There was a kind of shuffling about. People looked uneasy, as though a crime were about to be committed. Somebody coughed as sirens sounded in the distance, then an old woman who looked as though she had been asleep, her head back and her mouth open, took up the skein of talk like a trout after a fly.

It was my turn to hold her. I wrapped her in the special stuff. Then he wrapped us both in the special stuff, leaving a corner untucked to fold himself into.

All night my father hangs upside down / in the hospital basement / trapped under the huge pulsing bell / of a crystal jellyfish...

I’ve said it several times, both in public and in private: I do not lead an interesting life. Though many would say that my field of action, as the Detective called it, is fiction, I’ve always secretly believed that my field, my action, belongs to poetry.

Even as I uncover materials that suggest Renate’s appearance – a portrait of her sister on an East Berlin balcony in 1961, prisoner records from age sixteen till liberation, a Hollerith card that catalogues her physical features – she remains stubbornly abstract, a dream that can’t be retrieved.

At the close of our second series, print seemed to be firmly on the way out. ‘The electronic medium beckons,’ the editorial of that last issue declared, ‘with its heavenly promise of weightlessness and omnipresence.’ And yet here we are: Australia’s international literary journal, available once again as a beautiful printed object, albeit a different looking one.

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Editor

Designer

HEAT Series 3 Number 1

Contents

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From the issue

Brief Lives

Special Stuff

Six Poems

Death Takes Me

Only one refused

On Series 3 Number 1

Editor

Designer

HEAT Series 3 Number 1

Contents

Image gallery

From the issue

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