Ben Walter
Ben Walter’s poetry, fiction, and essays have been widely published in Australian journals, including Meanjin, Island, Southerly, and The Lifted Brow. His début novel manuscript was the winner of the people’s choice category in the 2017 Tasmanian Premier’s Literary Prizes. He won the 2016 John Shaw Neilson Poetry Award, and was runner-up in Overland’s VU Short Story Prize. His latest book is Conglomerate, published as part of the Lost Rocks series.
The old dust was left behind;it hatched crystals, snowflakes,a multiverse dining with itself around a table.
Heart twigs beat against the breath andwinding legs patrol a speck of flesh;red neurons fire the sedge, slip below the iris of lagoon.
Shuffle the pool,there are diamonds;numberless suits,a face.
The dry has blinked.The tear can’t miss.
Ben Walter
'Line Up, Teeming' first appeared ... (read more)
if we are straws slurpingat this pool, it is to slake our own thirst; we have claimed this land as ten thousand flagpoles needing no flag, but we are gentle sceptres;a nest dispersed and cradling paper wings.
this silt: our home, where all legs hurry as their days dry up;this rot: our mother,tadpole to sedge. and sowe murmur the rhythmsof frogs when our stringsare plucked by breeze;we are instrum ... (read more)
walk hard –
grains of weather glitter like the night has sunk, streaks of thin stars, light rain sharpening the scrub; we are small, so small in the draining sky as squalls stroke searching for our skin.sweat-slumped on tussocks, raw pools smoking in the famished sun.
dragging mud across my knees,I whip my skin with shards. words are blunt in whisperings of gust.
walk hard –
no honour now ... (read more)
While we circled space,the paint-stained grass and the dogs in-and-outhuffing their thoughts, he’d told us how they tried to gill our work and rest in languid backyard bays. The bolts in rock, firm in life and death, were nowexempt from clasping hooks to bring the bait aboard, protected like the tiger, like the quolls;like rocks, we thoughtlike rocks and sand and water. Well, rules drift out wit ... (read more)