The launch of How to Read a City, Your Place of Last Resort will take place at WestWords, 41 Hunter St, Parramatta NSW at 6pm on Friday 15 May.  Futher details click here.  

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Mark in Mudflats + Shifting Baselines

The timber steps down Koorabel St. are broken now—
each year since you left the water dragons
trace less time through mangroves, stepping down
the hand-carved stone above the mudflat lines.

Brother, you and your Boys Brigade
threw crabs at the white-faced herons.
Chased me towards the swamp wallabies
over near Heinrich’s old place.

Later, when your kids arrived, we taught them
to feed bread to the mynas and starlings.
The long-finned eels were gone by then
and you weren’t far behind.

Dad says he remembers the red bloodwoods—
shading the saplings waiting
to become thick blackbutts. He could always name
the old-man-banksias along Old Forest Road

but he still doesn’t know what time makes of us all—
the cakes Mum doesn’t bake,
now the plastics you breathed cleaning up
Port Botany finally swept you overboard.

Dad says Pa tried to catch the dwarf tree frog
mimping down through the ironbark leaves,
fishing from the balcony or drifting
down Lime Kiln Bay

where we hid from the fun-run
swimming Doak’s pool—
watched the kids choke up the hill
then we caught the bus back to school.

The tinny always went so slow—
…………tarwhine, mulloway
…………hand-hooked
…………cat-gut line

but now the 5hp motor’s blown
and time has held its breath
these two years since the granddaughter
you won’t meet was born.

I arrived too late to see what was woven
and stitched before cleared roads
took out the old long grasses
that have always snugged these bends.

You left before you knew
what would soon
be whittled down
in time.

Summer homework for our kids was a splash at Oatley Park—
sinking in sludge near shark net shreds.
Angophoras heaving heavy grey trunks
over hand-hewn elephant stone.

Only last year, I saw the flannel flowers
cosset the bay in velvet sprays—
your dust now scattered, parts of you
fly over in memoriam.

But the goddess always separated you
from your preferred forms of truth—
the gunja dried in rum and paper bags
tucked under the bonnet of your Hillman Hunter.

The little kids learned names in the library today,
where the breeze did not murmur their skin—
all the things you wanted for them
now lost like vanishing Instagram timelines.
I try not to hold on to things.

The sea eagles have returned to the bay—
skimming mullet the storm chased away.
Hard to forget that I hid from you
and the boys in your brigade,

taking shelter
in old peppermint roots

the size of the car you left behind.

.

**

On Love Lost Days 

Everything is a work of art—
the mother-of-pearl beads
laced to fading curtains.
Bleached abalone inlaid
in memories shined by river salts.

The snow-clipped berry
in wet-montane at my car door,
the sallow sky on your dry skin,
your face,
in this sand-blown evening,

everything—
is a work of art. Your heart in folds,
asking for a kindness which drives beyond
the listener’s balm I offered up
this lonely night as witness.

Your mind, too,
is a work of sorts—
a tide the Inglis River writes
in silence, shaping siltstones
laid over our lost names and stories.

The soft-felt crying on
freeze-dried days
which find you
larger than
your wounds, everything—

is a work, to start.
A heart left hard will soften the boil,
the smartening yolk
will smother the sullen sky,
where side roads hint of poplar gold.

And love, you will find, is a work of heart—
a second exit laughed in smiling folds,
encircled by this road
that calls you on and on
in restless words of hope.

…………………you will
………………………………………..see me
………….there
…………………………………………………on and
…………………on and

.

**

Fake Emu Field Report

Short wings, one lid blinks dirt, the other blinks-out all known horizons at the Hoddle Street Grid, site of a land division scheme that doesn’t quite contemplate the emu strut but it contemplates the ‘rights’ of settler-folks like me who live in towns where emus have gone missing. They’re wise, those emus—open to all understanding of cultural norms, laying down fresh assumptions of what an emu brings to a landscape at a particular time in a space capsule—of course you realise they originated on an alien planet, landing here in the Sassafras “Tasmanian” breeze, listening to Peter Sculthorpe, especially those old rustlers that remain when the landscape blows away, oooph oooph. You’d be forgiven for thinking emus were alien, but it’s just a euphemism we use since they’re [almost] extinct. I hear you ask, Do emus make great pets? Probably not, unless you have rocks in your [head] garden, though they show up in the strangest of places, from time to time where they escaped to the beach at Potato Point; in the back paddock over Jugiong way, and sometimes on that long stretch out of Kununurra where the lone motorcycle man heading east towards Gulgong best be on the lookout if he wants to keep his helmet on. Down here on the Emu Road to Deloraine, the grass is long and quite unburned oooph oooph. This bird here looks much the same as the ones where the Blue Mountains train stops at Emu Plains—it isn’t really-real, it’s a sculpture, because the community couldn’t afford the real thing. No-one can afford accommodation, but some can afford fake grass for the rusted emu oooph oooph oooph meep meep—a little flightless autocorrect won’t go astray in the ashtray of your missing colony of koalas. My goodness, you look great in those feathers oooph oooph. Everyone says oooph after watching Better Things, never realising it’s the lingua franca of the emu oooph oooph—because fake emus never say a thing.

.

**

How to Read a City
– Last Drinks at the Helensburgh Hotel

Take the tall glass of Jameson’s, the undrunk ice
pooled in Sunday morning slick. The beer still stands

the city, the country, the too-big terrain that had us compelled
to attempt this gulf, this build-up, this beer-swilled wet season.

Take the roses from the wall, swap out the lazy pastoralists resting
on carpet down the end of the Helensburgh Hotel hall,
the tender fall
………………….-en petals like you

and I who never belonged where
water and shampoo slide down the
steaming glass, the black and white tiles,

the shower door that even now still cracks.
I never knew which way it bent, inward or outward,

the opaque green glass as heavy as a three
Daiquiri hangover, thicker than a wristband entrance

to your last show. I never know which way anything
is supposed to go, directionless in the saddle, brok
………………….-en and gone. We’re almost there

and never will know what might have happened
had we not pushed beyond the wrong way /

go back / the city limit sign,
the neon exit,

and you and I asleep
on borrowed pillows.

.

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Elizabeth Walton is an emerging literary writer and a musician whose work concentrates on environmental and social justice. She has been listed in many national literature awards including the Tom Collins and June Shenfield poetry prizes. A finalist in the Furphy and Woollahra Digital Literary Awards, the AAWP and Ros Spencer poetry prizes, Elizabeth has recently been in residency at the Wollongong Botanic Gardens and Bundanon. An Anne Edgeworth fellowship recipient, she recently completed her Masters of Creative Writing with a Macquarie University Award for Academic Excellence and is now completing her PhD in Creative Writing with Professor Hsu-Ming Teo. Her new poetry cycle, How to Read a City, Your Place of Last Resort, is a collaboration with punk rock drummer, Richard Lawson, a work shaped by nature, impermanence, and the act of finding beauty in decline. This bold new work will be performed live by Elizabeth and Acacia Quartet at The Church, Phoenix Central, on May 17 2026.

How to Read a City, Your Place of Last Resort, is available from https://www.5islandspress.com/product-page/how-to-read-a-city