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
As dead as
Non-fictionAs a Mauritian person, I’ve always known about dodos. I first heard about them from my dad’s family. The dodo was only ever found in Mauritius, and I naively believed that everyone knew that. But when I was relaying my experience of listening to the podcast to a group of friends, they were surprised to hear that the dodo was Mauritian.
When the birds scream
Non-fictionI read books in which girls like me made friends with cockatoos and galahs, and my mum told me stories about my pop in Queensland who could teach any bird to speak and to whistle his favourite country songs. My favourite story was the one about the bird who used to sit on his shoulder while he drove trucks for work.
Object permanence
Non-fictionTigger arrived with one eye and a tender but wary disposition, and at first it seemed like the missing eye would be the locus of his mystery. But within a few months of his living in my small apartment, he began presenting strange troubles – back legs listing when he turned a corner, spasms in his resting spine – that were quickly diagnosed as arthritis and diabetes.
