Issue 31, Summer 2021

Description

‘Helby Island Afternoon’ by cover artist Tatjana Mirkov-Popovicki welcomes us to a bright day on the West Coast.

• However, we discover creatures lurking below the water’s surface in feature author Brenda Carre’s ‘Birdie’ and Colleen Anderson’s ‘The Search’.
• Leaving the idyllic waterfront behind, we head into the city, where we encounter yet another creature in ‘It Was a Chupi After All’ by Elsa M Carruthers.
• In Graham Robert Scott’s ‘Armageddon by Tarantino’, human monsters appear against the backdrop of the sky falling, and in SiWC runner-up Janet Smith’s ‘Maslow Meets the Mayfly Moon’, the ground falls beneath our feet.
• We search for belonging and home in ‘Houses’ by Matthew Nielson and ‘A Kinder Home’ by Hajera Khaja. Allaigna and her companions also make their way back home in the final part of JM Landels’s Allaigna’s Song: Oburakor.
• In Bumblebee Contest winner Alan Sincic’s ‘Blind Maggie’, we learn not to mess with the titular heroine, and Frankie Ray puts the screws on her investigation in the last chapter of Mel Anastasiou’s The Extra.
• The poems in this issue situate us firmly in place with vivid imagery of their settings. Àkpà Árinzèchukwu grounds us in the familiar hospital waiting room in ‘Prometheus,’ and Samuel Strathman shows us the wild landscape from the viewpoint of the ground in ‘Behind the Sumacs’.