Content warning: animal death, allusions to colonisation

The cow’s wail wafts ghostly
in life. In death,
it breathes on the air,
odourless, a clean tongue.
Not even flies would touch it.

Amongst asphodel vitality,
one sick paddock, a haven
for the diseased body.
Trampled earth, pondweed, sure,
but trees and turf,
spinifex, kangaroo shit;
mean antiseptic for Paterson’s squalor.

Elsewhere, in Martian silence,
pungent baking rubber
and saltbushes in caked dust,
she lies, a hide perfectly stretched
over sparse bones, bugless,
scentless, soundless, cacophonic.
You can hear the dead
under this sky.