Vessels of Love is an annual poetry program presented by Poetry Sydney that seeks to explore ideas and forms of love over the week of Valentine’s Day, 8-14 February.
The 2026 program focused thematically on ‘love’s forces of abundance and decay’ through the poetic works of seven artists: Faye Couros, Willo Drummond, Martin Edmond, Ethan Price, Pooja Mittal Biswas, Michele Seminara, and through the guardianship of Lenore Bassan, Minnie Agnes Filson (1898-1971).
Moving through gothic folktale, autobiography, eco-poetics, found poetry, magical realism, body horror and absurdism, Vessels of Love 2026 channels worlds where love sustains and destroys, feeds on itself, and creates its own environment. Harnessing poetry’s reach into film, sound and visual art, the collection captures love as a living, shifting force in perpetual motion, existing between the overwhelming richness of connection and the inevitable transformations of time. Rather than resolving the tension between abundance and decay, these works inhabit it, occupying the space between what love is and what it does—between symbolism and lived experience, memory and fiction, the personal and the mythic.
The films featured in the collection are a collaboration between this year’s feature artists and The Salons. Three of the poems and films are available to enjoy below, while the full collection can be viewed here.
A Typewriter Guilty with Love
by Michele Seminara
Artist Statement
When prompted to write about ‘love in abundance and decay’, my mind immediately leapt to Elizabeth Smart’s poetic novella, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept. This autobiographical tale of Smart’s tumultous and ill-fated affair with English poet George Barker is operatic in both its grandeur and demise. The couple’s scandalous relationship spanned two decades and resulted in Smart having four of Barker’s children while he remained married and fathered three children with his first wife.
A Typewriter Guilty with Love charts the course of Smart and Barker’s relationship by responding to each of the novella’s ten chapters with a ‘found’ poem sourced from the text. The book (and these poems) juxtapose the prosaic with the poetic, elevating the couple’s love to the status of myth while simultaneously miring it in the grittiness of human reality. The decay inherent in the baroque abundance of Smart’s love story is the source of its enduring appeal and tragic beauty.
A Typewriter Guilty with Love
ACT I
1
I am waiting for He
whom I have waited
so long, to disgorge from the bus,
every drop of my blood
vibrating with shameless intention.
Then She (whom I never expected)
peers out, with Madonna eyes
that hypnotize, her flood of hair falling
in damp mourning-
weeds of lament and foreboding.
She is his dear heart; He, my beloved;
and I, their treacherous host.
The triangular net of our fate is cast —
O forgive my imminent sin!
The poisonous seed of his love
has already mortally pierced my skin.
2
I pray for forbearance
but my jungled sex is infested by desire.
Beneath veils of trivial propinquity
he draws me in like gravity —
seducing me with cyphers
on a typewriter guilty with love.
Under my tunic of chaste behaviour,
a fox devours a dove.
3
Love, like a refugee, has sailed
and nature, God’s perpetual whore,
has seduced all shame away.
My angel beguiled me with sadist eyes
while I bathed beneath the waterfall
and has left me floating flagrant
on a wild inside sea.
I am muse of this new-found land,
delirious as a high, round note —
nothing can ever be more than now,
he has pierced the very centre of my soul.
Let my flood of milk and honey feed the world!
IT is done. I am nothing.
And all the earth solicits me with joy.
ACT II
4
Hungry in the Ford under the desert sun
we cross the border into tragedy —
police sirens warning, Turn Back, Turn Back —
because of love, only too much love.
Did you intend to commit fornication?
Did intercourse take place?
(It did, Inspector, and his fruit was sweet to my taste.)
Be quiet! Don’t try to lure me!
They are taking me away from my beloved,
prosecuting me for what was in our eyes.
My sin is noted on fourteen virgin sheets
and filed away, six carbon copies of each,
as punishment for my coquetry
in this country, corrupt with hypocrisy.
5
Through the fall sunshine
a prodigal daughter
the world in her pocket
contrary as a tree
comes hurrying home
face like a prayer
asking for no one’s forgiveness.
6
Father’s desk massively symbolic between us,
the long cold of his measuring eye.
Mother a harpy of relentlessness:
I want nothing to do with you!
In decency’s court, what is my defense
but one, small, nude word?
Love? Stuff and nonsense!
(Don’t cry — tears only increase the crime.)
Desolated by unbelievers, I long
for the pleasure of our illegal kiss.
Neither duty nor reason nor guilt
can incline me anywhere away from you.
Let the jealous peer from behind drab curtains,
our passion can conquer the world.
The fates grow weary of my procrastination;
I must salvage our love from this blood.
7
His apple-tree face
is straightjacketed to the bed
and he is chewing a frightful drug.
Is this a hospital or a goal?
It’s a nightmare rendezvous.
Go on, says the nurse, his wife is already in there.
(But didn’t he say I was the one?)
I’ve done it twice today, he sighs,
once with her and once with you.
You Cad!
You c—t!
Women are so possessive.
(But aren’t you serving two?)
Rubber corridors — could you tell me
the way out of here? — stairs spiraling
down for hours.
Careful, dearest.
I can carry love like Saint Christopher,
but will drown in this sea of suspicion.
8
Doubt, like a Harpy, claws
at the chemical coverings of my brain.
My heart, buried by unpunctuated hours,
has utterly collapsed.
It is near dawn, and for ten brutal days
he has not come back.
The creeping fingers of dissuasion
type holes in my naive game.
Miles away, in Pity’s name, it is
her hair falling like grief on his chest
as he burrows like a baby at her breast.
He has sinned most dangerously against me.
He has betrayed love, which love will not allow.
I wonder if he notices that I am dead?
Walls of gloom grow in my caged head.
But I do not bleed;
instead, I cradle his seed
and in a bed as black as the grave,
try to synthesize hope in my Hour-of-Need.
ACT III
9
This breast that once burned from far away
is frozen over like Everest.
I am a coma of sedative monotony,
stricken stiff, beyond longing.
I wander, like Dido,
chaste, ecclesiastical, praying
for Him to fill my bed.
Cold bones!
The unborn embryo withers on my coils.
I can feel the little bastard moving
but my loneliness grows greater than the child.
Forty days in the wilderness and not one holy vision.
I am nature’s seedbag, waiting
for the kiss I must have or die.
10
I will not be placated by mechanical existence
or acquiesce to suicide, pimp of death.
My undammed grief craves violence!
Neon’s flash relentlessly
as I race disaster down Third Avenue,
wailing under her window
for him to descend and stroke my hair.
A usurper has been in the temple, O God,
bribing him with her ten-cent tears.
The hand that once revived me is paralyzed;
I slip beneath the flood.
Now polestars decay into falling stars,
hope gushes from my arterial wound,
dreams dissolve into water,
and I am drowned alive.
Only the child still pins me to this
turning world — nailed
on the conjunction of passion and pity,
our petrified legend is crucified.
Let him write the postmortem
that will acquit him of these murders.
I hemorrhage my sorrow into this notebook,
dying for the language of love.
A Day on Hiva Oa
by Martin Edmond
Artist Statement
In June 2025 Mayu and I went to the Marquesas for our health. We were both post-op and looking to spend time somewhere that wasn’t a ward or a hospital waiting room. It was healing to be cast beyond the limits of our known world, to be welcomed by those who lived there, and to be shown some of the secrets of their islands. Such secrets are never fully disclosed; they remain mysterious even to those who hold them; as they should be. In writing this piece I was trying to evoke that secrecy, along with the joy of being in a place that gives you what you need, and also the joy of giving back what you can to the place that gives to you: love in abundance and decay.
A Day on Hiva Oa
Fragments of white coral lie out on the black volcanic sand like tissue from the sea’s brain. They are not soft, however, but hard, like bones. Someone made a heart out of them and wrote the word ‘Tahiti’ inside. We are not in Tahiti any more, we are on Hiva Oa, riding a Toyota along the spine of the land. Our guide is Heiana, she drives fast, with one hand on the wheel and the other working her mobile phone. The road is narrow and steep, with blind corners and hairpin bends and sheer cliffs falling hundreds of metres to the blue ocean below. Goats dislodge stones that rain down from above. Don’t worry, she says, I used to go skateboarding here. Heiana is from Huahine, she met her Marquesan boyfriend while working on the cruise ship Paul Gauguin and moved to Atuona to live with him. She is tall and rangy, barefoot, tattooed, with a white streak in her hair. She points to an island, Fatu Huku, offshore, and says it was turned upside down by a jealous god because it was too beautiful. We come down from the hills and stop at a small bay where a man sits on a bench outside a grey rectangular building. He is Heiana’s uncle and he sells us a packet of dried bananas. Heiana says she has many uncles. In the cove the sea rattles its bones. Sturdy palms festooned with bunches of yellow coconuts lean out over the water. When one falls it might drift on ocean currents all the way to Ecuador. Or Peru. Or it might germinate here on the beach at Nahoe. South America is six and a half thousand kilometres away. That’s where the kumara came from, no one knows how. Kumar is a Quechua word for sweet potato. From the next bay, Puamau, a thousand years ago, people set out over the sea and discovered Rapanui/Easter Island. The biggest tiki in French Polynesia stands there, up on the marae at Iipona. Takai’i is massive, solemn, made of red tuff and has had his penis hacked off. At Marie Antoinette’s we drink lemonade and eat wild pork stew with breadfruit chips. A man takes a ukulele, inlaid with pearl shell, from the souvenir stand and plays and sings a song while the women behind the counter dance. Down by the shore we eat fresh fruit from a stone table while jungle fowl peck at the scraps. When we are done the detritus is swept into the sea. We go swimming, Mayu and I. We are here for our health, we have both been under the knife. The scars on her belly look like the stars of the Southern Cross. My navel resembles the Eye of Sauron. A big wave knocks her over and rips the goggles from her head. We find them later, thrown up on the sand. On the way back Heiana tunes her phone to music. We are travelling with a Catalan couple. He is called Casanova, he takes Heiana’s phone and selects Jacques Brel singing Ne Me Quitte Pas. Teresa, his wife, whispers: He is eighty years old! Casanova shouts and sings all the way back, punching the air with his fists. When we get to the roundabout, Heiana sends the Toyota barrelling around it twice, whooping and sounding the horn. I can feel salt from the sea prickling in the wound below my belly button. Mayu has frangipani flowers in her hair and when she leans against me, I smell their perfume. All things seed and grow and flower and fruit then fall and rot and we are no different; we may be old and scarred but we are ripening still; and when we fall we will fall together.
Murder / Suicide
by Pooja Mittal Biswas
Artist Statement
Merging the Brontëan gothic, Caliban-esque desire, and the consumed/ consuming horror trope in The Substance, love in this poem is not a gentle surplus but a feral plenty, blooming teeth-first out of sites of harm, madness and hauntings. Tenderness and violence are folded into the same gesture: the kiss that tastes of cyanide, the beloved imagined as both dove and parasite. The poem stages abundance as a kind of excess that overruns the body—electrical, florid, grotesquely lush—while decay appears not as an ending but as an alchemical state in which organs liquefy, bones become instruments, and even verminous self-loathing is repurposed as a strange, desperate form of care.
Murder / Suicide
there are flowers, as under the sun
there are stars, as under the dark
there are eyes, as under sleep—under death.
you hold me as if all these are true. but I
(some gentle excoriation)
(some sticky exudate
between bruised, perforated cells)
do not deserve this.
I sold my truth for survival. my insanity for
sanity. I do not deserve
your pity
you who have a dove inside your skin
a pallor sweeter than death:
bones
dull, white, to-be-yellowed things.
we do not scratch we do not scrabble
like the living trapped in coffins, dumb animals
locked in cages, addicts clawing off their
skins
grandiloquent
nectar
glass-red wires
electric blood
sparks bitter as cyanide on our tongues
when I kiss you, beloved,
till death do us part
so I shall kill you
& you me, a simple agreement,
a contract
argentine as the blade of a knife
at a moonlit throat.
come, now: authenticity
is a privilege for those who do not
fear, or do not fear to fear. I, coward,
blasphemer, have long since fled
from myself as men flee from hurricanes—
can you blame me? it was that or be
ripped apart
by my own stupid, starving, rending fingers
as wailing widows rend their hair,
as were-beasts rend their own flesh
that was once human.
some ugly, throbbing mass of a thing
a placenta ejected wet & fleshy, heavy
with a life, a sentience of its own. all the
grotesque little twitches
of a brain, a body mid-seizure.
they talked about electrocuting me.
(as treatment, not torture.
torture-treatment.) they said
the sizzle
the awful burning
gash soul-deep
the wracking judder
the white, nuclear implosion
would stay in my brain,
nary a mark of it
elsewhere, save my shuddering
limbs. they’d
electroshock me like they do to people
on death row, but they’d stop
before I died. (& then they expected
me to be reborn.
ridiculous. gotta kill me first.)
they said they’d
tie me down, put padding between my jaws
so I wouldn’t bite my tongue off.
(good riddance, frankly. like Caliban,
my speech has
brought me nothing.)
they said they’d do this to me. said it
while I hung from the ceiling,
noose pulling sharp under my chin
wondering why I let his hands on me
if I could let my hands on someone
to murder them or just the reflection
of myself in their eyes. do dead eyes
still reflect their killers, or do they go
opaque
stages with the curtains closed?
I scrounge here in the marrow-warm gutters
akin to vermin; I am vermin, a rodent
dwelling in your stomach, claws gouging
the soft, slick silk of your gut
teeth consuming you
from the inside out. your organs
red & shiny as pomegranate seeds
between my worrying fangs, all of you
grist to the mill of me.
you & your small smiles
not small from shyness but from
hunger, underfed as children
of droughts & famines are, I the blight
upon your fields, my rake
in your grasses, fingers in your
hair, nails at the corner
of your mouth forcing it open
for the pills:
eleven turns down the furrows
of the earth
turning your soil
planting my madness in you
saliva & blood
drooling mouth & lolling tongue
excess & excretion
the hot stink of dead things
left out in the sun too long.
devil that I am, I will crouch
on your shoulder
or behind your spleen, anywhere
you’ll have me, a nest of wasps
beneath your ribs, in your lungs
your softest tissue
lined with stings
tender, red, inflamed
pornographic
pink-pricked & pus-glossy
around the puncture points.
they’ll leave you alone
(I’ll leave you alone)
I promise, just a bit more hurt
before you rest. I too will rest
within you, a parasite
in its host, a larva
in its pupa. helping, not hurting:
erasing you. erasing me. you will
become me & I you, merging,
liquefying our organs
as all chitinous beings do
until our flesh is the same.
the husk & the pit, the disease
& the germ. tooth
& nail. the tooth
shatters, as does
the nail, the will:
only the shattering
remains.
Read and watch more from the Vesssels of Love at The Salons.
Michele Seminara is a Sydney-based poet and serves as Co-Managing Editor of Verity La Journal. Her work has featured in publications such as Cordite, Mascara Literary Review, and Australian Poetry Journal. She is the author of two poetry collections — Suburban Fantasy and Engraft — and two chapbooks, Scar to Scar (written with Robbie Coburn) and HUSH. She is currently working on her verse novella, Dis.
Martin Edmond was born in Ohakune and grew up in small North Island towns. He has an MA from Victoria University of Wellington and a Doctorate of Creative Arts from the University of Western Sydney. He travelled with avant-punk theatre Red Mole in the 1970s, worked as a screenwriter in the 1980s and has, since the 1990s, concentrated upon the writing of prose. In 2013 he received the New Zealand Prime Minister’s Award for literary achievement in non-fiction. After forty years in Australia, in 2023 he moved to Japan, where he lives in Shinanomachi in the mountains of Honshu.
Pooja Mittal Biswas is an Indian-Australian based in Bidjigal Country. She has been widely published in literary journals like Meanjin and Overland. In 2024, she was shortlisted for both the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards and the South Australian Literary Awards. She has been awarded grants from the Australia Council for the Arts and Create NSW, and has been interviewed or reviewed by The Age, The Australian and ABC Radio National’s The Book Show. She currently teaches at the University of Sydney’s National Centre for Cultural Competence.