The supper

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  • Published 20221101
  • ISBN: 978-1-922212-74-0
  • Extent: 264pp
  • Paperback (234 x 153mm), eBook

after Garry Shead 

Now it is the appointed Time, the Hour at which Man and Bird and Beast
are brought together through a Convocation of Labour and Labour’s
prime Reward; where Sacrificer and Sacrificee, still fragrant with
the Blood of Morning and Harvest, gather by twisted Beak and crooked
Hand to acknowledge that the Conditions of Honour and Hunger have
been met for a fifth or fifteenth Night in a Row; where it has become
customary for them to drink Port Wine from unleavened Barrels of
dead Swine Gut and dead Oak Tree and melted Beeswax and to remedy
their collective Misfortune with the cutting of Meats and sowing of
Teeth; where each Participant here has a Name and where each Name
is an Order of Animal derived according to the ancient Hierarchy of
Famine that names and consumes all living Things; where the Door
and Window of the Room in which they supper have been flung open
to allow their Evening’s Prayer an easy Escape through the irreverent
and oppressive Geometry of Lighting that characterises their Mood as it
characterises their unstoppable Passage through History; that they may
witness it fly outwards toward a God who is neither real nor there, just
a Patch of Sky filled with Benevolence, Humour and Divine Mystery
and who, in turn, fills the Earth’s eternal Stomach with equal Measures
of Light and Shadow, Drought and Flood, Satiety and Satiety’s grand
Opposite. 

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About the author

Luke Johnson

Luke Johnson is the author of the short-story collection Ferocious Animals (RWP, 2021), and a lecturer in creative writing at the University of Wollongong.

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