
Press

Augury
Let us be birds
I’ll turn my sadness into nightingale song
And people will listen to me whinge till dawn and call it beautiful
You can be an owl
And hunt me
Or if that sounds too much like a dream
Born from Eurocentric literature
From too many nights breathing Juliet’s lines at my mirror
Imagining “what if young Leonardo but a lesbian”
Then OK I’ll do slam poetry as a rosella
And you can do genderfuck drag as a lorikeet
Hell let’s be sparrows or gulls or geese
Let’s just get away from the ground
And all its greed
For bodies bodies bodies
Let us be birds
And have a meet cute on a wire
Our wingtips could subtly touch
While we chirp about why the humans
Are all suddenly staying inside
Let us be birds that shine fluorescent
In each other’s secret light.
Don’t you see that dreaming is where the power of flight begins?
Didn’t you hear that the dinosaurs wished on a shooting star for wings?
Hold out your hand at curfew time
Four radii away I’ll hold out mine
Stare at our hands together
Until the quills start to break through the skin
Aching for the sky.
Written by Nikki Viveca
Read by George Cowell and Jess Lu