Melody
My dad tells me one of the young tradies he works with sent him a video about how the
vaccines are going to kill everyone who gets them – especially the booster shots which will
supposedly kill you on the spot.
‘He doesn’t believe it’ my dad assures me, ‘he won’t get vaccinated, not because he
thinks it will kill him, but because he’s afraid it will make him sterile. ‘And there’s
no arguing with him about it’ he says. ‘I’ve tried.’
And what of the contradictions? The genuine need for protections of various kinds including environmental (not the it’s-either-me-or-you style protection of borders btw, or is that a contradiction in terms? I am not asking to be cute. I am trying to think this through).
What of the immunosuppressed and compromised? What of those who cannot get vaccinated either because of certain health conditions or treatments, or because they are not yet eligible? We know that higher socio-economic areas tend to have higher vaccination rates than the rest of the community – this data has been emerging in Sydney, and elsewhere, for some time now – and that much of the vaccine injustice globally falls along class and race lines.
* Christian pop songs on AM radio
REFRAIN
All
It’s a putting oneself into a space of deliberate uncertainty. Stepping into the unknown. A practicing in that space. Training. It’s about thinking provisionally. Speaking small. Not for all.
It’s about languaging. Being attentive to words, to meaning. To the meaning that can be smuggled in however unwittingly.
It’s about taking seriously – which might have nothing whatsoever to do with being serious.
*whistling tunnel
Melody Ellis is a writer and academic of Greek, Anglo-Celtic and German descent living on unceded Boon Wurrung country in the south of Melbourne. She teaches creative writing and literary theory in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University, where she is a member of the non/fictionLab research group. She comes from a background in the visual arts and is interested in interdisciplinary, experimental, collective, and fictocritical approaches to writing.
Andy Jackson is a poet and creative writing teacher, and was awarded the inaugural Writing the Future of Health Fellowship. He has been shortlisted for the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry, the John Bray Poetry Award and the Victorian Premier's Prize for Poetry. Andy has co-edited disability-themed issues of Southerly and Australian Poetry Journal, and his latest poetry collection is Human Looking, which won the 2022 ALS Gold Medal.
http://amongtheregulars.wordpress.com/
Tina Stefanou is an Australian-Greek artist based on Wurundjeri country in Wattle Glen, Victoria. With a background as a vocalist, she works undisciplined, with and across a diverse range of mediums, practices, approaches and labours: an embodied practice that she calls voice in the expanded field.
Peta Murray is a writer-performer and late blooming academic in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University. Her experience as theatre-maker informs her research on the role of arts-based practices as modes of inquiry and cultural activism. She is the author of plays (Wallflowering, Salt), blogposts (mmmmycorona), and multi-modal works of live art and diarological science. Her current focus is the making of HERD, a queer cantata with wreckedALLprods.
Khalid Warsame is a writer and arts–worker. His essays, fiction, and criticism have appeared in numerous publications. He has appeared as a facilitator and guest artist at writers’ festivals and his work has recently appeared in the anthologies New Australian Fiction (KYD), Growing Up African in Australia (Black Inc.) and in After Australia (Affirm Press).
