When E returned from London he bought home some UK poetry journals. This week I have been stop-start reading a recent edition of Poetry Wales (Winter 2025, Volume 61, No.2). Gwenhwyfar Ferch Rhys is a poet and spoken word artist from Scotland and Wales. I couldn’t find a full version of her brilliant poem Two truths and a lie online, but here is an extract:

A fun fact about me is that: I grew up in boarding school.

But nothing happened, so I don’t mention it. Most of the time I don’t remember.

…

The older girls dressed me up as ‘Olivia’ though I don’t really like the name.

And I was more mature for the fact that I went with it anyway.

…

It had already been decided

by the doctor, that I was a boy.

A fun fact about me is that: I grew up boarding in someone else’s body.

The doctor lent me one - a boy that time - but I can’t find where to return it

(Extract from Two truths and a lie, published in Poetry Wales, Winter Edition, 2025)

I find this piece to be a real shapeshifter, in form and content. It’s one I’ve returned to over the last few days.

Finally, a recommendation from the brilliant The Paris End led me to Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty. Winner of the 2004 Man Booker Prize, it simmers with elements of Brideshead Revisited and Saltburn, but unlike Charles Ryder and Oliver Quick, I really wanted things to turn out OK for Nick Guest.

The book spans eighty-three, eighty-six and eighty-seven, the beginning and crushing centre of the AIDS crisis. But the pandemic is barely mentioned until towards the end, when it becomes apparent that it was always a background character waiting to step into a much larger role.

This is not a review. There is no order to the below, apart from the position in the pile next to my writing desk. I have found something to enjoy in all.

1. Poetry:

Collected Poems, A.D Hope (A & R Modern Poets, Angus & Robinson Publishers)

2. Books:

The Mule’s Foal, Fontini Epanomitis (Allen & Unwin) / The Line of Beauty, Alan Hollinghurst (Picador Books)

3. Other

When E was away for his sister’s wedding, F and I stayed home and spent a lot of time together. I devoured a couple of new ABC shows after bedtime: Treasure & Dirt and New Zealand Spy. I also took a Friday off work and went to see an eleven am showing of The Odyssey, spent a fortune on books at Readings, Carlton and sat in the sun for a bit. Solo parenting is a tough gig, you are always on shift, even when at your ‘official’ job. But the reality of it forced me to slow down. So what if we spent an extra five minutes in the carpark while F ‘drove the car’? Or if she went to bed a little later. We just had to stay calm long enough with each other to survive.

A couple of mornings before E returned home we went for a babychino at ML Patisserie in South Melbourne (amazing fruit-shaped ganache desserts btw) and on the walk up the hill to daycare she insisted we sit on the step outside the closed offices of an Architecture firm to ‘just watch the traffic Mummy’ and finish our drinks. That I would recommend.

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You can also pick up a copy of my collection Gentle Creatures (Vagabond Press, 2023). Click the images below to be redirected to the publishers’ websites.

                                             atticpoet.com | @theatticpoet on IG

If I had more time I’d cook all her snacks from scratch, prepare overnight oats in perfect lightning jars. I’d make fudge from avocados and cacao. I’d rise with the workers on the nearby construction site to pluck fresh herbs from a garden that would flourish and never die. The warmth from the oven would heat half the house. I would introduce F to homemade hummus.

In this version she doesn’t stand at the fridge saying mummy I want something, I ask, what do you want? To which she’ll reply something and may eventually (under her breath) whisper the words cheese or mango. By this stage she is usually hanging off the shelf where the milk is kept. I can hear the plastic buckling. I’ve chosen an extra half-hour of sleep or a walk on my lunch-break rather than roasting sweet potato. While I decide what to do for dinner she sits on the bench top, sucking down a pouch of yogurt and eating slices of chicken. This evening I am boiling water for frozen vegetables and making us each a peanut butter sandwich.

We eat together on the long, wooden table. She is often on her knees or trying to sit on my lap. Sometimes eating and sometimes not. F puts her hand in her food and rubs it against the polished grain. Tells me I’m finished after I’ve had two mouthfuls of lukewarm peas, carrot and corn. I say mummy’s still eating her dinner.

Love,

Steph

Poet Mail:

Above the cutting

The teenage boys will lean against the railing like two herons, carp-hungry 
their necks long, hairless spouts
One will wear a blazer, the other a school jumper knotted about the waist

The clouds will not be finished raining, incubating, as silver carriages 
will shuttle between stations
The sky will have the consistency of a soaked tea towel

I will be thirty weeks pregnant and sick of school traffic, the ungovernable era 
between three and six

I will be driving to visit my parents, stopped behind a Richmond 2017, Member 
bumper sticker

This will no longer be my home 

I will be unable to imagine holding my baby
I will prepare for multiple scenarios, a long confinement 

When I finally check my phone I will see my husband’s thumbs up, a low-caps kiss 

Beside landmarks of small, suburban fame, I will remember that I loitered 
by the graffiti on another bridge that says: Eileen, I’ll always love you
I will remember that I stood beneath it and imagined the desperate things 
I’d do for love 
 
Soon the vehicle ahead will take a chance, make a right and I’ll turn left
One of the boys will lift a wing, swivel his head and see right through me

The baby will push on my bladder to remind me it’s there
And I will turn the wheel one, two, three times before I pull into the driveway

easter saturday

this morning, another born between two
more important days 

i’m quick to be in awe
with the way she moves with no attachment 

for the first time this year we dress her in winter clothes
she is still pliant

concedes each limb pulled through each arm and leg hole
with little fuss

i’m resting on a picnic bench 
and she is running down a hill as though she’ll never stop 

Photo

Photo note:

The garden overlooking the gully at Hepburn Springs, Dja Dja Wurrung Country / Central Victoria, 2022. F and I were up there this weekend as a deluge of rain prompted flood warnings further north. The Sunday markets were empty and the wind blew us sideways. A volunteer at the tourist train, dressed from another century, emerged from the fog (and the gents) like a ghost as we sheltered under the old iron awning. On Monday you could hear the water rushing from the bottom of the hill, the creek full and flowing for the first time in months.

Places to submit:

Rawhead: A Journal of Art and Literature / Deadline: 16th August / 3 - 7 poems 

Osmosis Press / Deadline: 30th August 2026 / 6 x poems 

Sho Poetry Journal / Deadline: 31st August / 5 x poems 

The 2026 Oxford Poetry Prize / Deadline: 31st August 2026 / Judge: Rowan Ricardo Phillips / £10 per entry 

Middle of the Air Poetry Competition 2026 / Deadline: 31st August 2026 / Details: The winning entries will have their poem or lyrics interpreted and professionally recorded by acclaimed musicians, Ziggy Ramo and Missy Higgins, who will also be choosing the final winning poems. The finished pieces will be broadcast on ABC Radio National as part of ABC Radio National's The Music Show during Australian Music Month in November.

t'ART Press / Chosen: Anthology for Queer and Trans writers / Deadline: 31st August 2026 / 1 x poem up to 100 lines 

Salt Hill Journal / Deadline: 7th September 2026 / 5 x poems 

The Journal / Deadline: 15th September 2026 / 3 x poems 

Metphrastics / Deadline: 15th September 2026 / Welcomes submissions year-round responding to works in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s permanent collection and special exhibits / Theme: Wounds 

Poet Mail is free. Please consider supporting my writing by ordering a copy of my collection Invisible Wasp (Liquid Amber Press, 2024).

You can also pick up a copy of my collection Gentle Creatures (Vagabond Press, 2023). Click the images below to be redirected to the publishers’ websites.

                                             atticpoet.com | @theatticpoet on IG

This troubled time followed the publication of Invisible Wasp, I was on maternity leave and my motherly body felt like it belonged entirely to the baby. I bought some envelope address stickers from Officeworks and spent an hour (while F was napping) on Dad’s printer, trying to get the sizing right.

It was a disaster. I was too embarrassed to stick up my poems in the daylight, plus the adhesive didn’t equal the rainy spring of twenty, twenty-four. Everything I stuck down ended up facedown on the grass. I couldn’t stand the thought of people looking at me, fiddling around telegraph poles in my sloppy maternity clothes. In the end I did a couple of rounds of our local oval while walking the dog at night and gave up.

Where I’ve failed, poets like Jaidyn Luke Attard and Darby Hudson (plus many anonymous writers) have succeeded in claiming space in a city that favours advertising and graffiti. Next time you’re waiting for the green man, look closely, you may find some unsolicited poetry amongst the mess of stickers and ads for ‘tasteful’ nude modelling.

as a pedestrian i've been following these poetry paste-ups for decades, and have greatly admired many of them. i think like performance poetry before it, it allows those disenfranchised from anthologies, websites, and magazines [like this] an opportunity to get their stuff out, with a nominal financial outlay, and without editors [like me] and gate-keepers of literature spelling out all manner of rhyme & reason.

π.O., Editor’s Letter, Unusual Work, Issue 41 (I have a few poems published in this one!)

Finally, via a recommendation from another poet, I discovered Romalyn Ante’s collection Agimat. It’s a brilliant collection of sickness and healing. This is Breath (An Extract) from the collection.

1. Poetry:

Madison Godfrey, Dress Rehearsals (Joan, an imprint of Allen & Unwin) / Romalyn Ante, Agimat (Chatto & Windus)

2. Books:

The Coca Cola Kid, Selected Stories by Frank Moorhouse (Angus & Robertson Publishers)

3. Other

Holding hands with strangers. It’s uncommon for me now to touch people I don’t know. I don’t hug people the way I hugged my friends in my twenties. I don’t date anymore and I think it’s best I avoid contact with others as F is a petri dish of daycare germs. It’s for everyone’s own good.

Last Saturday, after rushing in late to ‘Ballroom Barndance: An Afternoon of Square Dance and Two Steppin’ at Brunswick Ballroom, I found myself absorbed into a circle of dancers, linking arms, slapping and grasping palms, daisy-chaining and shaking everyone’s hand.

The older I get the more resistant I become to group activities, touching strangers and small talk with work colleagues, but under the multi-coloured dome of the Ballroom, everyone smiled like it was normal and I managed to relax little, my hand gripped by a small woman wearing a different chunky ring on each finger.

Poet Mail is free. Please consider supporting my writing by ordering a copy of my collection Invisible Wasp (Liquid Amber Press, 2024)

You can also pick up a copy of my collection Gentle Creatures (Vagabond Press, 2023). Click the images below to be redirected to the publishers’ websites.

                                             atticpoet.com | @theatticpoet on IG

Good morning I say to the little bottles of retinol and factor fifty sunscreen on top of my chest of draws. I stop to take a hard look at myself in the mirror, my lips are dry and cracked. I blame the penguin-fresh winds of Antarctica. I am shoeless and have approximately four minutes to decide what to wear and get dressed before we need to be wheels up, in the car. Before the sun the algorithm was offering up pictures of Alexa Chung and Dev Hynes in the two thousands, a woman with five cigarettes in her mouth and a single lighter. I'm taking a look at myself and thinking about the two thousands, that slippery era of starting a child and leaving a decade later an adult. I feel largely the same as I did at the start of my thirties, despite the different hair colour, the toddler, the c-section belly and unflattering wide-legged but comfy jeans.

Time to stop ruminating. Earlier F was at the door with an empty wooden candleholder, picking off bits of wax and singing happy birthday to herself. I choose three items of clothing, sling them onto my body and shove my work laptop (in its hot pink case) into my bag. Almost ready, just shoes and teeth and medication. E is looking for his slides and F is sliding down each stair on her bum. There is something incurable about July. There is something subterranean, but perfect about the lower level of our house, where the bedrooms are. The pink walls were a good choice. I’m pulling on my boots and time is up. We depart like three ticking-bombs, I think the house must be relieved to see us go.

Love,

Steph

Poet Mail:

Search history 2024 - 2025

It goes: Blocked ear, painful / Blocked ear, terrible pain / Blocked ear, do I need to see a doctor? 

Sound enters my good ear, hits a wall three quarters in. Like a bird hitting a window.  

My top searches of the year: Why won’t my baby sleep? / C-section scar feels like bursting / Stubborn belly fat after pregnancy 

I’m almost thirty-seven. I must stop googling, go see a doctor.

My daughter makes a scene. I’m told she is wilful. That she’ll need boundaries, control. I don’t say: no, not wilful, just determined or you wouldn’t call a boy that. 
But I smile and say, yes, just like I was. I find new ways to disappoint myself. 

Search: what’s the saying, “a woman never stops being a daughter”:

A daughter is a daughter for life, a son is a son until he takes a wife (proverb). 
A disobedient daughter ceases to be your daughter and instead becomes your enemy (Lorca).
All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does, and that’s his (Wilde).

I listen to podcasts instead of therapy. Find people who think like me. 

When the baby goes to daycare, I ask:  

What is hand, foot and mouth disease? / When should you stop the dummy? / High fever, when to go to hospital?

A series of viral illnesses, a spate of canker ulcers, brings me low. But I love lying
on the living room floor in the evenings, just before bedtime, when she hovers above me. Merging, slow light, her face, rude and close, deciding if she’ll trampoline on my ribcage or join me on the rug, observing the ceiling.

But there is also trying to write and parent. To write and work.

I think about The Simpsons episode where Homer gets a job at a bowling alley, quits the nuclear power plant. When Marge gets pregnant with Maggie, Homer must go back. 

He changes a sign that says, Don’t Forget: You’re Here Forever to Do It For Her.

Against doctor’s advice (a real doctor) I blow out my ears to devastating feedback, a hundred birds escape. 

The fluid will take a while to drain, keep up with the nasal sprays, breathe in hot steam and sleep on the non-blocked side. Avoid swimming.

Latest searches: Dealing with tantrums / Failing at …
My toddler slaps me and smiles, waits for a response. 
I do some writing in the evenings. 

easter saturday

this morning, another born between two
more important days 

i’m quick to be in awe
with the way she moves with no attachment 

for the first time this year we dress her in winter clothes
she is still pliant

concedes each limb pulled through each arm and leg hole
with little fuss

i’m resting on a picnic bench 
and she is running down a hill as though she’ll never stop 

i hope the new jumpers will last a few more months-
perhaps see-out the maturing year

Photo

Photo note:

Winter in Turnpike Lane, London, 2018.

Places to submit:

Woollahra Digital Literary Award / Deadline: 19th July 2026 / Invites submissions of digital-first Poetry (plus Fiction and Non-Fiction) / Judge: Luke Patterson / Entry: $26 

Splinter Journal / Deadline: 30th July 2026 / 3 x poems 

The London Magazine / Deadline: 31st July 2026 / 5 x poems / 50 lines max

Arc Poetry Magazine / Deadline: 31st July 2026 / 3 x poems 

Blackout Poetry Competition (Babyteeth) / Deadline: 31st July 2026 / Theme: Blackout poetry, each entrant gets the same source material to work from / Entry: $5

Winchester Poetry Prize / Deadline: 31st July 2026 / Judge: Julia Copus / Entry: £7  

The Paris Review / Deadline: 31st July 2026 / 6 x poems 

Sprig Magazine / Deadline: 31st July 2026 / Each poetry submissions must be submitted in 12-point font, and must not exceed one a4 page.

The Coniston Prize / Deadline: 1st August 2027 / Judge: Carolyn Forché / 3 - 5 poems / Entry: $20 

Poet Mail is free. Please consider supporting my writing by ordering a copy of my collection Invisible Wasp (Liquid Amber Press, 2024).

You can also pick up a copy of my collection Gentle Creatures (Vagabond Press, 2023). Click the images below to be redirected to the publishers’ websites.

                                             atticpoet.com | @theatticpoet on IG

For this month’s Poet List I have compiled the poetry collections and books I’ve read so far this year. In June I’ve made an effort to sit at my writing desk and read. I particularly enjoyed Deaf Republic by Ilya Kaminsky and a slim volume of poems by Alana Kendall, the distance between us, published by Melbourne Poets Union in 2015.

This is not a review. There is no order to the below, apart from the position in the pile next to my writing desk. I have found something to enjoy in all.

1. Poetry:

January > Marie Howe, What the Earth Seemed to Say (Bloodaxe Books) / Grace Lee, Joss: A History (Giramondo Poetry)

February > Anna Jacobson, Amnesia Findings (UQP Poetry Series) / Hope is the Thing with Feathers, Emily Dickinson (Gibbs Smith) / Sarah Rice, Alight on all things precious (Liquid Amber Press)

March > Ender Başkan, Two Hundred Million Musketeers (Giramondo) / Kevin Brophy, Portrait in Skin (Five Islands Press)

April > Grant Caldwell, Dreaming of Robert De Niro (Five Islands Press)

May > David Malouf, An Open Book (UQP) / Grant Caldwell, Dreaming of Robert DeNiro (Five Islands Press) / Pam Brown, True Thoughts (Salt Publishing) / Songs of Love and Hate Speech, Dominic Symes (Rabbit)

June > Mosab Abu Toha, Forest of Noise (4th ESTATE) / Ilya Kaminsky, Deaf Republic (Faber & Faber) / Alana Kelsall, the distance between us (Melbourne Poets Union) / Ada Limón, Sharks in Rivers (corsair poetry) / Ruth Padel, Girl (Penguin) / Carol Ann Duffy, Selected Poems (Penguin)

2. Books:

January > My Brother Jack, George Johnson (Collins Fontana Books)

February > Hedda Gabler, Henrik Ibsen (Penguin Classics) / Landlocked, Doris Lessing (Granada)

March > Cannon, Lee Lai (Giramondo) / A Man for All Seasons, Robert Holt (Bloomsbury Publishing)

April > The Mint Lawn, Gillian Mears (Allen & Unwin) / Scripsi, 1989 (special Penguin edition) / The First Bad Man, Miranda July

May > 12 Edmonstone Street, David Malouf (Chatto and Windus) / Shadowboxing, Tony Birch (Scribe)

June > Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, Olga Tokarczuk (Translation published by Fitzcarraldo Editions) / Fineflour, Gillian Mears (UQP)

3. Other

You don’t need to be into Cessnas to enjoy watching planes taking off and touching down for an afternoon. The Flight Deck Bar & Grill at Moorabbin Airport is like a bowlo for pilots. There are trophy cabinets with eagle-topped awards for ‘best student instructor’ and ‘student with most flight hours’. The outdoor dining area is seated right off the runway area; sometimes the planes park right up outside the chain link fence. While toddlers squealed and ran about the sandpit with a variety of old push-toys, a couple enjoyed heart-shaped parmas with those tiny bottles of sparkling wine. Another man stood up close to the fence, filming each landing. When helicopters flew over everyone stopped and bent their necks backwards. The airfield makes hopeful fliers of us all.

Poet Mail is free. Please consider supporting my writing by ordering a copy of my collection Invisible Wasp (Liquid Amber Press, 2024)

You can also pick up a copy of my collection Gentle Creatures (Vagabond Press, 2023). Click the images below to be redirected to the publishers’ websites.

                                             atticpoet.com | @theatticpoet on IG

Thursday night at the urban winery, the staff are nice to us because we’re their only customers, my mum friend and our toddlers.

We sit on a long bench playing chicken. Seeing how far we’ll let them go before standing up to call them back or herding them away from the decorative wine barrels.

I know they’re circling towards the service entrance that leads to the back alley, the smoking area and rear of the garden shop next door. It’s because we’ve told them not to.

In a quiet moment F is applying sunscreen to her friend’s shins. He’s rolled up his pants to the knee, allowing her to apply wild stripes, before stopping to put the top of the roll-on-bottle in her mouth. Stop, I say for the millionth time. Why must she learn by putting everything in her mouth?

In a cafe she’ll drink a babyccino and watch the barista work the coffee machine. But I feel self conscious in places where they serve alcohol and nice food. I look up and see she’s picked up a butter knife from a table and run over to negotiate its release.

The food comes, pumpkin arancini balls and cheesy croquettes, finger-food they smash and leave. A bowl of chips disappears. We cajole and trick them into eating. My mum friend and I mop up what’s left.

When her partner arrives we are sipping our drinks and watching them take turns to jump off a chair. They are squealing and laughing and full of hot food and apple juice. I kiss a tear from F’s cheek after a minor fall.

Perhaps her partner and the bartenders think we’re letting them get away with too much. By seven pm the kids are comatose in their prams. We tidy up as much as possible and leave.

Love,

Steph

Poet Mail:

Mother’s group (extract)

I knew we weren’t caricatures, we were real people, but as we went for our fourth lap of the park it was hard not to see Mel, Jennifer and myself for what we were, first-time mums in our 30s, women with serious professions, who by sex (our own and the physical act of it) had ended up at home caring for infants, just like our grandmothers, who’d lived through the war. 

I saw Mel at the breastfeeding clinic. I’d watched her park the grey Volvo XC90 and struggle with Ollie. He bucked against the restraints of the Baby Jogger. In the waiting room she saw me and gave me a look that signalled critical air-loss. My daughter cried because it was her naptime. The midwife looked at her and said, well, to begin with, I can see this baby needs more sleep. In the beginning there was appointment after appointment after appointment. 

Jennifer cuts her hair short. After massive blood loss and an eight-day stay on the maternity ward it kept the smell of hospital grade cleaning fluid. Each time she went to the toilet it felt as though her insides might fall out. Why didn’t anyone tell her that her mind would be as brutalised as her body? Her coffee was a latte, cow’s milk. Real coffee. Not like the decafs and oat chais ordered by the other mums. Her son Beau had a birthmark the shape of a snail on his left buttock. Jennifer always made the effort to remember where someone had grown up, where their parents lived. Collecting stories, things to talk about. 

Photo

Photo note: The lunar-like landscape of sand dunes not far from Strahan, Tasmania (May, twenty-twenty-two). On the boat across from Melbourne, poor Marla had to stay in these awful cages on the vehicle and cargo deck. She was menaced by a yapping terrier called Thomas. I felt seasick and E enjoyed the expensive, all you can eat buffet on deck. It was our first wedding anniversary. The dunes and feeling of sand in my ears were a relief after the claustrophobic lodgings of the ship. I was sweating in my winter clothes. In the carpark there was a burnt out station wagon, a couple of broken office chairs where people had sat to watch it burn.

Places to submit:

McLellan Poetry Prize 2026 / Deadline: 15th June / 80 lines max / Judge: Gerda Stevenson / Entry: £8 for the first per poem and £5 each for subsequent poem 

POETRY Magazine / Deadline 15th June / 2 - 6 poems (10 pages max)

Wesley Michel Wright Prize / Deadline 22nd June / A poem or a collection of poems in English of between 50 and 500 lines / NB: To qualify for entry the work must be published in a print or digital book or journal within 12 months prior to the closing date 

PN Review / Deadline: 30th June / 5 pages max / NB: Active subscribers can email. Non-subscribers must send submission via post 

Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize / Deadline: 30th June / Judge: Mona Kareem / Entry: £12 per poem

Poetry London Prize 2026  / Deadline: 30th June / Judge: Seán Hewitt / Entry: £10 per poem

Wells Festival of Literature, 2026 International Competition / Deadline: 30th June / Judge: Clare Shaw / Entry: £8 per poem 

Poetry Ireland Review / Deadline: 30th June / Guest Editor: Colm Tóibín / 4 x poems

2026 ACU Prize for Poetry / Deadline: 1st July / Judge: Emeritus Professor Margot Hillel OAM and Professor Robert H F Carver / Theme: Witness / Entry: $25 per poem 

Cordite Poetry Review (Issue 121) / Deadline: 1st July / Guest Editor: Maxine Beneba Clarke / Theme: NO THEME / 3 x poems 

Poet Mail is free. Please consider supporting my writing by ordering a copy of my collection Invisible Wasp (Liquid Amber Press, 2024).

You can also pick up a copy of my collection Gentle Creatures (Vagabond Press, 2023). Click the images below to be redirected to the publishers’ websites.

                                             atticpoet.com | @theatticpoet on IG

Mears’ short story is Pipedream, a shape-shifting account of rape and misogyny. A long summer in an unforgiving country town.

I finish wondering why I don’t know her work in the way I do a writer like Helen Garner. Despite a twenty-two year age gap, they were contemporaries, even corresponding by letter. Garner famously Victorian, Mears growing up in Grafton, in the Northern Rivers of NSW, horse riding, marrying her much older English teacher.

Perhaps it’s because she died young at fifty-two, slowly and cruelly incapacitated by multiple sclerosis. Or perhaps it’s my own lack of a literature degree.

Maybe it’s because my twenties were taken up by reading the likes of Bukowski, Vonnegut and Bulgakov. It seems a shame I’m only getting to Mears now.

It takes me a month and a half to read The mint lawn. The dense and erotic prose is full of poetry, loneliness, family, dogs, jacarandas, girlhood, car crashes and sex. And yes, a lawn grown from mint instead of grass is a thing.

‘Hairy pubes are in. That’s what I’ve heard!’ Patrick catches Clementine in front of the mirror the next day, trying to rearrange the bottom half of her bikini. He has his arm full of oil and cooking implements. The smell of slow-cooking lamb and Patrick’s high laughter fills up the morning. Clementine remains in front of the mirror. Something looks silly about her new swimmers but she can’t work out what. Across her breasts march a line of yellow ducklings. Stupid, stupid, stupid, she goes outside thinking, hating herself this morning.

‘Taste this.’ Patrick offers her a sliver of outer lamb. her mouth, against her will, waters over the fragment. ‘Better than carrots?’ He is wearing his swimmers. It doesn’t matter that his pubic hair keeps curling down because it merges with his curly thigh hairs. Men are luckier, Clementine concludes, sneaking a glance down at her own unsafe bikini.'

The mint lawn, Gillian Mears, 1991, Allen and Unwin

On a Friday night I stand at the tram stop before the junction of Lygon and Elgin Street. I pull the sleeves of my jumper over my hands because it’s colder than I planned for. I’ve been to a poetry reading at Readings. I’ve spent too much on books. I see a young woman thumbing a copy of Monkey Grip (the new edition with the blue cover). I wish I had The Mint Lawn with me, for just in case she looks up to see what I’m reading.

This is not a review. There is no order to the below, apart from the position in the pile next to my writing desk. I have found something to enjoy in all.

1. Poetry:

David Malouf, An Open Book (UQP) / Grant Caldwell, Dreaming of Robert DeNiro (Five Islands Press) / Pam Brown, True Thoughts (Salt Publishing)

2. Books:

12 Edmonstone Street, David Malouf (Chatto and Windus) / Shadowboxing, Tony Birch (Scribe)

3. Other

If you’re in Naarm / Melbourne and reading this on the thirty first of May, you have mere hours left of free public transport. From midnight it switches to half price. On Monday afternoons F and I have taken to catching the bus, either to the Brunswick Baths or to Northcote Plaza to buy dried paw-paw and Polish ‘medicinal’ tea (tastes liked watered-down marshmallow). Before topping up your Myki card becomes simply Sisyphean again, get out and go somewhere. Expect delays.

Poet Mail is free. Please consider supporting my writing by ordering a copy of my collection Invisible Wasp (Liquid Amber Press, 2024)

You can also pick up a copy of my collection Gentle Creatures (Vagabond Press, 2023). Click the images below to be redirected to the publishers’ websites.

                                             atticpoet.com | @theatticpoet on IG

I think I might be anxious, I’m seeing flies everywhere I look.

After E’s parents leave for London, March is muggy, sub-tropical. We remark on the unusual weather.

I’m organising the kitchen cupboards in our new house. A fly appears, then two. They are also in the bathroom. Baby mosquitos? Fruit flies? Maybe. I work hard to stop my disgust from ruining everything.

The park outside our house takes a good soak of rain. It’s flat, no downhill slope for water runoff. I take the rubbish out and I’m mugged by a swarm of flies. Right in the face. I taste tiny bodies for hours.

I get a promotion. I can’t feel good about it because they want me to work five days a week. I negotiate to four and a half, so I can start early on Mondays and spend some of the day with F.

I’m sitting at the work desk I share with my husband before dawn and a couple of tiny flies drift past. Clap, clap. An off-beat slap of palms in our house means we’re trying to kill insects.

I look across at my writing desk, next to the work desk, and there is a fly circling a tea cup sitting on an anthology of poems from 2012.

They are not big flies, I can’t see the hairs on their legs or hologram-coloured wings. I can’t trust them not to be everywhere.

After daycare I take F to the library, then to Savers and then to get dinner. Itty bitty flies are all over the drinks fridge. The next day I read that Savers is in the midst of a bed bug epidemic.

E decides to tackle the problem head on. He does the type of deep dive internet research that I love him for. He says they are probably a brand of drain gnats, likely a result of stuck food waste and a swampy start to autumn.

He orders two bottles of industrial cleaner from a specialist website. It’s supposedly more powerful than Draino.

I start my adjusted hours. On Mondays I switch from work brain to mum brain to work brain to mum brain and at the end of the day go to an eight pm yoga class, where there are mercifully no flies.

This is real post-maternity leave. Not a warm-up. No cruise control. Hard, exhausting, but also, F and I catch the five-oh-eight bus to Northcote Plaza and she is so happy, pressed up against the window. Looking for red cars. Charming strangers who look back at me and smile when they alight at their stop.

Sometimes I still open a cupboard and see a couple of flies hovering around the mugs. I clap and shoo. Sometimes I just close the door.

Love,

Steph

Poet Mail:

Waiting for a red light, Preston

The woman smiles so sweetly at my daughter 
who is asleep in the carrier, despite the zooming 
vans, trucks and SUVs. Her head a bun I can tuck 
my chin down to kiss. The breeze bears petrol and 
the beef of service station pie warmer. If a vehicle left
the road now I’d save the baby, myself, and the stranger, in 
that order. I accept that I can’t save everyone, hope 
the dual carriageway keeps feeding cars to the suburbs 
and away from us. I’m the hard ground between two soft calves. 
My daughter shifts, the biscuit of her nose travels along my clavicle.

At home I feed her, lean forward to clip each breast back into its pocket 
and sit in the dark. She sleeps with currents moving beneath her eyelids.

Failing to do the housework with a newborn

I tend to the frying pan
You thrust against the harness of the bouncer
demanding rights I’ll withhold, for now 

Each time I put you down you want my whole body
This forever pregnancy, your need for reassurance
When I ball up and throw the tea towel, it’s in anger

I turn to face you and face myself
It turns out I’m the brat
You're realising that you can be unsure of me 

I cross the tiles and release the clips
Fly you like a bird, fragile, made of so many bones 
The dishes remain wet, another task incomplete  

Photo

Photo note:

This photo is a failure. My camera is a Soviet-era contraption, a workhorse. And I’ll admit I don’t know how to use it properly. This photograph would’ve been much better in focus. But there is still something about the way the child looks back. I recognise that carry, the type that absolutely wrecks the muscles of your mid-back. The other parent carrying [insert misc item here] to stop it being thrown or left behind. I know because I am following behind in a similar configuration. E is carrying F. I’m pushing the pram, our coats and shopping piled high on its empty chair.

Places to submit:

Poetry London / Deadline: Currently open, rolling submissions, they close sometimes  / 6 x poems 

Montreal Poetry Prize / Deadline: 15th May 2026 / Judge: Natalie Diaz / Entry: $28 CAD per entry 

Verandah Journal / Deadline: 15th May 2026 / 3 x poems / Theme: Revival / Submission cost: $5 for 1 x poem, $9 for 2 x poems, $12 for 3 x poems 

Robert Grey Prize 2026 / Deadline: 18th May 2026 / Entry: $20 per entry 

The Stinging Fly / Deadline: 20th May 2026 / 3 x poems 

Australian Poetry Journal 15.1 / Deadline: 22nd May 2026 / Guest Editor: Ella Skilbeck-Porter / Theme: visual poem 

River Heron Review / Deadline: 31st May 2026 / 3 x poems 

Under The Radar (Nine Arches Press) / Deadline: 7th June 2026 / 6 x poems 

2026 Ros Spencer Poetry Prize (WA Poets) / Deadline: 7th June 2026 / Entry: $15 per entry 

POETRY MAGAZINE (Poetry Foundation) / Deadline: 15th June 2026 / 6 x poems 

Poet Mail is free. Please consider supporting my writing by ordering a copy of my collection Invisible Wasp (Liquid Amber Press, 2024).

You can also pick up a copy of my collection Gentle Creatures (Vagabond Press, 2023). Click the images below to be redirected to the publishers’ websites.

                                             atticpoet.com | @theatticpoet on IG

Poet and emcee Rosie Bee is greeting the line of punters and people waiting to sign up for open mic as if her voice could hug them. It’s loud, warm and shocks the long car ride and food court dinner right off me. At the top of the Glebe Hotel stairs she asks if the man standing behind me is my plus one. I should say no, as I’m here alone, but I turn to look and recognise an old colleague. I’m gobsmacked. It’s been fifteen years. Y is there is perform for the first time. I’m embarrassed to be arranging a small pile of Invisible Wasps on a table next to a card reader. Like some sort of travelling salesman.

Another new reader arrives at the same time, asks to be put into the first bracket, somewhere in the middle. They tell me they’re unsure if they’ll go through with it. I tell them about a podcast I heard recently with UK comedian Stewart Lee who says being onstage is his safe space. This stage is in the middle of the room, surrounded by twee armchairs, vintage parlour suites. I worry about trivial things to stop worrying about bigger things, about how big my chin looks in photos, from the side. I touch my jaw as the host reads my bio, remind myself to breathe through my nose.

Easter

At Paradise Bookshop in Daylesford I pick up the 1989 special penguin issue of Scripsi. Scripsi was a quarterly journal published 1981-1994 by various departments at the University of Melbourne.

Within is a piece called A Writer’s Place, by Canadian literatus Timothy Findley. It describes Stone Orchard, a farm near the town of Cannington, Ontario, where Findley and his partner Bill lived and wrote. The essay trots through the village, we meet its people, observe the life the two men built with their menagerie of animals, kooky old lady friends:

If every day begins with sound, it also ends with sound- then silence. the last sound I usually hear is not ‘Goodnight’, but belle, the dog, as she tells the story of the day just past to whatever ears are listening out in the dark. She tells this tale in a series of long, rhythmic sentences that somewhere between howling and a moan. All the other dogs up and down the line seem to hear her; and, very often, they tell their own day’s stories back.

I have no notion, really, what it is Belle tells; but I sense that what she tells has meaning. Perhaps she tells, as I just have, of where she lives- and of who is there and of why it matters that someone else be told.

David Malouf - 1934 - 2026

This final paragraph is on my mind when I search our bookshelf for my copy of 12 Edmondstone Street. Which I’m aware of reading, but not sure if I ever finished. When an author dies the places they wrote about feel even more suspended in time.

The final poem in Malouf’s 2018 collection, An Open Book is Before or After. I finish this month with the first three stanzas:

At the threshold of a familiar

room, on a breath

suspended. As if the attention

of a benign lifetime-observer

for two beats, then four,

had wavered or been withdrawn.

The matter of a moment

only. Of no

moment or matter.

This is not a review. There is no order to the below, apart from the position in the pile next to my writing desk. I have found something to enjoy in all.

1. Poetry:

Grant Caldwell, Dreaming of Robert De Niro (Five Islands Press) / Pam Brown, True Thoughts (Salt)

2. Books:

The Mint Lawn, Gillian Mears (Allen & Unwin) / Scripsi, 1989 (special Penguin edition) / The First Bad Man, Miranda July

3. Other

As a child of the nineties I remember the fizzy pleasure of daytime TV, like Maury Povich and Cheaters. It was terrible, abusive entertainment. Not compelling, but perhaps like proto- doom scrolling. Neighbours has a comparable premise (Americans fighting each other), but elevates it with an A24 budget and documentarian sensibility. While some scenes feel too set up, the filmmakers (Harrison Fishman and Dylan Redford) step back just enough to show how stupid these disputes can get when people have access to guns, inexpensive home CCTV and the internet.

Poet Mail is free. Please consider supporting my writing by ordering a copy of my collection Invisible Wasp (Liquid Amber Press, 2024)

You can also pick up a copy of my collection Gentle Creatures (Vagabond Press, 2023). Click the images below to be redirected to the publishers’ websites.

                                             atticpoet.com | @theatticpoet on IG

I look at the dog that’s swallowed the bark and feel bad about the times I’ve misunderstood my daughter. We are two buildings away from her daycare, the kelpie is above us, on a small balcony. F is warm and smells like milk and marshmallow. The dog makes a snarly O shape with its mouth and retracts it. Stopping before any sound is made. I wonder how many times it’s been told off for barking at strangers. For scaring young children.

When I think a dog like that needs sheep and paddocks, I take it back. Regret the thought. F and I are soft and pink. I’ve only been on two working farms in my life.

F is pointing, trying to escape my grip, to get closer. I say let’s go, the dodo is telling us to keep walking. Dodo is her word for dog. Her speech is so good now I could correct it, but I don’t, there’s still something of the baby she was in the way she says it. We move on, I make eye contact as if to say we’ve listened and we’re leaving.

When F was pre-verbal I did a lot of reading. Mainly Google after midnight. I came across advice like: it’s important to exaggerate, be expressive, employ basic sign language, be firm but not inflexible, listen and look for cues, crying is always the last resort, the final stop in discomfort.

The red dog is my pity. The red dog is my concern I’m not a good enough mother. That I don’t listen when F takes off her clothes just before we leave the house. When she wants to wear something else, her gumboots, her Sonic t-shirt or lemon leggings that are two sizes two small. I’m shouldering both our backpacks, holding the front door open, looking at the time to see how fucked we’ll be by the traffic on the corner of Lygon and Princes Street.

As we move towards the fortified entrance to creche, F turns to me as though about to woof. She’s had enough of being carried. Freya wants to walk, I offer. I’ve read that it’s best to provide statements, not too many questions. Freya walk, she agrees.

Mummy thinks today you will have a good day and do fun things.

Playdoh with Maxie!, she replies.

My heart is smashed by her understanding, the high energy ways she swings her arms. Like an old man out for a morning power walk.

A person in a high vis jacket is putting down cones for sewage works. Cutie, they call out as we reach the gate. The kelpie is barking at someone behind us. As she bursts into the reception area I call out, don’t run Freya, slow legs, be gentle. She’s fallen over before I can reach her.

If you’re in Sydney tonight (the day Poet Mail comes out, 15th of April), I’m at the Sydney Poetry Lounge. I’d love to see you.

Love,

Steph

Poet Mail:

How to make bread and butter pudding

SHORT SUMMARY (a couple of punchy sentences to 
attract your audience):

Save your crusts, transform them into a decadent treat, lasting fullness.

The dairy of my body turns hormones to milk. Its state is humid, unmuscular. 

While the recipe calls for pure vanilla, I cupboard only imitation with
the baking powder and baking soda, unable to tell the difference. 

I spell out TABLESPOON and TEASPOON to ensure correct measure. 

IMAGINE PHOTOS OF BREAD-AND-BUTTER PUDDING STARTING HERE
A BAKING DISH, A JUG OF MILK, A HANDFUL OF BUG-LIKE RAISINS, 
AN OVEN DOOR, A TIMER AND THEN THE BIG VOILA! 
KNOTTED AND STICKY, PERFECT TO EAT, PULL APART 
WITH YOUR FINGERS 

Today we call the Maternal Health Line, ask: 
What’s wrong with our baby? The nurse says bathe her in warm water, reset

I say, I feed her, she cries, I hold her, she cries, I take her for a walk, she cries, 
I can’t stop working. I can’t lie straight in my own bed. 

Ed looks like he might fall apart. I say:
you can’t fall apart, because I can’t look after two babies! He runs another bath. 

I find long breaths with tails that release a little anxiety, I find INSTRUCTIONS 
hidden in a long essay:

Whisk wet ingredients –
Pour over 8 heaped cups of post-midnight kitchen window, rusks 
of branches swaying, an improving knowledge of furniture in the dark.
Wrap arms in muslin as if under arrest

Tomorrow: pictures with the grandparents, I’ll want everyone to stay longer, 
but they’ll go to give us space to be a family, and 

when Ed is sleeping (he must sleep sometime!), it’s always me and a mouth I can’t satisfy.

amanda says it works to their advantage:

                      the house is next to a vacant lot, a main road, a famous chicken restaurant
it needs a lot of work – but there is hope? 


my neighbour is washing his navy-blue Tesla

            it has a gleaming seal-body,
humbles my wooden house, the split fence and broken paint


when i work from home, days syrup into evening

           nearby apartments showcase modern living, small balconies
with hanging gardens 


tomorrow there may be nothing left to own –

            for sale signs beaming like game-show contestants, waiting 
for a host to quip, to say something witty, G-Rated


a spider spins a web in the cove of our side mirror
           I let it live, knowing rain will flush it out 


he’s out in the street again, washing the car

           hose water dampens the bitumen, the run-off pearly
with soap


it’s that time of day –

           cooling down, the hour 
when dogs pace at doors, waiting for owners

Photo

Photo note:

Freya and a friend in the rain. A late January bbq, which felt like the end of summer. Only to be followed by two months of muggy, tropic weather. A soggy interlude.

Places to submit:

The Southerly Poetry Prize / Deadline: 15th April 2026 / Judges: Paul Dawson, Kate Fagan and Bronwyn Lea / Entry Fee: $20 per poem

Anti-Heroin Chic / Deadline: 26th April 2026 / 3 x poems / $3 (US) submission fee

Kathryn Bevis Memorial Poetry Competition 2026  / Deadline: 30th April 2026 / Judges: members of Circle Writers, a weekly online writer’s group that Kathryn was part of / Entry fee: 3 poems for £10

The Adrienne Rich Award for Poetry / Deadline: 30th April 2026 / Judges: TBA / Entry fee: $15 (US) per poem / Long poems encouraged 

Map of Lost Places / Deadline: 30th April 2026 / Collaborative map/zine/public walk / Details: seeking submissions of unpublished short form life writing and experimental memoir (vignettes, anecdotes, fragments, poetry) up to 400 words, that considers:

How women encounter public space:
Ideas of leisure
How the city shapes us
Nostalgia/solastalgia
And is linked to a specific site in the Melbourne CBD which no longer exists

Plentitudes Journal / Deadline: 30th April 2026 / 3 x poems 

New England Review / Deadline: 1st May 2026 / 6 x poems 

Kyogle Readers and Writers Festival Poetry Comp  / Deadline: 1st May 2026 / Judges: Sarah Temporal, Jasmine Anoushian & Angela Szczotko / Theme: Under the Surface / Entry fee: $5, donated to the Indigenous Literacy Foundation

The 2026 Liquid Amber Poetry Prize  / Deadline: 3rd May 2026 / Judges: Angela Costi, Rose Lucas & Ali Whitelock / Theme: On Fire / Entry fee: $25 per poem & $15 per poem for unwaged entrants

The Suburban Review / Deadline: 3rd May 2026 / Theme: Noise / 3 x poems 

The Montreal International Poetry Prize / Deadline: 15th May / Judge: Natalie Diaz / Entry Fee: $28 CAD per entry 

Poet Mail is free. Please consider supporting my writing by ordering a copy of my collection Invisible Wasp (Liquid Amber Press, 2024).

You can also pick up a copy of my collection Gentle Creatures (Vagabond Press, 2023). Click the images below to be redirected to the publishers’ websites.

                                             atticpoet.com | @theatticpoet on IG

Before she can pull too many books off the shelves I fill a Kmart shopping bag with stories about Bluey, a monkey with too many feelings, a lady bushranger and a dancing tractor, strap her back into the pram and wheel over to the poetry section. I borrow Ender Başkan’s: Two Hundred Million Musketeers, a collection I’ve been meaning to read for some time.

i go to work / i go to work / i go to work / i go to work / dilân says - i love you dad / dilân says - but i love mum more / i go to work / four days in a row / 5,6,7,8 / im tired / when i go home i also go to work but i don’t say that

(Excerpt from A Workers Paradise, Two Hundred Million Musketeers, Giramondo Poetry, 2025)

I read at my desk while on my ‘break’, while F naps. I read and miss an important delivery from Fedex, with my knock-off AirPods in, orange noise cranked up (she’ll sleep until I wake her at three).

Work, there are many different types of work. Not all considered work by the government. I meet a friend for coffee, they’re a single parent ‘working’ four days a week, I say, that’s two, no, three full time jobs.

Kevin Brophy’s 2002 collection, Portrait in Skin sits in the middle of the bookshelf behind my writing chair. His children are school age, older than my toddler, who sits on my lap and demands to read a book about a red dog. A book I don’t have.

This week it’s red dogs, last week it was orange cars, always rare things. Brophy writes in his poem, Morning:

At school they kiss me, business-like as birds,

and leave me by the school fence

with the other parents also suddenly at a loss

but wanting not to show it. I want to shout a last message -

some kind of reminder to them.

***
From the school it is uphill work,

pedalling as though to wind up my life

to make it go for another day

(Excerpt from Morning, Portrait in Skin, Five Islands Press, 2002)

On Wednesday evening, after swimming laps, I’m pulling out of the Woolies carpark, doing the maths on quitting my work-for-money-job. Could I find enough things to keep us occupied at home, on rainy days, on days with no plans. Could my desk softened body bear the brute physicality of it? My hair dries slowly into crusty, chlorine tendrils. It’s raining again.

when i lived in turkey my music teacher said that he’d only once been to another country, bulgaria when it was communist - how was it? i asked - fantastic he said people everywhere were out on the streets and in the bars drinking talking and singing every night

(Excerpt from A Workers Paradise, Two Hundred Million Musketeers, Giramondo Poetry, 2025)

At the pool I execute a clumsy turn at the shallow-end wall and start my last lap of the evening. When I reach the deep end I look up and see a teenage lifeguard looking at me, embarrassingly I think it’s because he’s about to tell me how good I am at swimming. Instead he says, I’m sorry, but you have to get out. I’m closing the pool while there’s lightning. I look back and the pool is completely empty, the sky the colour of oyster shell, the lifeguard is just doing their job and we’re on the brink of another unusual storm.

This is not a review. There is no order to the below, apart from the position in the pile next to my writing desk. I have found something to enjoy in all.

1. Poetry:

Ender Başkan, Two Hundred Million Musketeers (Giramondo) / Kevin Brophy, Portrait in Skin (Five Islands Press)

2. Books:

Cannon, Lee Lai (Giramondo) / A Man for All Seasons, Robert Holt (Bloomsbury Publishing)

3. Other

Fruit toast. An overlooked item on the cafe menu. A solid choice for vegans (when you don’t want a peanut butter cookie for breakfast). Yes, it’s silly to pay the cost of a whole supermarket loaf for two thick and warm slices, especially in this economy, but with the world on fire, make sure you request extra Nutlex. It’ll (temporarily) make you feel better.

Poet Mail is free. Please consider supporting my writing by ordering a copy of my collection Invisible Wasp (Liquid Amber Press, 2024)

You can also pick up a copy of my collection Gentle Creatures (Vagabond Press, 2023). Click the images below to be redirected to the publishers’ websites.

                                             atticpoet.com | @theatticpoet on IG

You went all limp, E says. I think I know the exact moment, mid-fall after my ankle rolled and I over-corrected, perhaps thinking it better to hit the ground and start again than keep going in the other direction. Like falling off a horse, the sprain knocks the wind out of me, slows down time. Next I’m sitting with one busted leg, the other covered in grazes, in front of the private school boat sheds on the banks of the Yarra. It’s the final afternoon of Moomba, a man in an industrial wetsuit glides by on brown, sparkling water.

I catch my breath and say to F, don’t worry, Mummy is fine, just needs a moment. We’re at eye level, she’s not looking at me but at the sleek white shells, the gunwale of long boats being lowered into the river. The crowd, like a fed snake, keeps collapsing and expanding, surging forwards.

I listen to my favourite podcast and there’s an ad for an online therapy platform, at one point the voice-over artist whispers: you’re behind and I can’t help but panic.

I walk with a limp for a week (before the fall), a real gammy body roll of a limp. I stop running, worry I need a hip replacement. The kind osteopath gently rolls the joint around the socket while I lay on her table, no pain? that’s good, you definitely don’t need a hip replacement. She diagnoses glute tendonitis, gives me some exercises and then checks the soft tissue around my c-section scar, easing suspicions of hernias, ovarian cysts or tumours.

I get back to my desk at home after the appointment and I am behind, it is almost ten am, the daily machine of spreadsheets, google meets and slack messages already churning without me. F’s daycare app says she’s had a wet nappy, had Weetbix, banana and assorted toasts for morning tea. I slide back into the messy current of it all.

Later I do the bridges and the hip stretches. Over a week the tightness starts to feel a little better. Then my ankle goes and again, it feels like I’m looking up from the bottom of a very tall ladder. F looks down eventually at the glossy pond of blood around my knee, Mummy owie she declares. My heart glows with her small measure of sympathy.

Love,

Steph

Poet Mail:

Thinking about giving birth, hoping things will be OK

Feeling the pinch before fingers land, no –
           I don’t want to hear your friend’s birth story 

Too many nights needing the toilet, a glass of water
then dawn slipping the blinds

again, the good hip aches
meaning effort to roll over, to push up, undulate 

to the colder pillow-face
a fly sticks close to the bed, buzzing 

the kind of
words that are pins, I answer a text message:

no, the baby hasn’t arrived yet, but thanks for asking
I never say I miss cigarettes, red wine 


Today a neighbour collects a package 
sent to our address

I can’t imagine having babies in my thirties or forties
at three am you’ll feel your age… 

I guess I will, I think, my hands on my belly, searching 
for the comfort of her spine


In calm gravity, couples whisper during the ads –
twinned heads melting in the secret of each other

the film is sad, so I cry there and 
all the way home

until that thin under-eye skin stings
and my tears turn to gas 

because it’s thirty-five degrees
and I’ll never go alone to the cinema again


Mum sends heart emojis, thinking of you – 
I’m given a pamphlet on post-natal depression

and I want to ask him to wash my feet, squeeze the 
meridian point in each arch

like a button to release a wave that
mutes everything

the busy midwife says it’s only false labour
stay at home, monitor the pain –

I’m sitting on fresh sheets when my waters break –
my phone goes unanswered for three days

Small, terrible hour

She cries between times I drive a nipple into her mouth
I show her the garden 
Moonlight, butter to my exposed neck, her cheek

My ankles are heavy with small insects
Fruit on the lemon tree falling through a still month
startling the dog, who is following,

determined not to be left behind 
By the bamboo, she is almost gone, neck softening 
in the pit of my elbow

All at once, the exhaling of muscle, finding me alone –  
the dog has lost interest, waits at the door
At my feet, it’s true, the basil has not lasted the summer 

Photo

Photo note:

An arty shot of the view from our Lakes Entrance motel room. A few days before Christmas, there is no-one in the pool, it’s rained on and off for several days. It’s cold for December. The room is neat and the bed is comfortable. After watching pelicans look for fish on the town’s small marina, we put F to bed. We sit and read on the bench outside the window until we’re sure she’s deep asleep. I plan to do more reading in bed, but fall asleep instantly. It’s only nine o’clock. I don’t think I’ve slept that well in a long time.

Places to submit:

Shō Poetry Journal / Deadline: 15th March 2026 / 5 x poems 

The SCWC 2026 Poetry Award / Deadline: 22nd March 2026 / Theme: states / Judge: Julie Janson / $15 per entry

Anne Elder Award 2025 / Deadline: 23rd March 2026 / For first books published during 2025 / $35 per book

The Adroit Journal / Deadline: 31st March 2026 / 6 x poems 

Banshee Press / Deadline: 31st March 2026 / 4 x poems

The Berlin Literary Review / Deadline: approx 31st March (will close early if submission quota reached / 7 x poems

The Nature and Place Poetry Competition 2026 (Rialto) / Deadline: 1st April / Theme: Nature and Place / Judge: Mona Arshi / £7 per entry 

The Southerly Poetry Prize / Deadline: 15th April / Judges: Paul Dawson, Kate Fagan & Bronwyn Lea / $20 per entry 

Poet Mail is free. Please consider supporting my writing by ordering a copy of my collection Invisible Wasp (Liquid Amber Press, 2024).

You can also pick up a copy of my collection Gentle Creatures (Vagabond Press, 2023). Click the images below to be redirected to the publishers’ websites.

                                             atticpoet.com | @theatticpoet on IG

O, all our bookish dreams come home in Ikea maplewood

I leave him to it, the books on my desk are piled on top of each other, there’s barely room for my elbows, the way I like to pause sometimes when I’m writing and hold my face in my hands.

While packing up the old house I found a few long lost and interesting literary artefacts:

• A copy of (now defunct) Ambit, Issue 243 edited by Lias Saoudi from Fat While Family

• A collection of Robert Lowell poems (cover damaged from propping up a salt lamp)

• Various free zines from the Sticky Institute

• A burnt CD of Joan as Policewoman’s 2007 album: Real Life

• Ethel, Volume 8 from August 2021, a beautifully hand-stitched zine with a hand-stitched cover. The issue features 100 poets (who all received a contributor copy). Impressive stuff, a beautiful artefact: www.ethelzine.com

• YOU Zine in a paper bag with a floppy disk taped to the cover

• Various sketchbooks and journals, including my Year 10 Drawing, Painting and Collage course diary. Plus some notebooks from Covid.

On Sunday I am forty minutes late to the launch of Sarah Rice’s Alight on all things precious at the impressive (but frustratingly far from everything) Library at the Dock.

Lucky for me, Rice’s presentation is generous in length and content. I manage to enjoy most of the ekphrastic poetry alongside the artworks that inspired them.

One of the central poems in the book is The Appeal of Paint: A Man Waits for his Execution. It’s after Another day in Paradise, an exhibition of paintings by Myuran Sukumaran, “ringleader” of the Bali Nine. A man executed by firing squad ten years ago.

In the later part of the decade Sukumaran spent in prison he worked prolifically on his art.

A selection of self portraits and a portrait of his mother (with family permission) are published in Rice’s collection. They are thick with a kind of grief for something that hasn't happened yet, but also, already has.

Rice assumes Sukumaran’s voice in her poem, she writes:

I ask that my paintings

walk out with me

into the sunshine

Into the waiting space

My executioners cannot face

the myriad faces of me

This is not a review. There is no order to the below, apart from the position in the pile next to my writing desk. I have found something to enjoy in all.

1. Poetry:

Anna Jacobson, Amnesia Findings (UQP Poetry Series) / Hope is the Thing with Feathers, Emily Dickinson (Gibbs Smith) / Sarah Rice, Alight on all things precious (Liquid Amber Press)

2. Books:

Hedda Gabler, Henrik Ibsen (Penguin Classics) / Landlocked, Doris Lessing (Granada)

3. Other

We’ve spent the last few weeks preparing for and then moving house, it was also F’s second birthday and E’s parents were in town. It’s been busy! So, this month’s recommendation is more a list of several things I’ve done lately that’ve sparked some joy. I made this Victoria Sponge for F’s party, I would recommend making sure you charge your mixer before attempting. Aerating eggs by hand sucks. The cafe overlooking the Giraffe enclosure at Melbourne Zoo is great at ten am on a Monday morning (non-school holidays), but the entry price of fifty-four dollars and fifty cents per adult is bananas. The recently opened Northcote Aquatic and Recreation Centre (NARC for short) has a spa and sauna area second to none. Save your money on Sense of Self and get to NARC. Go before the after school rush, as parking is tricky. Dancing to a Bob Dylan cover band at the Lomond Hotel in Brunswick East. I saw at least one of the band members at the Brunswick Baths the next day for toddler swimming lessons. Hopefully with a hangover to match.

Poet Mail is free. Please consider supporting my writing by ordering a copy of my collection Invisible Wasp (Liquid Amber Press, 2024)

You can also pick up a copy of my collection Gentle Creatures (Vagabond Press, 2023). Click the images below to be redirected to the publishers’ websites.

                                             atticpoet.com | @theatticpoet on IG

It’s not an unforgivable change. His coffee drinking starts once a week, on a Sunday, then seeps into other days. We’ve always been tea drinkers.

Fridays, mid-morning at the fancy bakery near his work; I wonder if he thinks of us or if it’s a relief, that for a few minutes we’re not on his mind, that he’s in liminal space, watching people photograph their Pistachio Fig Danishes for Instagram.

Tuesdays in the office; a colleague has shown him how to froth the milk on the Delonghi.

When I put F down to nap on a Saturday I’m starving; I grab my keys and leave to get a sandwich, he’s on his way to hang out the washing, asks for a Magic if the machine is still on.

Our time is portioned and heavy with routine –

Work, Daycare, Naps, Exercise, Supermarket, Cooking, Hygiene, Fun, Culture, Writing, Video Games, Park and Cleaning.

He arrives home with bags of shopping, I’m not long out of the shower and my hair is damp but also longer and darker than it used to be, the blonde bits snipped off and gone so long they’ve vanished from the wind.

I don’t mind the coffee drinking. I think I prefer the wood of roasted beans on his breath than greasy tannins.

I reach into one of the bags for life and pull out an enormous grape, bite it in half, he fishes a cup out of the dishwasher, makes tea the way we like it.

Love,

Steph

Poet Mail:

In Oban

There is a split above the stone harbour mouth
Too high to be the horizon 
God-lip or trick of light?

From the window of our hotel room, I could use a finger
To unpick it
To break it open
To jiggle about in the wound 

Or leave it
Let it liquify in all
The amplified and pale colours 
Of the coast 

Refuse to investigate 
And enjoy our honeymoon  
The view of ferries
Rolling into the ancient pier

I could 

Watch you shower
Intimate in being amongst your clothes
Not just in sex, but also
Everyday nakedness
The weak points
You expose while dressing, 
Where I could
Lay the cold weapon or 
Warmth of a tongue 

This morning finds me luxuriating 
Under the peace 
Of hotel air-conditioning
Outside, rain bulldozes the sea
Wipes out any errors 

Water is falling in the bathroom 
As though you’ll never run out 

The Irish Sea

beside it
unbeautiful town beach
rotting stakes 
like blistered
whale-bone, no –

it was 
leftover pier
yes
and a picture 
of me 

as young woman
squinting 
on molten silver pan
of wet sand
i didn’t see the razor clam 
until

i stepped on it
cut my foot
no
it was 
more a graze
that took in
salt 

there was 
too much longing
not enough
sex – 

yes 
it was july
maybe 
or august 
by september 
i was back in london
skin smooth
without injury 

i stood 
by the open boot 
and hauled 
my bathers 
up 
under a towel
thought about
being nineteen 
in thailand

even then i
felt older than
possible

now I’m thirty-six

and i’m 
over the sink, 
with soap still
on my fingers

she can’t wait
beside herself
screaming in 
the next room 

there’s a blackbird nest
above our clothesline
in it
three strange-necked 
chicks

while 
inner city cats
do another turn
around the garden

I stop to give
her all my attention
my daughter is
pointing at me

me?
i ask, 
me, your mother? 

I rinse one
hand, then the
other

Photo

Photo note:

We are moving house. This is F and Ed under the fibro patio, looking into the backyard. I am standing at the stove. When we move we won’t have a garden, but two balconies, a large public park on our doorstep. Until now, tradies and painters have spent more time there than I have. I’ve an idea of how I’d like to pack things, but haven’t made a start. We’ll leave behind two bark-shedding eucalypts, their roots that stop anything else from thriving, a lemon tree that drops more lemons than we know what to do with, the ruined fence that swings open on windy days, so much half-alive bamboo. I realise that F won’t remember her first home. All those hours we sat out on the old couch feeding, sleeping, feeling fragile. She won’t remember the dog, the silly creature who lay in the dirt all summer by the veggie planter, the mud-box I just couldn’t get anything to grow in. I don’t know what to do with the rake. I don’t know what to pack away first.

Places to submit:

Loom Literary Journal / Deadline: 20th February 2026 / Pitches and full drafts for fiction, nonfiction, poetry and comics / Theme: Work that critically, thematically or formally engages with film, television and video

Hills Hoist (The Suburban Review) / Deadline: 22nd February 2026 / 3 x poems / 20 lines max 

Roundtable readings / Deadline: 22nd February 2026 / Public reading event, Naarm 14th March 2026 / Submissions open / Email: roundtablereadings01@gmail.com

Sutherland Shire Literary Competition / Deadline: 28th February 2026 / $15 per poem / Traditional & Free Verse categories / 80 lines max 

Volta Magazine / Deadline: 1st March 2026 / 6 x poems

The Ada Cambridge Poetry Prize / Deadline: 8th March 2026 / $15 per poem / 30 lines max 

The London Magazine Poetry Prize / Deadline: 13th March 2026 / £12 per poem / Judges: Isabelle Baafi, Dean Browne and Luke Kennard / 40 lines max 

Sho Poetry Journal / Deadline: 15th March 2026 / 5 x poems 

Poet Mail is free. Please consider supporting my writing by ordering a copy of my collection Invisible Wasp (Liquid Amber Press, 2024).

You can also pick up a copy of my collection Gentle Creatures (Vagabond Press, 2023). Click the images below to be redirected to the publishers’ websites.

                                             atticpoet.com | @theatticpoet on IG

Their logo is a glowing, white question mark in a headstone surrounded by cartoon pink and red flowers. It’s lo-fi and a bit endearing. Kind of a Word-Art kitsch.

I think a lot about the type of person who would dedicate themselves to this work.

Ron M has taken 21,289 photos of graves since May 2014

He writes ‘I’ve got a growing list of names that I refuse to take photos for because they couldn’t be bothered to say thanks’

Ron M. also says, ‘I’m not gullible enough to believe that someone born 140 years ago is your first cousin’.

Helping people can be difficult, especially when they’re asking for something for free.

I think about the cemeteries I know. I like reading headstones. Doing the math on how old someone was when they died. Recently I drove past Melbourne General at dusk, the light was the sort of golden luminescence you get as a hot day cools. I thought it was nice the dead were getting some sun. (I resist the label morbid, more interested in past lives and stories).

In London’s Abney Park Cemetery there is a memorial to over a hundred people who died when an incendiary bomb hit a nearby shelter in October, 1940.

This is from a public archive of WW2 memories (collated by the BBC):

A few days later, I saw men wearing gauze masks bringing out bodies, and placing them in furniture vans… this is the only thing that comes back in my dreams - the furniture vans and the water.

The connection of such ordinary images, furniture vans and water to a terrible memory leads me to a few imperfect, sentences:

When speaking to friends about death, it’s always something to do with rockets, a desire to be blown up

I think and dream about the cemetery and can only see the man’s back, his too-big-for-the-handcuffs hands

Three figures repeating themselves under enormous Conifers, their shapes distant and closed to me

….

I don’t know why I’m here again

The Bhutan Pines bend shamefully, these paths are very narrow

I want to slip into the earth and go dark

I compose a rough draft and edit until I’m happy to leave it, save in a folder that says FOR REVIEW MARCH 2026. I know I won’t go back until at least April.

Later I’m reading through a collection of Mary Howe poetry (What the Earth Seemed to Say, New & Selected Poems) and arrive at Hurry, a poem that disturbs a week of writing.

Howe writes:

Where do I want her to hurry to? To her grave?

To mine? Where one day she might stand all grown?

I can see myself rushing F out the door, to work, to daycare, into the car to go the shops, to the park. I can see that cloud-breath morning I saw the man arrested in Abney Park. Mimosa-toned light warming stone.

Sometimes there is too much to pay attention to.

This is not a review. There is no order to the below, apart from the position in the pile next to my writing desk. I have found something to enjoy in all.

1. Poetry:

Marie Howe, What the Earth Seemed to Say (Bloodaxe Books) / Grace Lee, Joss: A History (Giramondo Poetry)

2. Books:

My Brother Jack, George Johnson (Collins Fontana Books)

Other

Festival Hall (Viagra Boys, 20th January, 2026)

It’s not John Cain Arena, it’s not the Forum, it’s not the Tote or the Curtain - it’s not pretty or grand or intimate. The red bucket plastic seats are uncomfortable, the line for drinks is not too long. It looks like a good place to watch a boxing match. It burnt down in 1955. The toilets are easy to find. There’s a stage where the Beatles played in sixty-four. Where my dad saw Shintaro, The Samurai in sixty-six. You can’t smoke inside anymore. It’s owned by Hillsong. That means it’s a church on Sundays.

Poet Mail is free. Please consider supporting my writing by ordering a copy of my collection Invisible Wasp (Liquid Amber Press, 2024)

You can also pick up a copy of my collection Gentle Creatures (Vagabond Press, 2023). Click the images below to be redirected to the publishers’ websites.

                                             atticpoet.com | @theatticpoet on IG

Two days ago we packed the car and left home. The first night we slept in a motel in Lakes Entrance. All in the same room. After we put F to bed at eight p.m, we sat outside the window until we were confident she was asleep. I snuck in to have a shower. Fell asleep the moment I put my book down.

It’s hard to imagine F having her own interpretation of what we do and why we do it. I’m told that memory doesn’t start until two or three. But in the morning she points to where she saw me hide a bag of dried apricots the day before. Points to a graze on my leg and says, Mummy owie.

On our first morning in Narooma we study a Stingray using one wing to flap through low and current-less shallows. PADI certified divers shimmy into wetsuits, before embarking on swim with seals tours. A Frenchman is talking into a radio, trying to find more in Large and Mediums.

F and I watch the boats sail, out the lagoon and into the Tasman, towards an island know as Barunguba in the Yuin language. A corpulent pelican lands on the outdoor sinks where fisherman gut their catch.

I push the pram along the shorefront, in a skirt I would rarely wear back home. It’s silky and light on my legs. We take a shortcut through the big holiday park on the foreshore. There are families waking, caravan doors opening, kids roaming in packs on bikes and scooters. We’re different people on holidays.

On Christmas Day F is up early. Not for presents, but because we’re still sleeping in the same room. She wakes and stands up in the cot at the foot of our bed. Mummy Daddy Mummy Daddy. We pretend we’re asleep.

I lift her out of the cot and hold her to my chest, but it’s our smell, our breathing that’s something to be awake for. I let her walk around on the floor until she grabs E’s asthma puffer from his bedside table, falls into the curtains and it can’t be undone.

We’re still working on our own traditions. Our traditions are still shaped by are own families.

I think it’s important to do something to mark the day, so we spend the morning on Mystery Beach. F marches towards the breakers, as though they will treat her with kindness.

But it’s wild ocean and rock. A man in camouflage wet-gear approaches the water with a spear gun. I spy an oily glimpse of a flipper before it’s emulsified to sea foam.

When F has her lunchtime nap we make our Christmas dinner. There are never enough cutlery or plates or knives in serviced apartments, but we don’t do a bad job.

Love,

Steph

Poet Mail:

Chore Cycles

Unlikely precipices, the shock of beamless air, knowing 
it was never supposed to be me, pregnant in February
but here we are, unexpectedly, on the ledge of failing 
summer, taken already by granite-cool days or surprised
by extreme heat, arriving from no place, to kill the grass

Today is thirty-nine degrees celsius
and if blackbirds drink the water I’ve left out, I won’t know
I won’t linger
New flowers burn down with no-one watching –

Take it easy, some people start painting, varnishing decking in the 
last weeks of pregnancy             can you believe it? 

                      The midwife touches my hand, sends me home
whatever is morphing in my body turns, the bassinet is built 
and tied to the bed

The backyard swings between mud and dust
There are fires near the Grampians, flooding up north, while I
bend over to pluck weeds, trying not to fall, imagining a life
as a statue, filled with human, perspiring 

Open-mouthed birds pant along the back fence –
I feel sorry for them, pity myself, if I could be anything
I'd be the rayon shirt I've just fastened to the line

Come out (I cajole, close to pleading)   
this house is too hot to stay inside
                                                         you must leave but stay close

Pegs disintegrate beneath my fingers 
The fabric dries quickly when I wash the delicates

Going back to work

Sneaking back into the waxwork of peak hour tram ride
I slide my pinky finger next to another commuter’s pinky 
Our thighs touch, but I retreat almost immediately, the mild sonic
Of the movement, electricity makes the windows quiver, briefly
I take in the micro details, all I’ve forgotten about public transport
I suffer intrusive thoughts about resting my head on their shoulder
Maybe they could put an arm around me, tell me I’m doing the right thing 

On the way home, our daughter is being picked up by my husband
From daycare. He’s sent me text messages asking if he needs
To feed her dinner. Yes, I reply, just something simple. Tin of tuna, some
Pasta and maybe a little cheese. There are 24 stops between us, nothing
Too serious, just the rest of South Melbourne into Southbank, the city
The terraces of Carlton, into North Carlton, the footslog
Of the Brunswick side of Lygon. It’s too crowded to take off my jumper. 
Today my clothes smell nothing like her

Photo

Photo note:

The Graduation Party, Nanyuki, Kenya, two thousand and nineteen. The graduate cuts a cake, watched closely by her mother and uncle. There are blessings and speeches, we line-up to clip money to Esther’s gown. I make the mistake of bringing flowers (not a Kenyan tradition). I eat my weight in Ugali, okra stew and warm Chapatis. We are invited as outsiders and welcomed in. There’s a family member in charge of keeping the monkeys away from the food.

Places to submit:

Meniscus / Deadline: 15th January 2026 / 3 x poems

Splinter Journal  / Deadline: 19th January 2026 / 3 x poems

Poem of the Festival / Verve Poetry Press Festival Competition / Deadline: 20th January 2026 / Judge: Victoria Kennefick / Theme: Love / £6 per entry 

Magma Poetry Competition 2026 / Deadline: 31st January 2026 / Judge: Rishi Dastidar / £5 per poem 

Fourteen Poems / Deadline: 31st January 2026 / Theme: An Anthology of Queer Poetry / 5 x poems 

Kent & Sussex Poetry Society Open Poetry Competition, 2026 / Deadline: 31st January 2026 / Judge: Mimi Khalvati / £5 per poem 

Slush / Deadline: 1st February 2026 / Slush seeks previously unpublished (including Substack, Instagram etc.) short fiction of up to 5000 words in length. This includes micro and flash fiction as well as comics, prose poetry and other forms. 

Poetry Ireland Review / Deadline: 1st February 2026 / Guest Editor: Sinead Morrissey / Theme: Home / 4 x poems 

Yeats Poetry Prize / Deadline: 1st February 2026 / Judge: Joseph Legaspi / $15 per poem (US) 

Poet Mail is free. Please consider supporting my writing by ordering a copy of my collection Invisible Wasp (Liquid Amber Press, 2024).

You can also pick up a copy of my collection Gentle Creatures (Vagabond Press, 2023). Click the images below to be redirected to the publishers’ websites.

                                             atticpoet.com | @theatticpoet on IG

But first…

This is not a review. There is no order to the below, apart from the position in the pile next to my writing desk. I have found something to enjoy in all.

1. Poetry:

Sentenced to Life, Clive James (Picador) / Best of Australian Poems 2025, Eds: Nam Le & Jill Jones (Australian Poetry) / Free Logic, Rachael Briggs (UQP) / Rabbit Annual 2025 (Rabbit)

2. Books (Fiction, Plays & Magazines):

Almost a mirror, Kirsten Krauth (Transit Lounge Publishing) / Arcadia, Tom Stoppard (Faber and Faber) / Hecate, Vol 14. No.2, 1988, Ed. Carole Ferrier (Hecate Press)

3. Other

Poetry gigs - a year in review:

nb: Open mics bring out an embarrassing mix of insecurity and elation in me, that’s difficult to express. Most of the experiences below are directly transcribed from my notes app. I’ve tried to be in the moment with this record. However, sometimes I’d had a little to drink. Sometimes I left a gig and forgot to write anything down. So gaps have been filled in the process of looking back.

January

Motley Bauhaus - 8th Jam (sic), 2025 (Lygon Street, Carlton)

Go on early. Feel outdone by the deadpan, cleverer poets who go next. Sit at the bar and have a few nice chats.

Drinks: one cider, one rye whisky butterscotch cocktail.

February

The Last Outpost, clay pots - 3rd Feb, 2025 (St Kilda)

Pressed metal ceiling, sketches and caricatures on wall, giant fish head, seafood restaurant busy in the room next door. Hamish Danks Brown, local poetry figure of note is MC. Intimate, no way to get lost in the audience.

Drinks: two glasses of red wine

March

Chaotic Musings, Vibe Union. Creatures of Habit (Brunswick Street, Fitzroy) 11.03.25

Lots of noise and people who know each other. I take my usual spot up the back of the room. Open a book. Chat to some people I recognise by the toilets. Reading feels warm, well received. String of hot days come to an end, rain, see someone slip outside the Punters Club. Brilliant first and second sets.

Drinks: two glasses of red wine, one old fashioned

April

April open mic - 17th April, 2025 (Chamber Poets, Woodend)

April marks the Woodend Haiku Festival in Dja Dja Wurrung country / Central Victoria. Each poet arrives on stage with two or so pages of little mic drops. It’s the 109th edition of Chamber Poets (Woodend RSL, every second Saturday of the month), local poets, including festival director Myron Lysenko, perform beautifully, a bushy bearded bush band provides accompaniment. I love a help yourself coffee and tea station, plus a cocktail list with prices from 2011. I read a long poem and go over the five minute time slot. V. embarrassing on International Haiku Day.

Drinks: three or four small cups of tea.

May

6th may, Mixed Zoning, poetry and prose night

The kids are so earnest. Older lovers, bad boyfriends, Covid in Clunes, whales. My poems about babies make no impact.

Joan Didion and lots of noughties fashion.

TV with a fire, cushions on the floor. This is a new arts space just opposite my house. My daughter is sleeping in the front room. Please have your cigarettes and leave quietly. DO NOT wake the baby.

Drinks: three paper cups of red wine

June

Poetry and Parenting, Willy Lit Fest, Williamstown, 21st June

Two poets discussing two very different stages of parenting. Except Nathan gets Covid. Fortunately poet and Liquid Amber Press publisher Rose steps in. We have a small audience. But the room in the beautiful Williamstown Hall is also small, so it feels intimate instead of empty. A couple bring in a baby in a carrier. When the baby starts to cry I tell them not to go, but they say they need to feed the baby anyway. I worry that I come off a little desperate. The room laughs along with my poems. They’re not funny poems, but I think people are laughing because they recognise something of their own experience in them? In the main hall a big event is wrapping up, thunderous applause and people streaming down the corridor, looking into our room, at me, wondering where I fit in the scheme of things.

Drinks: two cups of tea, a Diet Coke

July

150725, To the Ends of the ‘Verse, Cafe Gummo (High Street, Thornbury)

Earnest, spoken word.

Hippy couple in their twenties, who live out in Hurstbridge, freestyle rap at each other. They remind me of kids I knew from Sydney in the early 2010s. A lot of them moved from Marrickville to Katoomba. Now most live in Naarm / Melbourne. Inner North. Or Lutruwita / Tasmania.

Read a new poem, ‘missing cats’. Reception feels lukewarm. Needs work.

Between open mic sets, freestyle jazz band, excellent musicians. More freestyle rapping. One person sings along in these beautiful wordless scales. Mini arias soar in the punk bar.

Cold inside and out, winter. Coats stay on inside.

August

Radio Laria, feature, Black Spark Cultural Centre, Northcote

Buzzing to be asked to feature. My poetry ego is boosted.

Really nice crowd. Nice to chat with familiar faces. Open Mic-ers absolutely kill it. MC reads through the bio in Invisible Wasp before I got up. Feels like they are making fun of it (or just my too-tender ego??). Think everyone has a good time. Note to self, in future, keep bio to one line. Ego-death?

Drinks: three silver goblets of red wine

September

Vagabond Book launch, Thursday 18th September, The Alderman, Brunswick East

Featuring readings from new collections by: Paul Carter, Emilie Collyer, Eartha Davis Jill Jones, Laurence Levy-Atkinson and Holly Friedlander Liddicoat.

Something like warmer weather is wafting down the Brunswick side of Lygon Street tonight. I’m sweating in corduroy and a heavy jacket. The upstairs room is packed. LK Holt is poised and serious as M.C. I want that kind of gravitas.

One debut author has about twenty or so family members and friends in the room. They are excited and in awe of her. Nice to catch up with Sam and see Emilie briefly after the launch wraps up.

Drinks: two negronis

October

Headless Poetry, 6th Oct, Red Betty (Sydney Road, Brunswick Street)

Enter from an alley behind Moreland Road side of Sydney Rd.

It’s a bar that feels like it could be a warehouse. Or burlesque funeral parlour. Very classy line-up: Cher Tan, Amelia C. Winter, Ash Dor-Shiffer and Jennifer Compton. Hosted by Jocasta.

Kind of crowd where everyone knows everyone, I enjoy the poetry and fiction readings then slip out. Short tram ride home.

Drinks: two cans of Guinness

November

28.11.25, Mayfield Ceramics, poetry party and market, Abbotsford

Running late, helping out with Freya’s dinner then getting ready takes ages. F must sit on my lap while I put on makeup. Pull up in a taxi just as readings have started. See Caroline in crowd, hard to go from work, to mum, to poetry listener, buy wine, try to concentrate. Relaxed crowd. Put my hand up for last spot of the evening, new poem, ‘Mess’ (love and domesticity poem), goes down well. People come up and say nice things after. Dizzy with the good response I buy two ceramic bowls and a Christmas ornament.

Drinks: two classes of Sangiovese, a Guinness at the Leadbeater after.

December

Rabbit Annual launch, 10th December, Wheeler Centre (CBD)

No poem or skin in the game with this one, but feels like a Christmas party for Naarm poetry. Grace Yee is in the house. Plus other familiar faces and a couple of people I know well enough to speak to.

Good panel conversation, excellent readings (including ones recorded and sent in by interstate and overseas poets, v. impressive).

I run into Caroline W on my way out. Last time we saw each other was at the Sydney launch of our Vagabond books. My peroxide bob is now grown out to brown, shaggy cut - it takes her a minute to recognise me. She’s launching a new collection next year, I say I’ll be there.

Drinks: three glasses of red wine (plus dumpling dinner at Shanghai Village, Chinatown).

Poet Mail is free. Please consider supporting my writing by ordering a copy of my collection Invisible Wasp (Liquid Amber Press, 2024)

You can also pick up a copy of my collection Gentle Creatures (Vagabond Press, 2023). Click the images below to be redirected to the publishers’ websites.

                                             atticpoet.com | @theatticpoet on IG

On Thursday 17th February 1972, a deluge of rain flooded Melbourne’s / Naarm’s CBD. Cars floated, city workers were stranded on benches and, according to this article, a motorist in Flinders Street discarded his trousers and set out to recover his floating car in his underpants.

I contemplate the chaos of that Thursday afternoon, a day in late summer, while cruising down King Street this morning. It’s (what I like to call) Work Christmas Party Thursday, the most expensive day to Uber all year. A woman in a green dress floats past us on the corner of Collins Street. I hope her pristine-air lasts all day. That there is no last-minute downpour.

F has slipped her arms through the harness of her car seat. A bomb made of rice cake has gone off back there. In a few hours I’ll tell some colleagues on a Zoom call that 2025 has aged me, we bought a townhouse, a new (used) car and the dog died.

When I feel awkward I overshare. But it’s true, in certain lights I catch my reflection and see a big line running across my forehead. A glass bottle of retinol sits on my dressing table. I often forget to apply it.

We cross King Street Bridge and I think about a guy I briefly dated called Marty in the mid-2000s. I was eighteen and he was twenty-eight. I remember meeting him at the Casino after clubbing. He wore these horrible long sleeved shirts with patterns on them, gelled blonde hair and shapeless (but not in the fashionable way) blue jeans. I think he dumped me to get back with his ex-girlfriend.

This week I am brimming with personal histories. I walk through the narrow enclave of my old university to an event at the State Library on Wednesday. During that afternoon of flooding in 1972 the waves were driven by 34 mph winds. In parts of Elizabeth Street the water was four feet deep. I see the payphone I’d use to get people to call me back when I was low on credit.

Despite the pleasant weather, it’s a wet fart of a December. I turn the heating on to get rid of the last shiver of cold air in F’s room at six am. The sun is soft. While F is in daycare I push through endless spreadsheets, analysing and cataloguing shot after shot after shot. I’m always out the door when it hits five. Changing uniforms for the next shift. Desperate to put my arms around my little one.

Ambitiously, we drive through peak hour traffic to Ikea in Richmond. All through the Burnley Tunnel my toddler repeats Annie, Annie, Annie, the name of her favourite carer. F loves her, points to her photo in reception whenever we arrive.

I find myself in the far left lane, concrete wall on one side and massive truck on the other. Feels like I could be erased at any moment. At Ikea F eats the peas and lingonberry jam, barely touches the plant-based meatballs.

Love,

Steph

Poet Mail:

Mixed zoning

When the dog dies, we come home and tidy up, we consider moving – 
but everything is too expensive, underquoted    My guts wobble scrolling
realestate.com.au, until I throw the phone face-down onto the armrest
Too violent, Stephanie, my sister tells me, but I think she means powerless         
A raft of evenings holds us to appointment, to looking after Freya
Routine feeding bathing sleeping emulsifies some of the dog-grief   
She does a loud fart when she falls over, loses her mind when she can’t 
peel a banana, pounds an orange from its skin   Ed, I think we’ve got 
to stop eating on our knees, on the couch, stop drinking at home, but I don’t 
need to explain how comforting it is to watch TV with a big plate of food
on your lap   The crack between the wall and floor widens in the laundry
the landlord must decide whether to re-stump or renew our contract
A young gun from Ray White goes door-to-door. This house could go 
for one-point-five million   Five-thirty is as dark as his charcoal-grey Tesla
snug against the curb, on a pile of leaves I swept from the doorstep 
Tonight, I’m walking to Coles thinking about how much I miss the dog
how she had to search every bush, because if she found a bone
or a wrapper from the fried chicken place, it was like finding gold 
In that way our lives were always surrounded by precious things 

first six weeks

pushing stray milk 
                           back into your mouth
because you need it.

             you fight me, expel my thumb like a bad diplomat
you fill the house 
                          with white noise  –

pull on my reins and i’ll follow. 

i sit open mouthed on the couch, my breasts are 
               sore and chewed-on taps. 

i thought i was a good worker, but i can’t face 
               another nightshift. behind curtains you 
sit on my back, i sleep on my feet.

your dad mops and strips the bed,
                  he files your birth certificate and

searches Officeworks for someone 
             to help with the photocopier

                   he is tired, but he is trying.

in shifts
            one holds the baby
                                  the other feeds themselves.

i’m your horse, and i carry you after my legs bend inwards
      until the pram stops shaking and

                             you’re no longer slapping your 
chest with fists wet from tears. 

                                              there is a rage in you
that i mistake for something wrong in me –

in a month i see the shape of your eyes, their blue drama 
                               you are rare, never still

your dad holds you while                         
                       i stand in the garden get a little sun 

until you click you mouth to call me over, 
               here i come.

Photo

Photo note:

Housemate applying make-up, London, 2019.

Places to submit:

Anthropocene / Deadline: 31st December 2025 / 3 poems / Guest Editor: H.R. Link 

Griffith Review / Deadline: 4th January 2025 / 4 x poems / Each poem no longer than 2 pages / Theme: Lost and Found 

East Riding Poetry Comp / Deadline: 10th January 2025 / Theme: My Universe / 45 lines max / Judge: James Nash, Wendy Pratt, Matthew Hedley-Stoppard / £4 per entry 

Meniscus Journal / Deadline: 15th January 2025 / 3 x poems / 75 lines max 

The dead week between Christmas and New Year is ripe for a yearly submit to publications with rolling deadlines. Below are some I keep on my list:

Unusual work / Email submissions not accepted / Send with extra stamp and envelope for reply to: Collective Effort Press: p.o box 2430 gpo melb vic 3001 / Editor: π.O.

Poetry Magazine / 4 x poems / 10 pages max 

Overland Magazine / No more than 3 poems per quarter 

The New Yorker / 6 x poems / Do not submit more than 2 poems in 12 months 

The Nation / 3 x poems / no more than 6 poems per year 

Confingo / 3 x poems / 50 lines max 

Poet Mail is free. Please consider supporting my writing by ordering a copy of my collection Invisible Wasp (Liquid Amber Press, 2024).

You can also pick up a copy of my collection Gentle Creatures (Vagabond Press, 2023). Click the images below to be redirected to the publishers’ websites.

                                             atticpoet.com | @theatticpoet on IG

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This week we finish season two of Twin Peaks (E has seen it before, I haven’t). It takes months. It’s twenty-two episodes long! Midway David Lynch and Mark Frost check out, only to return for a brilliant, genre-busting final episode.

The finale is great, but hard to reconcile with the see-sawing pace of the episodes that go before. I’ve never had to work so hard to enjoy something so much.

*

In two thousand and eight David Byrne and Brian Eno released Strange Overtones, a song from their collaborative album, Everything that happens will happen today. I listen once a day for seven days.

I wake up every morning
I hear your feet on the stairs
You’re in the next apartment
I hear you singing over there

It’s easy to like, a poppy, up tempo tune. Hard to tell if Byrne is perving or helping his neighbour out.

Strange overtones
In the music you are playing
I’ll harmonize
It is strong and you are tough
But a heart is not enough

I also can’t get over how Byrne falsetto sings the word mittens as meetennns. I sing it to F as I make her breakfast. No Mummy, she says. The lyrics are strange and touching.

Put on your socks and mittens
It’s getting colder tonight
A snowball in my kitchen
I watched it melt before my eyes

Songwriters: David Byrne / Brian Peter George Eno / Leo Matthew Kelvin Abrahams (Label: Todo Mundo).

*

After a group writing session, I chat AI with a translator / editor and a media comms professional over a reasonable glass of Gamay.

Artificial Intelligence is steamrolling through their industries. Also socially, as they both are in group chats infiltrated by responses run through Chat GPT.

We reminisce about our Media Communications and Political Science degrees from the mid-to-late two thousands. I admit, I remember doing a whole semester on “new” media then cringe, wind it back, I hate how much that ages me

I’m listening to a Spotify playlist featuring Crystal singing bowls, frequencies and gongs to lift you up and transcend. It’s just music to write to. Quite possibly AI generated. I don’t love it, but I’m struggling to wrap this up.

Curious, I go to ChatGPT to help. I ask it to sum up my month based on what I’ve written above. The reply is as strange as it is instant:

This month you’ve been immersed in contrasts—reading poetry that’s both direct and fragmentary, clear and splintered. You spent a long stretch finishing the second season of Twin Peaks, navigating its uneven pace and long hiatus, ultimately rewarded by its bold, surreal finale.

A daily ritual formed around “Stranger Overtones” by David Byrne and Brian Eno, a song whose upbeat sound and self-referential lyrics resonated with you. You even fixated on one odd, memorable vocal moment.

You also had conversations after a group writing session with people working in translation, editing, and media communications. Both described how AI has already changed their workflows—and how disheartening it is when colleagues run messages through ChatGPT. Together, you reflected on your early training in “new media,” now simply media, a sign of how things have shifted.

This is not a review. There is no order to the below, apart from the position in the pile next to my writing desk. I have found something to enjoy in all.

1. Poetry:

Lucy Van, The Open (Cordite Books) / Ali Whitelock, and my heart crumples like a coke can (Wakefield Press) / Pam Brown, click here for what we do (Vagabond Press)

2. Books:

Exclusive! Dispatches from The Paris End, Cameron Hurst, Sally Olds and Oscar Schwartz (Giramondo)

3. Other

A short recommendation this month, watch Tim Robinson’s The Chair Company (HBO). It’s deranged and surprising. Yes, Robinson plays another obsessive, hypersensitive man raging through a void of idiots. But it’s what he does best. Just renewed for a second season.

Poet Mail is free. Please consider supporting my writing by ordering a copy of my collection Invisible Wasp (Liquid Amber Press, 2024)

You can also pick up a copy of my collection Gentle Creatures (Vagabond Press, 2023). Click the images below to be redirected to the publishers’ websites.

                                             atticpoet.com | @theatticpoet on IG

On Cav Ave there are three types of preacher: the overbearing Jesus man, the boyish Hare Krishna and the man sitting with a sign that says God is Love.

My view on spirituality is more breath-related, in a secondhand bookshop in Broadbeach I flip through Bowls: A Practical Guide and find this paragraph:

The Tall Stance… after taking your stance, bend your knees, just slightly to relax. Do everything slowly. Concentrate, breathe deeply, and keep your mind solely on the amount of green you want to take and the weight in which you intend to deliver the bowl.

The Australian Open of Bowls is held in the Gold Coast every June. It’s the Super Bowl of Bowls. The Grand Final of Bowls. This is Bowls country.

Our apartment is twenty-seven floors above Surfers Paradise Boulevard, the balcony faces the river, directly across from the Slingshot Ride. We are inundated by screaming that goes late into the night.

You can watch videos of it on Youtube. Most people look to be in a state of fast-release joy (yes, I do mean like they’re having sex). See: TRAUMATISED BY SLINGSHOT SURFERS PARADISE GOLD COAST best rides movie world 2023 schoolies

Occasionally, riders even pass out after being shot over ninety metres up at one hundred and eighty kilometres per hour. It’s a milder version of landing a helicopter on Everest.

By the Pacific Ocean burgers cost $25 (no fries). I buy new swimmers from Surf, Dive ‘n’ Ski, change in a nearby public toilet. Someone has left a Try On sticker for Hygiene on the lid of the sanitary bin.

My new bathers are bright orange. I hope the lifeguards can spot me if I get stuck in a rip. I love the ocean, but the power of it scares me. The lifeguards are young and wear reflective sunnies, they have hair like broccoli and don’t look afraid of anything.

Standing waist deep in the surf I’m thinking about Bowls. I peel back my shoulders and anchor myself into the wet sand. Making sure my centre of gravity is dispersed evenly.

Love,

Steph

Poet Mail:

Mess

A country of laundry, held firm by pegs, parliament of our socks, the green towel, my red swimsuit between the back door and the back fence, 

even in winter I’m out here in the light shorts I wear to bed, pulling down the dry, but 
dewy garments, face cloths as I need them

refilling a bucket of disintegrating pegs, thighs and calves freezing, barefoot, always
seeking a type of bearable pain 

When I say it’s not a test, or be honest, I see you weighing up your response, the other day I pinch you and you won't pinch back. I ask why you hold your punches, when I think I could take it, 

perhaps I am looking to rouse you from the calm sea where you live, in the end you put your hands up, say I don’t want to hurt you

I sigh and let us return to the TV

It surprises me, catching infrequent moments of frustration, straying from affability, over a pile of wet dishes, rubbing your hands together furiously because I’ve said something flippant and left the room 

when I test the limits of your peace there is still a cornucopia of tasks and good work to put your hands to,

sometimes love forgets the reply, finishes the job 

On post-partum running

The earth is wet leather, heavy leather
Smacks of voices, calling for the ball

Big oval lights and physical contest
After the long, fallow season 

The ridges of my shoes clean, un-mudded
With heel held to soft buttock

Maybe stretching
Maybe killing time

Legs not slender but powerful 
I think myself a heavy horse, always hitched

After the long, dry season:
Wet shoes, flying earth, exhaustion and pain

In the beginning, there’s no beginning
Because we’re awake and outside time

She’s born poised, spawn on the way to frog
Untested legs  

Before a year was out 
Her limbs grew so long they wound

Under my body and turned purple
Now I persuade my stride open

As if running was ever easy
As if it ever came naturally

Photo

Photo note:

Watermelons and many litres of bottled water outside an off-licence in Dalston, 2021. As the city regresses into winter for days of non-stop rain and Antarctic wind, I have Jonathan Richman’s That Summer Feeling rolling around in my brain:

When there’s things to do not because you gotta
When you run for love not because you oughtta
When you trust your friends with no reason ta nada
This joy I’ve named shall not be tamed
That summer feeling is gonna haunt you
The rest of your life.

My socks have become a second skin, my shoes might be ruined from trying to wrestle F out of puddles, I think about juicy watermelons and off-licences, cans of Gordon’s G&T for £1.50, lemon-flavoured water for a hangover, slowly making my way down Kingsland Road on a Sunday afternoon.

Places to submit:

Ploughshares / Deadline: 15th November 2025 / 3 - 5 pages of poetry / $3.75 (US) per submission

The Cheltenham Poetry Festival International Poetry Prize 2025 / Deadline: 16th November 2025 / Judge: Gregory Leadbetter / 50 lines max / £4 per poem or £10 for 3 poems or £15 for 5 poems

Poet Lore / Deadline: 16th November 2025 / 3 x poems (max. 8 pages) / Theme: On Devotion / Guest Editor: Patrycja Humienik
 
Stinging Fly / Deadline: 18th November 2025 / 3 x poems / Poetry Editor: Annemarie Ní Churreáin

Gwen Harwood Poetry Prize 2025 / Deadline: 27th November 2025 / Judges: Kate Middleton, Tim Loveday and Graeme Miles / 100 lines max / $18 per poem

Oxford Review of Books / Deadline: 21st November 2025 / 3 - 4 poems / Prefer no more than 30 lines 

The Marrow / Deadline: 25th November 2025 / 3 x poems / Max 4 pages 

Gregory O’Donoghue International Poetry Competition / Deadline: 30th November 2025 / Judge: Dean Browne / 40 lines max / €7 per poem or €30 for a batch of five

River Heron Review / Deadline: 30th November 2025 / 3 x poems / $3 (US) submission fee

The Dorothy Hewett Award / Deadline: 30th November 2025 / Award for completed manuscript (fiction, narrative, nonfiction, poetry, verse novel or memoir) / Prize: $10,000 and publishing contract by UWA Publishing

Brooklyn Review / Deadline: 1st December 2025 / 3 - 5 poems / $3 (US) submission fee

2025 Judith Wright Poetry Prize for New and Emerging Poets / Deadline: 5th December 2025 / Judges: Shastra Deo, Harry Reid, and Andrew Sutherland / 80 lines max / $20 per entry 

2025 Newcastle Poetry Prize  / Deadline: 7th December 2025 / Judges: Eunice Andrada and Jennifer Compton / 200 lines max  / $35.80 per entry 

Under the Radar magazine / Deadline: 7th December 2025 / 6 poems / Theme: Outside
  
The 69th Blake Poetry Prize / Deadline: 15th December 2025 / Judges: Natalie Damjanovich-Napoleon, Kevin Brophy and Coco X. Huang / Theme: The Blake Prize is an open poetry prize that challenges poets, both national and international, in conversations concerning faith, spirituality, religion and/or belief.

Poet Mail is free. Please consider supporting my writing by ordering a copy of my collection Invisible Wasp (Liquid Amber Press, 2024).

You can also pick up a copy of my collection Gentle Creatures (Vagabond Press, 2023). Click the images below to be redirected to the publishers’ websites.

                                             atticpoet.com | @theatticpoet on IG