Status Updates From Dropbear

I will meet you at the edges of a body shaped like loss
and trace the outline of your absence with smoke

then take from the air
the name of a man
who smelt like river
and spoke like distance

- Guarded by birds

It is hard to unlearn a language:
to unspeak the empire,
to teach my voice to rise and fall like landscape,
a topographic intonation

So in this place the shape of my place
I am trying to sing like hill and saltwater,
to use old words from old country I am so far from:
bundjalung jagum ngai, nganduwal nyuyaya,
and god, I don’t even know
if I’m saying it right

3.5. Deeply appreciative of the sharing of cultural
Knowledge.

This is a refreshing change to my usual romantasy read… it’s helping break the slump