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.
Where the wild things aren’t
Non-fictionMelbourne Zoo knows that it sits in an uneasy position as a conservationist advocate, still keeping animals in cages, and with an exploitative and cruel past. Our guides for the evening walked a practised line between acknowledging the zoo’s harmful history and championing its animal welfare programs, from the native endangered species they’re saving to their Marine Response Unit, a dedicated seaside taskforce just waiting for their sentimental action movie.