Attention Shoppers.

Are you in the market for fictions? Compelled by stories in the mouseprint on cans of bamboo shoots? Nutritional-poetry in the ink stains on egg shells? It's time to drop your groceries in the aisles and trolley over to Cottonmouth VI.

Cottonmouth night VI is happening on Thursday, July 10 at the usual haunt - Bar 459 in the back of the Rosemount Hotel. As a gift for our sixth birthday (yes! It's been six months! We're street-legal!) Cottonmouth has inherited the most beautiful sky-blue typewriter, set with inks of many colours and consistencies. It hungers for your touch.

Cottonmouth VI sees wordsmiths Cassie Lynch, Kevin Gillam, Annamaria Weldon, Jay Pruyn, JJ DeCeglie, Martin McKenzie-Murray and Crispin Wellington take to the stage. Claire French and Gemma Willing perform new words from dramaturgy. Paul Carter, author of the fulsomely titled "Don't Tell Mum I Work on the Rigs, She Thinks I'm a Piano Player in a Whorehouse" and "This Is Not a Drill" tells evocative stories with jungle themes.

Adam Trainer makes music to bracket the set. This is truly an exciting line-up.

Doors open at 7 pm for open mic registration and the night kicks off with Mr. Trainer at 8 pm. Gather your dairy goods and perishables, bring $5 worth of change, and meet us there. Shoppers, it's the end of the financial year and poems and fables are CHEAP at Cottonmouth!

So we keep running out of copies of our zine on the night, it doesn't matter how many we print. If you missed out, please placate yourself with a digital replica in the Portable Document Format. And if you contribute something next time, you'll definitely get yourself a copy!

Download Cottonmouth Issue 5 (PDF)

The zine was edited by Scott-Patrick Mitchell, with layout by Patrick Pittman and illustrations of televisions and vampire teeth by Jessyca Hutchens.

We were back at the 459 Bar on Thursday June 12, and thankfully our steampunk-powered amplification and reproduction technologies managed to stay functional for the entire night.

It was another huge one with a great crowd and a wonderful and extremely all-over-the-place selection of readers and performers. Any month that features zombie rockumentaries and nutso mad percussion alongside established poets who I've respected for years gets my vote by default.

Here's a gallery of shots by this month's excellent photographer Jane Bennett. We shall get performances up for you shortly, and the peg-wall will be uploaded for your reading pleasure as soon as I can figure out how to write a bulk Photoshop action to remove the penises that some lovely person drew on every single one.

If you want to perform at a future Cottonmouth, odds are we want you as well. Get in touch, why don't you?

We'll see you in July.