Live Encounters Poetry & Writing Volume Two Nov-Dec 2026.
Final Winter Swim, poems by Nigel Spence.
Final Winter Swim
Surf’s up for the final winter’s day. Walls rise from the ocean’s sheen,
rumpling the surface as if a colossal underwater creature
is moving landward, pushing up six-foot faces, glassy,
muscling toward the beach’s arc,
peeling left and right, surfers
in the take-off zone
hoot with delight.
Inshore, he’s much less certain. The shore break lands with a force
to hammer flatfish skimming the bank. Breathe, step
in, dive. Cold clamps the lungs, bites the skull,
and it’s a wave-smack throwdown
with a surge through the gutter
to lift and carry even
the strongest bodies
while the retreating suck foments a blithe, lethal intent.
Barreled and tumbled, lost in the wash, he knows
waves of elation. Found now, remade
under spray blown back toward
the horizon that cuts away,
the offing as sharp as salt
sting in split skin.
Sandy Evans Plays a Descending Minor Third
The piano diminishes to
one unresolved
chord.
She steps forward, lips grip
the mouthpiece, cheek lines sharp,
fingers press pearled discs
into a brass body. Faint laughter
back at the bar, somewhere
a cough. Then the horn breathes
two notes, slow,
in low register, washing the room
a kind of blue,
a collective sigh
as the mood descends
with the interval, only
three half steps
down to the tonic that holds
everyone in place with a frequency fat
and warm, edged with spittle-crackle, rumbling
below the stave like trains underground, tremoring
up to pulse vital organs. Above,
four overtones layer,
smoking a blown language
that all understand,
each in their own time.
Flush
Seven sauna days under morose
cloud, the promised rain withheld,
till drops float across the yard.
We sit beneath the eve, drifts
of spray ghost by the blue gums
beyond the fence, drawing near.
Dots on the rail, tabletop,
the deck at our feet, a cool spritz
to settle the dust and calm
mad end-of-summer pollens
that hang around the garden.
The marsh frogs start their engines.
Rain lines tauten to wire threads,
gutters rouse and run, shifting
desiccated leaves from beds,
and the sky lets loose: a surge
down the drive, the lawn floods,
a dense spill from the roof
drenches us—longed for splatter,
hammering hard surfaces,
flushing away all matter.
© Nigel Spence
Nigel Spence is an emerging poet who lives on Wallemudegal land (Hunters Hill), in Sydney. He worked for many years as a child and family social worker, child rights advocate, and CEO with overseas aid agency ChildFund before completing a PhD and working as a research fellow and associate lecturer at the University of New South Wales and University of Wollongong. His lifelong hankering for poetry has found time for expression in recent years, and the poems are coming. His poetry has been longlisted for the Lane Cove Poetry Prize, and he is a regular contributor in Mark Tredinnick’s Poetry Studio.