Hello

      Sometimes I Radiate Sometimes I radiate, clouds form in my hair and you breathe from me. I am beech and birch, I am oak ash scrubland, I am waking up. Since I’ve been planted here I’ve been keen to remind you that I come from elsewhere. I don’t...

      Self-Portrait as Grammar Revision Some of my dogs are rich. I hurry not to buy such expensive cars. The dentist jumps highest and my friends can bark loudly. Today I feel like toothache. For my birthday I would like that tree. I shall come to your...

      Stripping the Carcass Stripping meat from the leftover chicken turns my stomach – separating sagging skin from gristle; detaching spinal column from shrivelled vertebrae and bleach-white bone. But I was taught by my mother not to be wasteful, as...

      Two close voices 1 If I remember when the full moon rose while sunlight still warmed the evening’s outline from below I don’t picture you in the scene but understand that you were everywhere each closing bud each bird settling to roost each...

    Parched sparrow Does it ever happen to you? A sparrow appears in your dreams Beak open, mouth parched Waterless desperation in its eyes Night after night of a parched sparrow You wake up one morning with nothing on your mind except the memory of some dry...

      Noticeable The greatest quality of the only person who has ever noticed me is that they think that I’m noticeable. In school everything that made me noticeable made me a target: the birthmark on my face that everyone in my class gave a different...

J V Birch lives in Adelaide. Her poems have been anthologised, exhibited and published in Australia, the UK, Canada and the US. She has three chapbooks with Ginninderra Press and a full-length collection, more than here.  

      The Key of Dreams That’s not René Magritte with his apple on his hat not holding a pipe. While he’s not there, he’s been dispensing French words chalked in a clear cursive hand, because words make good pictures. He’s no fool and in his sober...

      People in glass houses A woman couldn’t make up her mind what character she wanted to be in her story. One moment she wanted to be kind and good the next she wanted to be distant and thoughtless unable to see or hear anything clearly. If she...

      Science Remember, Sir, when I blocked the sink with paper towels and turned on the tap and you noticed only when it poured over the side and splashed on the floor and you swore, ran over, pulled up your sleeve and plunged in your arm up to the...

      For a Journey to the Forest in Time of Snow Purse, dirk, night-cap, kerchief, shoeing-horn, buget, and shoes; Spear, nails, hood, halter, sadle-cloth, spurs, hat, withy horse-comb; Bow, arrow, sword, buckler, horn, brush, gloves, string, and thy...

      Overblown Rose A glassmaker, breathing down a long, metal rod, blowing a bud to a bulb which grows, told what it’s meant to be, how it’s meant to look. Cold, outside air hits; the shoot splits; little notions spitting out from the stem crystallise...

      truth bomb listen I grew up in a suburb where each street was named for a fairy tale in the land of dark forests and grimm siblings and in my mother tongue which brought you rapunzel and rumpelstiltskin no story ends in a twee happily ever after...

      Diggers We brought two diggers home, furious black engines, charged and alive, fire eyes with a touch of white. Outside, they clawed the earth, ripped back its skin, made visible its bones, a kingdom of limpet arms, divorced fingers outlining...