At the point of dissolution, I was wrong.

Anne Elvey
More augur and sere, bloodwood trees raft a mirage

Ahead in the road, a harrier resting on air is breve

not oracle, just resting on white sky filled with heat
Cicada’s rhythm shifts down from sharp staccato

to a dirge, until the whole world falls silent, as though

something has stepped too close and threatens
Tripping a shift, reek of dead kangaroo is its’ only ghost

Our eyes skulk, shadows creeping through shadows

openly flat and shockingly real. This isn’t poetry
You want me to slow down, I want to write to the quick

Space cleared overflows with another, some swarming

ant-like to the rotting eye of a trammeled snake 
Tourists come in thousands to see Everlastings quicken

and end in pulsations of wind. Vans wall the highway

Define foreign, the tongue that will say it is your own
There seems to be no grass, until, while you’re not

looking a brushfire explodes and takes what you hadn’t

seen, leaving a smoulder, continuous and petering
In a roadhouse called Last Resort / No Man’s Land

a caged bird swings its legs above its head, ratchets upright

to drag its beak along the wires and a kid dances with it
A newspaper is splayed to a clipped story of the dingo

whelping its own death, poison grafted to a day

two years in the future and its’ dull rupture
Landscape re-mapped by jutting elbows of cats crouched

over blue wrens. No one here calls this place mythic

Voices buried by sound of passing trucks
A controlled burn somewhere and I wonder how much

smoke it takes to cover an ocean. Over the road, two

girls with clipboards measure fuel loads by the acre
Soothsay and spate, as a child finding a natural

clearing in the forest, ground blue with radiations

of Leschenaultia, electric as mirrored sky