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

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.

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.

Sartre’s lobsters
Non-fictionIn The Secret Life of Lobsters (2004), Trevor Corson describes how, before the lobster’s status had sufficiently improved for affluent urbanites to desire its meat, ‘lobster’ was used derogatorily to describe British redcoats during the American Revolution and, later, dupes or fools in general. Which brings me to Jordan Peterson.