a brief language of crows
at dawn, crows chew colloquial news, how they eat apple to the core, adore bin day,
scavenging horizon, prying lids off garbage.
a bloke i met, he said watch what all those murders do: they are on to me, on to you. their funerals are a clamour: black becomes
colour of how a beak can glamour. corvine
law sees them tearing down walls, clattering
claws on gutters, one blue eye watching you,
the other sky, blinking in half-light. these would be writing desks, they swoop now: the magpies
bark & scowl. i heard that down south, the crows
even dig out meth discarded in petrol station
trash cans, much to the amusement of cops watching.
Scott-Patrick Mitchell (SPM) is a non-binary West Australian poet. SPM appears in Cordite, Westerly, Southerly and Rabbit, as well as anthologies such as Contemporary Australian Poetry, New Poets 1, Stories of Perth, banQuet, Hashtag Queer and Going Postal. SPM’s debut collection, The Bruised Universe, is forthcoming from Indifference Publications.