Before I forget again

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Mother-daughter trip

PoetryNana B and Zeide once ice-skated on a lake in the Carpathian Mountains in Poland. ‘I was made for Poland,’ says Mum, as Brisbane roils with heat....

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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.

A perfectly ordinary dachshund observes the problem of being

Poetry Breathing your small inauspicious body almost into incomprehension, supine and crouched, lost to the world, or to that portion only dachshund speech describes, your propulsive unyielding deeds...

Mother of pearls

FictionBut we are more animal now than we’ve ever been. We read the water that leaps into our pools; we filter all kingdoms of life through our gills. We understand that the tendrils connecting one life form to another run much longer and deeper than you might expect. And we can entertain the notion that our strange tasks were like the fateful beats of a butterfly’s wings, and maybe the witch was a rare genius, able to perceive how the purloined dog, the pawned bird or the swapped cats would, in the mysterious rippling of the universe, lead to our deepest desires coming to pass.