Brett Dionysius
Jean Wimmerlin on Unsplash
Brett Dionysius was founding Director of the Queensland Poetry Festival. He has published four collections of poetry, two chapbooks, an artist’s book and a verse novel. His eighth collection, Weranga, was released in 2013. He was short-listed in the 2017 Montreal International Poetry Prize. He teaches English, lives in Riverhills, Brisbane, and in his spare time watches birds.
On Not Having Encountered Snow, Aged 50
The lioness killed & ate her cubs because her will
is absolute. Her zoo is a deviation. The fur-line
must be protected at all costs by tribulation. A
difference of mere millimetres existed between
a gentle lift by the scruff of the neck & sinking
her three-inch canines into her prodigy’s throats.
All over the world, protein gradients collapse upon
themselves like tawny-eyed supernovae; an eternal
hunt between the hot expanding energy of love
for her cubs & capture’s weight, the gravity of iron-
bar oppression; freedom crushed into a tight ball.
The lioness has never seen snow; flecks of spittle
form flakes as she sneers at her keepers trying
to remove the bodies of her young, slick as ice.
©2021 West Trade Review
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