Live Encounters Poetry & Writing Volume Three Nov-Dec 2026.
Pauses, poems by Stephanie Green.
Pauses
I put my ear to your chest and listen
as your rattled lungs fill and empty.
Like the sea you seem tireless.
I want you to breath me in,
to hold me inside your body always,
but with each exhale you remind me
nothing stays as it is.
The weather always turns.
Clear summer blue thickens with haze.
The scent of smoke weighs on the breeze.
We walk down to the harrowed beach,
rutted dark yellow by storms,
and watch the white tide together.
You’re quieter than usual, counting
the pauses between the waves.
Is that how we live, I ask you,
waiting for the pauses?
There are no real still points,
you remind me, only moments.
Not even words stay the same,
not even when you write them down.
I can’t write your breath into being,
but your words will always remind me
of the in-between places, the moments,
and the promise that we can begin again.
In Pieces
Everything is in pieces.
Nothing is whole.
The streets have become abstract compositions.
Jagged edges, broken pathways,
segmented oranges and apples spilling
from their majolica plates, lips,
eyebrows detached from their anchoring
places, floating on the dusty air,
flat oblongs that once were cars and trucks,
a child’s plastic toy peeking
from behind a fractured pylon.
There is no straight path,
no fast highway through this,
no complete sentences to unsay it,
only disjointed fragments and whispers
telling us this way, and that way, and
a faint breeze on our cheeks
from the last distant windmill,
the sun rising over a blackened sea.
© Stephanie Green
Stephanie Green is an Australian poet, essayist, biographer and short story writer, widely published in Australian and international journals, and in recent anthologies such as Fire and Rain, eds Yuyutsu Sharma, Sally Breen and Jennifer Mackenzie (Pratik/APWT 2023), The Incompleteness Book II, eds Julia Prendergast, Eileen Herbert-Goodall and Jen Webb (Recent Works Press 2021), and the Anthology of Australian Prose Poetry, eds Cassandra Atherton and Paul Hetherington (MUP 2020). Stephanie’s most recent collections are Seams of Repair (Calanthe, 2023) and Sahara Rain (Liquid Amber, 2026). Currently an Adjunct Senior Lecturer with Griffith University, she lives and works on the unceded lands of the Yugembeh/Kombumerri Peoples in south-east Queensland.