When I was younger, I often sang to cows to bring them to my family’s milking shed. Within an hour of this job, if it was winter or early spring, I would be feeding their stolen babies. Or at least the half …
newborn high cheekbones from your mother your father much younger her dowry of sheep goes astray you have his jet black hair his dark eyes your given name means splendid brilliant shining one//young child your aunt takes you on as slave
The Amphibian Literary and Art Journal Memory 10
If looks could kill, Maggie, the black and white cat who lives around here, would be long dead. What a glare I give her when she does that insouciant late afternoon wander down the hill, heading for her evening feed of the …
The Trumpeter 41 (1)
Photo credit: Mona Pyke
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.