Vaudeville

Featured in

  • Published 20230207
  • ISBN: 978-1-922212-80-1
  • Extent: 264pp
  • Paperback (234 x 153mm), eBook

after an extract from Rimbaud’s ‘lost’ manuscript La Chasse Spirituelle

I am crying over spilt existence which is no commitment to fealty or compliance to patriotic singing no matter the conditions. All those issues of war played with and ‘learnt through’: sandpit classroom or patch of carpet that’s a battlefield. I would never encourage anyone to lapse into heroics, and would likely try to persuade otherwise. I would stop before a finish line if I had the opportunity. I find no satisfaction in the death of an enemy which is an office of human failure to gather each to their own. Keep science that offers more than daily bread away from this fragment of bushland.

Already a subscriber? Sign in here

If you are an educator or student wishing to access content for study purposes please contact us at griffithreview@griffith.edu.au

Share article

More from author

When the ships become water nymphs

Poetry Swans that are almost swans, sharp-tongued fruits,  mocking sheep farmers whose faces grow woollen, dancers at the bush-doof manic to their portable generators – changes come swift...

More from this edition

About face

Non-fictionOur image-centred world has elevated what writer Jia Tolentino calls ‘Instagram face’, a racially ambiguous assemblage of ethnic ‘greatest hits’ – wide cat-like eyes, big lips, smallish nose, high cheekbones. Few people will have a face that fits this template... But, whatever, you can pay for it. 

Wax

FictionI touch the wax of their pickaxes, then run my hand along the wax rock of the walls. One man squats a few metres away from the others, holding a pan. As I move towards him, I notice a label with descriptive text about Victoria’s gold rush, a reminder of the foundational gruesomeness of the enterprise – the colonial history of world’s fairs, or zoos, here insisting on itself in a minor carnival of the macabre. 

Living in kayfabe

Non-fictionOn free-dress days, I wore my sister’s dance tights to school because they made me feel like I was a real wrestler. I would’ve worn my Speedos if my mum let me. Other kids stared at me and asked ‘What are you wearing?’ and I’d tell them that this was my wrestling gear.

Stay up to date with the latest, news, articles and special offers from Griffith Review.