On the dawn of the solstice, under a sky washed clean of clouds, through the cold air cut with woodsmoke, through the piñon-juniper hills, the quiet comes singing. The quiet takes the shape of a woman. Frost in her hair, mud on her boots, a woman comes singing down the hills, her voice a holy…
I grew up a foreigner in my own country. I was born in Australia to Greek immigrants, but my parents were born in Egypt, not Greece. So I grew up a Greek-Egyptian boy in Australia, a cultural mix that was a target for racism. There wasn’t much room to fit in. In the 1970s, Bondi…
On the beach my belly rippled, thick with the baby… I watched a child’s head go under, and not resurface. Where was the mother? Gone. Unthinking, I ran into the waves. Gentle they were, like silk around my bairn. I struck out towards the darkened hair. Behind my closed eyes, lies the curve of the…
Somewhere two kids are leaving the kitchen. Somewhere, a mother has given instructions. Can you two do a job for me? Go and pick up the milk from the gate. It’s one of those days where the Southerly has swept the sky clean. You’re wearing denim dungarees. The label on the front says SKIN JEANS.…
I am three and I am running away. I am running away from my brother and my sister and into the water falling from the sky. They wear togs. My sisters are dark blue like the moana when there’s about to be thunder. The frills at the hips are wavy shades of sunshine. My brother…
I watch the road. I live in a little copse of trees and I keep a fire waiting for strangers. I am a transmutating thing—I can form into fog or a pack of rats. I like best to transform into an owl, the most vicious owl, and I tap tap tap on people’s windows and…
One summer the clouds changed into whales. Before that happened it had been one of those disquiet summers. People had stopped at the seashore to watch lightning storms gathering on the horizon; they had quit their jobs and their failed marriages, instead massing lazily in the city’s parks; they had complained about the heat and…
We need a setting for this story, but nobody can afford a garden anymore, there’s Covid in the bars, and the seas aren’t safe to swim in. The chateau by the mountain was unprofitable and fell into disrepair. The sports fields aren’t fit for use after the floods. Where do we go, but our apartments…
Every twenty-eight days, the poets posted pictures of the full moon in the group chat. ‘Wife looking horny tonight,’ they wrote. ‘So hot.’ ‘Harvest Wife, resplendent in fog.’ In life, it was true, the full moon magicked the sad city and its rumpled harbour. In life, it was huge and magnetic. In the photos, though,…
Before my first appointment, I walk through drizzly Newtown, my shoes belching. Personal bias, maybe, but to me this place has always seemed like a cartoon dog with a giant rain cloud over its head. It makes complete sense that here, in 1903, a gardener would have made a formal request for half a tonne…