Zephyr Zhang
cranium avium
I hold your skull up to the light,
a makeshift kaleidoscope
fracturing and refracting
a desaturated photo
of my mother’s statue, weeping
calcium tears on a bed
of poppies. Like the calcium
of you, my dear twig
snapped between two thumbs
in a collapse of fine powder,
a porcelain yolk running
through my fingers
like marrow. How sweet, how brittle
is my calcified globe. For you,
I have been practising on dried
leaves. There is no geodesic dome
lovelier. Like the crackle
of thin ice underfoot, you
are a smooth riverstone,
each orbit, a fading warmth.
Loretta Riach
I EXTEND MY ARMS,
after Claude Cahun, ‘I Extend My Arms’, 1931/32. Photograph, gelatin silver print on paper.
not to defy a gendered reading, but to feel the wind sailing through
as i extend all parts of myself: far-flung, double-jointed
finding a girl there, i’d hold her
as all other parts of me are rock, have been weathered. i’m not ready yet
to accept full geological reckoning
to accept even one end of a heavy thing. to make myself useful
i slow dance. if i’m leading, i could not be
without a feminine touch
into thin air, flexing the muscles of the hands
like probing the clues for minerals, for a change
like two thick goblets full of sky
they grab and love. my body’s stone
i gesture out there
not for lack of trying, but for what i know my arms can do:
to conduct, to bear, to frame
Anuja Mitra
dream journal
I look for everyone I’m missing in rooms that don’t exist. I traverse the stairs of this dream-invented house, down and up, up and down. Each door flung open has a mirror inside and the click of the knob is the clink of them cracking. At the end of the hall is a firelit party where the only conversation is me. Why does the unreachable feel more like reality? I can never find anything in my sleep but I’m always searching for it anyway. A friend in the crowd, a treasured ring. Or maybe the friend is the treasured thing. Sometimes I can’t bring the apology up out of my throat. Everyone else in the dream tells me to forget and move on but I’m insistent, like Cassandra prophesying the embers of Troy. I’m the worst kind of protagonist. I’m someone who compares herself to Cassandra. I’m the first to flee the party, bass thundering after me like an angry god. The hardest part of loss is learning. In the cold light of day you excise the pain, reorder what you thought you knew, redraw the map of a familiar house. You expect normalcy when it knocks at the door. You open the windows to the early morning mist. You let the mind do the work the heart can’t fathom, so one day you wake up and find you can deal with anything, even this.
Zephyr Zhang 张挚 likes to step on crunchy leaves. Their debut chapbook, moonlight circuit, was published in AUP New Poets 12. You can find more of their work at zephyrzhang.com. Loretta Riach is an artist and writer from Aotearoa. Their first chapbook, Possum, is part of AUP New Poets 12. In 2025, they held a residency on the island of Klovharun, Finland. More of their poems about rocks and art can be found in publications including Sweet Mammalian, Minarets, Poetry Aotearoa Yearbook, and Ōrongohau | Best New Zealand Poems, as well as previous issues of Starling. They are currently based in Naarm. Anuja Mitra lives in Tāmaki Makaurau. Her poetry and prose have been published widely in Aotearoa and also some places overseas, including in Landfall Tauraka, Cordite, takahē, Poetry Aotearoa Yearbook, Turbine | Kapohau, Sweet Mammalian, Starling, and several anthologies. Her debut chapbook, Bruised history, was published in AUP New Poets 12. She is sad to have aged out of being able to submit to Starling but delighted to sneak back in as a guest writer.