2025 Calanthe Collective Prize for Unpublished Poetry

The Catch

The outlier: my father swings back, casts reel to lure barra. An angler
that finds breaks in washed peaks & white slap. A promise of scales
like flecks of silver or chinks in chain mail. He teaches me to patience
the line, to hold in my chest the bob & the tug—the whistling
unravel. To know backlash with grunt & with grind.

The lean & the snap is automatic then. His tired line of lips condemned
to muscle memory. The broad root of his back contracting, he arches the rod
counts the length with clicks of his tongue. Draws the reel pulsing. A bite.

He fumbles, waltzes backward. Shucks himself upright. Opens the bail.
The creaking: his arms’ tightened sinew? Or the hollowing of his lungs?
The screw heads of his eyes as he clenches them? Or the pilings of the wharf
carved by perpetual storm, out there holding fort?

He battles blue blur like Hemmingway’s man or Spartacus
sentenced to the village & grown softer with age. 

His tussle scores a crowd: sea-beaten men in flat-caps
pocking the pier with their tackle boxes, the concerted focus
of a flock of sea gulls eying what remains. Eying the game. 

My father, hardly oblivious, yanks harder—an obfuscation of whitewash & sweat.
A never-say-no attitude, producing a glimmer: projecting lower jaw, camo skin
frog-like eyes. Gills as if two extra sets of lips. A pastiche of a creature, silt dweller
who lurks at the bottom alone, birthed by the Pacific—now taken to flight. 

The thrash & the flicker: a second sunrise, though much darker this time:
an all-watching eye that appears in the sky & winks its approval. My father calls
for the bucket. Cranes the catch, swings it toward us. Grasps the fish in bare hands
& holds it aloft. A moment christened by cheers & howzat & firm thuds on the back. 

Later, when few are still watching, he grimaces. The piece of metal careened gill, he takes
no pleasure in this, instructs me on the howing of un-flinching the flathead. A quiet
transaction then: to feel the damp slap of its fins, the pump of its last flailing breaths,
the crystalline salt on fingertips. The unsavouriness of its blood as it shadows the bucket.
Tiny turbulence, wet figure eights—I sense in the fish an inherited knowledge of escape. 

My father turns away, brushes aside neither salt nor spray. Avoids the remaining
onlookers, the sturdy light posts of their fibreglass poles. The hardening
of their brows matched only by the fish’s sudden limpness & still. 

He looks down. Looks up. There is no way to look. Does he know
how a body finds itself trapped, once goaded by lure? Too small he murmurs.
Weshould’ve thrown it back. The blood now a bruise. The bucket is a portal.
An idea of getting out before a head bashes a wall & a lesson in plastic
becomes the limits of the world. 

I am only 11, but more than once already I have seen these departures—the quiet
refrain that unsettles the myth of him. It’s as if he is talking about me, not the fish.
That midnight when this man I knew to duck under doorways, raced me to the hospital
& pleaded with triage to open his veins. When his own father died & he greyed
the water with his ashes, the years leaving puddles in the bowl of his hands. 

Small moments, even in the brash & the brunt, a flicker of a dormant knowledge
beyond the fresh wound of critique. A vision of could-bes not what is, some might
even call faith: that the man & his bucket will one day throw themselves
sideways. The wound cauterised in the water’s embrace.

I knew her once

There is a room—
not in your house,
not in your dreams,
but somewhere between the cracked spine of a storybook
and the hollow in your chest where laughter once lived,
the kind of laughter that floated up like soap bubbles
and never thought to land.

In this room,
childhood gathers like light-dust on a windowsill—
soft, golden, forgotten
until the sun leans in just right.

The light doesn’t shine.
It glows like breath held gently in the lungs,
a hush of amber,
the colour of afternoons that smelled like chalk and cut grass,
where the sky stretched forever
and time meant nothing but play.

You don’t open a door to enter—
you fall backward into it,
through the smell of melted crayons,
through the echo of a nickname no one calls you now,
through the fabric of a too-small jumper
folded like memory beneath your ribs.

A box hums in the corner,
stuffed with secrets:
the first time you were called too loud,
the first time you believed it,
the first time someone said grow up
and you did.

The walls still remember the songs
you whispered to the dark.
The ceiling holds the constellations
you made from glow-in-the-dark stickers and the promise of magic.

And if the room is quiet enough—
if you let your spine unclench,
if you let your grown voice go silent—
you’ll hear it.

And there—
in the stillest corner of the room—
is you who once danced for no one,
who made worlds out of cardboard,
who kissed scraped knees and named every star.

She does not ask why you left.
She does not need your apology.

She only wants for you to stay,
a second longer than you think you deserve,

and remember—
not who you became,
but who you were
before you asked permission to be her.

Oh radiant umlaut

She
is always angry at the world now,
angry at me for marrying again
to ‘some evil bitch’
and her ‘two dumb-as-fuck’ children
that she fights to the death each day.
She hisses,
‘piss off dad,’ from behind her barred bedroom door,
tells me she’s not going to school,
because the teachers and other kids all hate her.
She’s my youngest but she pisses ancient vinegars
into my cosmos
and bleeds black blood into her own heart, 

refuses
even to eat her favourite breakfast of avocado and eggs and cheese on buttermilk pancakes.
‘You eat it,’ she says, ‘I’d rather starve to death!’
She slams the door, still yelling that she hates her life and wants to kill herself
because it’s all total shit
and no one gets her
and no one cares about her
or her dream to become famous somehow, on the internet somehow,
by being discovered somehow or 

by
unboxing her unique poetry of sadness
that will echo infinite rhythms within the digital temple’s radiant umlaut,
reposted ad infinitum by other fourteen-year-olds
behind slammed bedroom doors
who are also busy setting all the world on
fire.

White Lilies

The swish as she raises the strap above your head. 

The click as she rattles the rosary beads around her waist that 

count the Hail Marys.

The hiss as she points to the crucifix and spits, 

“See what you have done.” 

Your body shrieks

pull your hand away 

but you dare not breathe. 

You stand stiff on eggshell feet

and wait
and wait, again

for the second
and the third
because today you misspelled

three words. 

The noon bell summons for the Angelus. 

You close your eyes, pray and wonder
how
God spells love. 

Underneath the heady perfume
in the corner
of your memories
where 

the Virgin Mary watches 

from her altar of white lilies 

there’s a stench
of stagnant water
from the vase of flowers
you toss across the convent yard.

Nhớ

Nhớ (verb): To remember and to miss. Both memory and longing.

I remember Vietnam in fragments.
The scent of nước mắm (fish sauce) in the air.
The sound of motorbikes humming.
The humid afternoons pressing against my skin.
I remember my bà ngoại’s (grandma) hands,
soft and wrinkled,
making bánh tét (new year cake) as if she’s done it a thousand times before.
I remember my anh chị em (cousins) laughing loudly
as we play a game of Tiến lên (Vietnamese card game).

But to remember is not the same as to belong.

Quê (noun): Motherland.
A place that calls to you, even when you are far away.

It calls in quiet moments.
It calls when I bite into trái xoài xanh (green mango) dipped in muối ớt (chili salt).
It calls when I dream in two languages.
It calls in my mum’s voice,
always softer when she speaks Vietnamese.

But to return is never as simple as answering a call.

Khoảng cách (noun): Distance.
Not just of miles, but of time, of language, of understanding.

The Vietnam I carry is stuck in time.
The clinking of ly (cups) raised in toasts.
The sweet taste of chè (Vietnamese dessert).
But memory is selective,
cradling what is familiar
while the world moves forward without me.
The language I once spoke so freely
now falters on my tongue,
words slipping away like water through cupped hands.
I listen as my family speak in rapid Vietnamese,
laughing at stories I barely understand.
I smile.
I nod.
The only things I can do.
Somewhere in the gaps of my comprehension, the distance stretches.

Lạc lối (adjective): Lost.

To stand in a place that should feel like home,
yet feel like a stranger.

I miss Vietnam, but do I belong?
There,my accent is clumsy, my habits strange.
A việt kiều (overseas vietnamese person).
I’m too foreign.
Here, my food is too pungent, my customs too different.
I am too foreign.

And still, I remember.

And still, I miss.

Nhớ.

Guerlain Shalimar

Mother,
When I was small,
I used to say you smelled like honeyed warmth,
like the sun wrapped in velvet -
soft as silk,
but strong and powerful,
like a secret.
I didn’t have the words then,
but I knew you were home,
when I smelt it –
wrapped in vanilla and mystery,
something no one else could place. 

It wasn’t until I was 19,
standing in David Jones,
shopping for a gift for Amari,
that I froze.
I could smell you.
Lemon,
bright and sharp,
followed by bergamot,
smooth as cool stone in summer,
then jasmine,
a soft kiss of night flowers,
vanilla warm as the last light of day.

I bought it.
Guerlain Shalimar,
the salesperson said it was.
Sprayed it on -
tentative,
as if you might appear.
They say scent holds memories,
and now,
when I wear it,
I don’t just remember you,
I feel you.
Amber lingers like the space
where your arms used to be. 

And now,
when Dad turns suddenly,
smelling you in the air -
he sees me.
And in that moment,
I am both here and not,
a breath away from you,
and he holds me,
not just as his daughter,
but as a piece of you,
a thread that ties us both to what we've lost