rabbit
kitten small as a toy
easter bauble bare cold body
stiff in the shade of hydrangeas
pricked ears grey fuzzed fur hardened flesh
kittens
weaning flat-scatter run
low under that old hydrangea
dead baby rabbit gone and more
blue grey feathers
Animal Studies Journal 14(2)
My critical autoethnography questions the discursive practices surrounding the consumption of domesticated junglefowl, birds scientifically known as Gallus domesticus and commonly known as ‘meat’ or chicken. I investigate the degree to which language might matter when it comes to the fate faced …
Animal Studies Journal 14(2). Photo of Sienna taken by Elaine Rollo
Stevo’s saying it’s a great night for footy. Zavier doesn’t know what that means for sure but the sky’s clear except for those two puffy clouds hovering over the ground. They’re pretty, glowed gold just before the sun dipped behind the skyscrapers.
As a white woman living on unceded Eastern Maar territory, an area now commonly known as “Victoria,” reading Emily Brontë’s Victorian novel Wuthering Heights is profoundly unsettling. Brontë’s Wuthering Heights offers evocative renditions of the Yorkshire moors, celebrating the moor’s snow-burdened beauty …
Cover detail from Critical Insights: Wuthering Heights (Salem Press)
A few years ago, a human neighbour picked me a handful of beans from her garden. She lived not far up the road from where I am writing this. It was a warm day and my first visit to her home. Her …
Heterotopia, Radical Imagination, and Shattering Orders, edited by Paula Acari, Routledge.
dad nods and we stop laughing
mum’s big story verified
no clouds up the hill new moon
this is Djargurd Wurrung land
bright like a lightbulb due north
next Sunday lunch what is that
window reflection but wait
.
Cordite 4 February. Image detail of cover by Henry Lai-Pyne
This chapter is part of an ongoing study of snake–human relations that is reorienting me from the harms of ophidiophobia. All through my childhood I was terrified of snakes. This culturally inherited fright led me to lead others to snake killings.
The Routledge Companion to Gender and Animals, edited by Chloe Taylor, Routledge.
They ordered her, this stiff pink corpse
Bare as a glare and way too heavy to lift.
I would say the bath is a coffin
Enamelled sepulchre
She might leave a dint in it.
The floral sheet is loose, her flesh is …
Literary Veganism 1 March 2024
Snake Church is a home-grown kookaburra-led cultural experiment. My scattered field notes, moments-in-time reports, begin with the first movements of spring, when the lush grass of unmown areas swallows my feet, then my knees. Snake Church finishes, for this paper at least …
Spring, well over a decade ago. I head up the rise before the fruit trees as a tiger snake moves across the path made by my regular round of the tree paddock, a cherished place transformed more than ten years before this …
