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Bee Bee Bee CS 14 Left Bee Turtle swan

Clade Song 14

Ant

a little rill of water
                             a trickle
          stiff blackjack leaves, fresh
muddy water
                              I am the storm
                                    the storm made music

                              ocean still remembers me
                  slow swimming against the mind
                  hawking after the huge
                  globed against limey mud

                              limestone rain
                      a continent of caves, a karst-land
                  sweet water chuckled and trickled
                  clicker
                              weedle witter snitcher
                                             clicker and clean – fact
                                                 strigil clean to symmetry

                            purple quartz crystals blossom
                  snowflake-feathery amethyst
                                             loops twines whickers
                  slops chackling
                  the only one to stop – chack!

                                    slick with antenna tip
                                    mouth touch:
                                    still
                                    my limp tongue
                                    my black mist speech

                              couldn’t: throaty mix
                                    phalanxed food gather
                                          bringing back a caterpillar, dead cricket, or bread crust
                                    gorgeous and rhizomic
                                burrowing into the weight of wood

                  heet-heet-hoot-of a form dragging
                          battles
                           wars of women: pincer dismem
                           berment legs, heads, leaked         acid
                                gnawing
                              breasts
                              fiddling yiddick
                              fickle scrillip clus–

                  towards mound
                                hail mound, womb, wing
                  towards mound
                                the new queens bite off their wings
                                the winged males and females emerging from the nest
                                they sing, they spread
                                small wings to flutter out above
                                surf-spray

                                          twirling and drifts
                                          stomps / salt-fuck desire driving
                                          groping for inland womb, lope

                                xiphillic, xenous
                                xanthous gas rooming
                                        skidding the red-bark pine / sight
                                of smell
                                lifemind, huckle scrupulour
                                I am frozen addled eggs on the tundra
                                sprawl the hot guts, my

moon, the
us is chamber, sheeeee: us-us-muses
milky and night, hollowed
freshed / lung
caste in sense, sleeping in

 
CS 14 Right Bird slug coyote
Cooke

Stuart Cooke's recent books include The grass is greener over your grave (2023) and Lyre (2019), which gathers an ecology of plants and animals from across Australasia. He lives in Brisbane, Australia, where he lectures in creative writing and literary studies at Griffith University.