Journal
Articles
Colour theory
I’d graduated to skimming transcripts on the Supreme Court website when Susy found the eyeball. There was a feral screech and a minute later she was standing in the doorway to my bedroom. What is that thing in the fridge? When I played dumb, she said in the blue Tupperware. What the actual fuck?
Back to the red earth
Before she opens her eyes, she knows with the very same certainty that she is of this land that Juanjo, her lover and the father of her five guris, isn’t going to be asleep by her side. But she could for once be wrong. So, she stretches out her arm and feels around. Instead, her fingertips touch his perfectly tucked-in bedsheet. His side of the bed is vacant like the rows of this year’s failed crop.
Have you ever seen the rain?
One by one the streets quietened down. A great hush washed over this city. Even the lights at night seemed dimmer. All of life lay dormant. Or maybe not – Toru couldn’t trust his eyes, could he? He had been living on the streets in the clothes he died in, scrounging food from tables outside restaurants and cafés around the city, but those tables were long gone.
Autumn
Tsunami-hit, shoved over at a tilt, they’ve left the bashed old kovil’s god-thronged tower standing, tallish, beyond the new one built to face, this time, becalm, the ocean’s power…
New Scientist
A body we can read and understand. If only I could put you under a microscope and transform you into a symbol to unite our disciplines: the communication phage.
Antecedent
Between one end of the gap and the other the gravity of our gaze can but scratch like banksias at your fingertips before starlight splits the present across his teeth into pearl and lime stanzas.
Medea – towards the end
She wanted to confuse the staff and brings in a pebble from the garden as suggested, placing it into the pocket of the man in the next room.
Rare
There are many ways to carry a story. My father smothered his stories with bravado. Here he is, laughing at the sea drenching him on the deck.
A Little Box
And didn’t I grant you six identical faces, each perfectly plain as the other and a sturdy mouth to clasp shut?
Reading the room
But if writing and reading about books means we’re ‘perpetually stressed and disappointed with book reviewing’, I can’t help but wonder if this recurrent hand-wringing demands more than to be defended or disputed on the grounds of accuracy or defensibility alone. Are book reviews ‘good’ or ‘bad’? Is the ‘soft vs snark’ binary real?
How can you write a novel without killing it?
On this land that has, for many millennia, seen the flourishing of language upon language, and now finds itself home to a population of which almost 30 per cent were born overseas, translation is part of our national identity.
Consuming content
‘Do food bloggers realize how awful their recipe pages are?’ a Reddit user innocently enquires in a thread I stumble across while googling food blogs bad. ‘Do they take reader satisfaction into account?’ According to more than 600 replies, the answer is largely no.