A new animal

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

Divine dis/connection 

Non-fictionMY FAMILY HAVE always been wary around animals, especially in the home (I could have written ‘non-human animals’, but a stark separation of human from animal is truer to them). My brother and I have changed because of animal encounters in share houses and via intimate others, and we now each live with a partner who likes cats (I ‘have’ one cat; he ‘has’ two). But our parents have remained the same.

Into the void

Non-fictionI think with a little fear, as I often do, of the many other (and much larger) creatures whose natural territory this is, and scan the surrounding water for any dark, fast-moving shadows. But soon I relax and settle into the rhythm of my freestyle stroke. Breathe. Pull. Pull. Pull. Breathe. Pull. Pull. Pull. Breathe.

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.

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