare planes by the lakes;
a cygnet ellipsis in black
parenthetical necks;
white sky reflected in high water.
we sit where I have stayed
and watched an oak open and close –
green again – the bench
suspended on ampersands.
Chris Arnold
...