Evelyn Araluen - Dropbear Poetics

    Tiddalik say
I’m such great thirst
I will drain the land
and drag my big fat belly
across the empty sea

    Bunyip say
I’m gonna gobble you up
if you step waters where I sleep
and with wet claws I will snatch
your spine and ankles to fill them
        with stain and stench

    what the Mopoke say
don’t need saying
if you grown up under his eyes

now here’s the part
you write Black Snake down
for a dilly of national flair
    true god you don’t know how wild I’m gonna be
    to every fucking postmod blinky bill
    tryna crack open my country
    mining in metaphors
    for that place you felt felt you
        somewhere in
        the Royal National

Waagan says use heart
but I am rage and dreaming
at the gloss green palm fronds
of this gentry aestheantique
    all this potplanting in our sovereignty
    a garden for you to swallow speak our blood

if you’re taking that talk
you gotta scrape it from my schoolhouse walls
filter gollywog ashtray snugglepot kitsch
into your pastoral deconstruct
    fill four’n twenty pies
    with artisan magpies
    if you sever their heads
    you can wear them to the doof

I say rage and dreaming
for making liar the lyrebird
for making mimetic
the power   Baiami gave
when Ribbon’s mischief swallowed first life
    ochre dust
    creation breath
    ancestor song

we aren’t here
    to hear you poem
you do wrong   you get wrong
you get
gobbled up

Overland Issue 230
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Some #weekendreading on the train back from Hakone. Carting my #auslit around #Japan... . #theunread

Some #weekendreading on the train back from Hakone. Carting my #auslit around #Japan... . #theunreadshelfproject2019 #travelreading
May 19, 2019 at 08:58AM