Snake Dream

Evelyn Araluen

It’s that snake again, or at least the deep purple green sheen of each scale as he twists and circles the fringes of my sleep. I was at the farm when he came, belly folded over the milk shed railing, watching the English class kid who died on Richmond road last year sink mouldy bread in a rain filled drum. Crow calls silhouette a dead gum forest. I kick shamepainted big dub joggers against the asbestos sheets and sing back deep corrugated thump. Another caw across the dam. I know why he came: plenty of corners to coil, plenty of mud to sink to and from, plenty of rats. He’s grown fat and full here and I watch him watch Jordan, or Joshua, or some whichever name for whichever prophet now lost to my other immigrant gutter dynasty, but there is no flesh on his bones, and all that bread is flotsam jetsam, another dream sunk split into other laws of elements. Nothing here to eat.

He slinks down the hill past rust and root to Jonathan’s rest at the very belly of the dam. That’s the only way to Woronora from here, an antipode to dig through, a coin a mirror, double-sided storage for the drunks and wastes of each generation that collided our youthings. In water screen I watch the lorikeets shatter from branch veins. They’re the shakey sort. They’ve been gathering and keening in some hip somewhere too far for this moment. What’s left is the kind of council I and they can’t reveal. Their beaks turn and follow each scintillation through some holy river limb. All this for I in inverse, so I watch as necks rise to the black dreaming gods pressing their power into dreams. Coiling towards the son of a thief cast up crucifix against ghost gum, the whole night hurtling. I and he and his fathers and the birds and soil scream. I am flinging and singing stones. Red dirt is black dirt is blood is swallowed up by storm eyes and crow calls and sound reverse—

Mira is finally what wakes me. She yowls at the bedroom door, pawing and pestering while I bring back my breath. For the longest minute she is the soundtrack to my disconnected limbs cartographing the bedsheets for Jonathan, until he is discovered warm and still and sleeping. She and I go get water together, my toes curling against her tail swirl, a few more biscuits and a hand over her head in exchange for a softened throat and a slumber curl anywhere but her own damn bed. I sit with her a while on the lounge, her belly full of bee hum. The night is in pieces around the room, fractured by a possum and hope bearing tree, cast on book and feather and empty coffee cup. My dream is like those street light shards, a marker of childhood return from our belly rolls down reserve ditches to something warm and made at the dinner table. I heap memories into empty ice cream tubs to store for tomorrow’s lunches and let Mira lick my fingers, her tongue rough and always a threat of blood. She is old and deserves what is kind and warm. The room lives and circles and breathes around us as she watches corners full of who I can’t see. Maybe snakes, maybe memories of other homes. I carry her warm weight against my chest and pilgrimage bed. We three all this house coil together under sheet and stars.

Evelyn Araluen is a poet, educator, and researcher working with Indigenous literatures at the University of Sydney, and a writer for Sweatshop Western Sydney. In 2017, she was the winner of the Nakata Brophy Prize for Young Indigenous Writers, and in 2018 she won the Judith Wright Poetry Prize. Her writing has appeared in publications such as Overland, Southerly, and Cordite. Born, raised, and writing in Dharug country, she is a descendant of the Bundjalung nation.