Featured in
- Published 20231107
- ISBN: 978-1-922212-89-4
- Extent: 208pp
- Paperback, ePub, PDF, Kindle compatible
My son has made friends
with the daddy-long-legs
under the kitchen bench.
Each morning
I am freshly summoned
to ‘um ook at em.’
Come look at him.
The body: a dot
of graphite
huddled in the corner,
its pencil-line legs
all bent up in a scribble.
I am relieved he is not like me
as a child: afraid of spiders.
‘Ook ook Mummy.’
He is pointing under the bench.
‘It’s is oome.’
His home.
I can’t bring myself to vacate
the corpse:
I want the friendship
to last.
Share article
About the author
Jo Ward
Jo Ward is a poet living in Kupidabin, Queensland. She is the author of A Quiet Sorcery (Hardie Grant, 2022) and founder of Ovidian,...
More from this edition
Before I forget again
Poetry I am a ceramic horse in kintsugi fields. Shards shred my tongue to gold rivers. Cracked and crazed – from fire gallops beast. Memory slips lapis lazuli. I break curses, gather spells. Nudge fresh letters in water troughs – watch words bob – shiny new apples to crunch.
Divine dis/connection
Non-fictionMY FAMILY HAVE always been wary around animals, especially in the home (I could have written ‘non-human animals’, but a stark separation of human from animal is truer to them). My brother and I have changed because of animal encounters in share houses and via intimate others, and we now each live with a partner who likes cats (I ‘have’ one cat; he ‘has’ two). But our parents have remained the same.
Easy rider
In ConversationMy first bull-riding job was a portrait of a young rider named Ian ‘Irish’ Molan from Cork, Ireland, for the upcoming event in Darwin that weekend. I attended the event that weekend and photographed behind the scenes and focused on Ian Molan in action. When it was the Irishman’s turn, he was thrown off the bull, who stomped on the rider’s chest repeatedly. I thought Ian was going to die. The bull was relentless.
