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THE KANGAROO FILES
1. Joeys In A Sack
the shooters' terrier was starving, too small to get his teeth around the roo tails, so mum fed him noodles on the side, from a polystyrene container, behind a big old ironbark, mud up to her knees, her hair in rollers, the shooters' children were using joeys as skipping ropes, lassos & dolls, tugging & snapping their limbs, small mouths shrieking, mum called me over, & told me to keep away from them, dad was down the riverbank throwing in a line, his brylcream hair gel spikes glittering in the sun, i kept a may holiday diary of animals living & dead, i heard the faint hiss & grunt from a hessian sack, through the canvas of the camper van, they were motherless joeys, the blue does strung up by the legs on the roo shooters' trucks, wobbling together in rows, necks hanging loose, grey ears bent & torn, i sat by myself in the afternoon & played with some strands of grass, the green tree frogs chirped out from the toilet block, & i thought of their flat pulpy bodies, smooth & squashed in under the lids, & the way they slimed up in my palm, frogs as big as saucers, the water systems flushing them cold, just the way frogs liked it, how i loved those frogs, & how i wished i was dead, as the joeys squeaked out from the sack all night, with plum blue eyes, too early to open, but they had enough life left in them, to show me how they could suffer, & how they wanted to live so badly, for their first day out of the pouch, with tails like levers, pushing the gangly legs forwards, until the head first, exhausted, tumble back in, the black claws scissored together, mum wouldn't let me save them, as the rain fell down & soaked the hessian, & how as the morning light came on, i knew that sack moved less & less |
