If Anne Carson had grown up on a cattle station in the Northern Territory – by Johanna Bell

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Smell
I will never forget.
Out behind the killing sheds.
Dry grass maybe a paddock or a holding yard no longer in use.
December, hot. Bull dust in our hair. We had gone to help his grandmother

slaughter
yearlings and scrub bulls
mewing in the yards.
You cannot imagine the feeling if you have not done it –
hard skull and soft white worms of brain

exploding
beneath the trigger
my fingers and his showing me how to take aim
how to locate the right place.
Blood spattering the both of us –
It goes right through your clothes you know he said as we leaned on the corrugated shed.

When you take them off
you’ll have stains all over. His eyes
moved onto me then and he said let’s check.

Naked in the dust it was true, sticky stains, coagulated
skin, I lay on the earth

and he licked it off.
Running back to the beast scooping the darkening soup
smearing it on my neck knees breasts, licking plucking diving
Blood is the smell of December to me. I remember it as
falling down for I kept trying to rise but it was hard to stand
while all around me
was falling too, that smell
the metallic edge of blood and sweet grass notes of beasts
watching us from the other side of the fence.
The loss of their kin still raw on us and his pistol fallen to one side.

An ideal kill
is one that is swift.
Such things I learned from the grandmother
later that night when we sat in the kitchen drinking tea.
Also that I should under no circumstances marry her grandson
for what’s made in the shed never leaves.

2. If Anne Carson had grown up on a cattle station in the Northern Territory intentionally mirrors Anne Carson’s poem titled ‘After VI. TO CLEAN YOUR HOOVES HERE IS A DANCE IN HONOR OF THE GRAPE WHICH THROUGHOUT HISTORY HAS BEEN A SYMBOL OF REVELRY AND JOY NOT TO SAY ANALOGY FOR THE BRIDE AS UNCUT BLOSSOM’ from The Beauty of the Husband: a fictional essay in 29 tangos (2001, Random House, p. 29). It deliberately contains many similar or same words, syntax and punctuation.

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Image: Thomas Marquize - Unsplash

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