by Mark O'Flynn
for Kate Fagan Against the empty storm clouds those white cockatoos like rents in canvas drift through the air left by fire. The clean sheets of their wings vivid as charcoal on snow. Acoustic cries fill the ashen void between scorched tree and leaden sky. They strip the blackened bark like metal at a car wreck fossick with primitive impatience on the verge of food. What language do they croak? what devious vernacular of proclamation and waste? Arranged phonetically with blundering morphemes like hacksaws grumbling through the air’s dirty paragraph. You lean from your window oppressed by rain as one stone age cockatoo in the face of desolation shrieks relentless greeting across the heavy sky hello hello hello. Mark O’Flynn’s novel The Last Days of Ava Langdon (UQP) was short listed for the Miles Franklin Award, 2017, the Prime Minister’s Literary Award as well as winning the Voss Literary Award, 2017. His most recent collection of poetry is Undercoat (Liquid Amber Press, 2022).
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