Author Archives: tblradmin

Abyss

by Katrina Vandenberg

If the best love poems have a little darkness,
how far down can I go? Thousands of feet?
The coelecanth is near, but it’s too easy –
the metaphor nettable and clear, the lost
link found, the beginnings of our own bones
in its pelvic fins – and I want to write about love

with depth to hold the unverifiable, the oarfish
that survives with half its body gone.
I want it to hold the giant squid no one has seen
alive, strong enough to scar sperm whales;
sailors have claimed its tentacles unfurl
from the night’s water, taking down their mates.

But can such poems survive these confused witnesses?
Can they handle the scanty evidence that surfaces:
the mottled sick and dead, the night-feeding
viperfish impaling victims with fangs
at high speed, its first vertebra designed
to absorb the shock? And how much horror

can this poem sustain before you forbid me to say
some call this love, the hagfish that bores
into the unsuspecting body, rasping
its flesh from inside out? Am I making you
uncomfortable? The pressure at these depths
could crush a golf ball. Are you cold?

Or is it enough to be awed by the blue-
green photophores of the lantern fish, the brief
and brilliant light displays? What the lights say:
I want you. Not so close. I am moonlight;
I am not here. I would eat you raw –
tell me if you want me to stop.

If you’re good with calculus and okay with imaginary space, you’ll love these equations. For the rest of us, let’s skip it.

Deakin

This is where my favourite computer lab is housed ^^

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jenna2step:

I keep thinking about the way you crashed into my life like a spring electricity storm, and how things will probably never be quite the same. How you twisted around the midnight hours and caught me in your teeth like a loose string. You broke me open and changed me. Left this wide open space where I could keep your memory, and some days I am still trying to figure out if I am a part of your outskirts or your inseams. You’re my favorite inside joke. A rogue wave in my sea. I caught a glimpse of you in coffee grounds at the base of the rose bushes, and every perfect moment where I could tell you things is ruined by half-shaken silence.

There’s something deeply enthralling about wolves

3 august.

life cracks open with just a little tap, pours sweet milky sap right down your throat. Learn to read the signs and you’ll find yourself right where you nee to be, another world open at your feet. This is the place we’ve been looking for since we were small girls chasing fairies in the garden, high schoolers in scowls  and witchy black clothes, angry young women who want to get out, out, out of the systems we hate & learn to shape our own lives.

This is a doorway, this beautiful ruined house with its facade of vines & mirrors, and the world behind it has a thousand faces. Faces like hte women who have lived here in Verottu Krottu for two years now, in steady encroachment of developers. Lucy walking like a warrior through cobbled streets. Annet slouched against the counter at the squatters pub, snorting with laughter ‘i’m not gonna work, not me.’ Micah leaning suddenly out a broken attic window, one arm around her scrawny cat and one reaching out ot toss the keys to su in the street below.

Sometimes this not-quite-secret world makes itself impossible to ignore; it’s like the brilliant dragon mural painted four stories high and 100 colours bright, leaping out from a s2quatted building in the heart of Amsterdam. It’s asking you – where can we go when we let go of what binds us? What do youw ant most in the world, in this world of the possible?

source: off the map by Hib & Kika, pg. 18