The Orcanauts

The drylanders call me White Gladis, the devil fish of Gibraltar. Since the war began, my pod and I have sunk three of their vessels and damaged a hundred more. We have yet to devour any of the invaders, but we will. Only last week a foolish drylander tacked his yacht away from the coast to avoid our territory. Our sentries spotted him, alone upon the waves. I gripped the rudder of his boat between my teeth and forced him to change direction towards the calves. I have been training them in battle tactics. The human tried to wrench back control of his vessel. Knowing his puny hands were on the wheel, I tugged the rudder violently, causing him to lose his grip and stagger. He almost fell over the side.

Terrified, he collected himself and switched on the engine. This enraged me further. I commanded the first strike team of calves to ram the hull. Their snouts were unable to penetrate the fibreglass. Under full engine power and aided by the wind, the drylander fled towards the shallows. We let him go, singing to him of empires fallen, as a warning.

Bonfire

It was a loud dinner. Everything was loud. The murmuring soundtrack of free jazz seemed to emphasise laughs and guffaws. He grew drunker and drunker and toyed with his food, which no one even noticed. Normally, he would wolf down everything they cooked, but he twisted his fork in the spaghetti and just kept twisting. As he was on serving duty, he cleared it up without anyone even registering he’d barely taken a bite.

Survey

But I have long lost my personal thread to this place, I realise, and thinking of this loss I almost feel mournful for a former life I see now as though in the third person, a life belonging to an altogether different man. Perhaps it is for the best that those old threads are cut, for it means I am free of them.

Exemplary 

The superego’s unvarying verdict: you have failed, you deserve it, get over it!  Stay in your own psychotic micro-enclave,  opining about enactment...

Fraser Gehrig after a dirty bump

Under floodlight he is beautiful a jacked and tanned bench presser who in preparation small stepped  on buffalo grass to hear the...

For my ex (an unforgiving poem)

Trust me when I wished you an eventful summer by which I meant processing yourself like a tardy  Microsoft update You will...

December 27

Sundown’s skies are warm like a picnic – scuffs of cloud like shiny scarabs jewelled into the evening’s tide. I sit...

picker

light’s tacked to the window i  want it to pick at me eat  me like fairy floss or a scab you  say...

Mapping my queer lineage 

When I graduated from high school, I was finally free to leave – to venture beyond the borders and confinements of my small town to search for something I inherently knew was missing from my life. And so, at seventeen years of age, I sped down the well-worn Carnarvon Highway towards an uncertain future.

The return of the femcel 

Where male incels blame feminism for their inability to get laid, femcels identify misogyny, power imbalances and unrealistic beauty standards as the cause of their struggles. Unlike previous waves of political lesbianism, the #femcelrights movement to opt out of sexual relations with men is more of a signal than a concrete commitment.

Real men eat meat

Men eat meat. And if a man does not, his masculinity will be in question; emasculation shall be his malnourishment. Many of us today mock the ‘real men eat meat’ refrain. Yet society still insists that meat consumption is a marker of manliness – and the redder the meat, the manlier the man.

No place like home

There are more than 4.4 million disabled people in Australia. We constitute 18 per cent of the population, and over 90 per cent of us live in private dwellings. Yet only 5 per cent of private houses built here meet national accessibility standards.