this is a rectangle. it is, i think. i write it around a document that doesn’t exist — the Flora and
Fauna Act. like a lot of law, you can see only its edges, enforcement, its normative tract. Its
pressed earth impres sive, for an Act that never was.
and yet i rem ember that unreal law, even if i
never ventured into the fog of history to read it. did
you ever? do you? remember its edges or core? i’m getting less sure, less sure.
these rectangles are artless. this poem is artless. i’m trying to get them to certainty. i’m trying
to not contribute to this amorphous wound. i’m trying to not make anyone a fool. it was real to
me, i referred to it before and Aboriginal
parliamentarians h ave read it into Hansard
and others onto events of public formal import.
and i hear it talked about all the time by
people i love and respect and even now
knowing it’s not ‘re al’ i nod along with people
who bring it up at rallies and meetings and
over meals. i only heard it wasn’t real a few
years ago and i went to law school a few times.
and also, maybe it is real in meaningful ways.
growing up, i heard: ‘they treated us
like shit, like animal s’ explaining: ‘we weren’t
human until 1967.’ one of these things is true,
the other one isn’t. so maybe it isn’t true
because we were legally human then, or
maybe it isn’t true because we’re still
dehumanised now. s ay it’s our understandable
suspicion about that law, say it’s gaps in civic
education, say it’s a ctivist rhetoric exploding
into history and memory. does it matter? maybe. when i got surgery on my abdomen, it was
my shoulders that hurt. referral pain, real wound. i writhed in haunt pain. i hurt my neck.
many acts are legal without a law. that’s how their laws work, more often than they don’t. all
things are legal without laws if you have a lot of guns and cars and iron and flour and rot
pointed at increase ingly few people. the Flora
and Fauna A ct governed their hands. It
doesn’t matter if t hey didn’t codify it and it
doesn’t matter if th e Act was the echo of anti
colonial rhetoric, if you were at the end of
that gun were you m eant to ask as they
ushered you onto a t ruck like cattle: ‘am i
lawfully an animal? a re you authorised to call
me an animal?’? an d years later, how can you
express that de grading power in a way
that made it real? ther e lives its threat, whether
the Act was real or not. ‘sometimes, my girl, you can be made animal’, whenever they want
to. not just intergenerational trauma, not just rhetoric. a parable.
but the Act is still not real. i’m getting less sure lately. i was so sure about the Act, so sure
trauma i s a clumsy word for all
adverse experience, mine anyway. it also makes for a bad archivist, just sometimes, mine
anyway. hedging. unclear. remade ever y time it’s pulled off the shelf, so
sure. a therapist takes me ba ck ‘to the first time’, or tries. i
say: ‘i’m scared of making a human story of my animal fear.’ i’m scared i’ll get the act
wrong, so sure. the scariest thing for me to say is: ‘i don’t know.’
my own lived experience is often useless, like okay. there was no jacaranda around when it
happened but when i smell it rot now, humectant on your path (an easy and big source
of decay like an infected throat). i get scared. i get a boner i get we t. i animal.
i’m at your very nice house party tr ying not to throw up, trying not to run, trying not
to punch on, cough, hump against my jeans. (he flora on my sensation memory
until i fauna. is this anything?)
please don’t put me on a committee about it. my lived experience advice for almost everything,
like a prey animal, is: forget rest eat forgive fuck run. i already remember
every one. even the ones you love, or i love. i know the y’re special. i know it’s not
fair.
i don’t know. while i’m writing this i’m trying to trace these flies back (did I mention the flies?
no? sorry.), to their maggots, to the dead mouse rotting somewhere in my walls. that’s where
they came from last time. i think.
