a vacant bale of hay. Tiny droplets of sweat sprayed across her cheeks and forehead. The shouting grew louder. The women rose to their feet. Edith Warburton stood before them. She gripped her chin in her palm. Blood dripped through her fingers. She pulled her arm back and hit Connie Miller in the jaw. Connie stumbled and fell. Edith pounced. She shoved her knee in Connie’s back and pulled her auburn bun. Bess jumped to her feet and cheered.
Chores Poetry
Aaron Nobes
Adelaide, South Australia, Australia
Like anything else, the distance between practice and theory of free speech prompts vertigo. From this vantage, the garden is a patchwork of rivals clamouring for sunlight: a system has been rigged to piss around fertility nutrient dense human effluence. • English ivy works as imperfect ground cover, or green facade, but must be stripped from its parasitic climb up the pencil pine and stringy bark gum. • Pluck the sourly sobbing oxalis pescaprae, ideally removing deep-rooted bulbs lingering bitterly.
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• Grasses strangle lavender. • Caltrops suffocate pigs-face. • Toxic oleander, sage, has accrued suckers. • Nettles await wind-swept martyrdom. • At least purslane and dandelion can be pastiched into salad. • Blackberry: nature's barbed wire, thin vicious tendrils only seen upon one's delve into this vapid mire, the devil's temptation to indiscriminately spray triclopyr present as butoxyethanolester and forever sterilise what could be. • Subject figs to heavy pruning they will grow back, like anything else.
