Poetry by Georgia Rose Phillips
by Georgia Rose Phillips
Like all things, it ends in surrender.
The Merciful Woman and the last
stray, coming in for the slaughter.
The body-bag rustles and glints
at a death whose frequency has
rendered it copacetic.
His ears tilt in understanding.
She liquidates the mutt and his trust
with the quick prick of a needle.
A prescriptive-calm envelopes.
She releases him from a life bound
to a villain Disney would patent
and boardrooms would promote.
As the warmth of life drains,
the dialogue pales into a stale intransigence.
‘Are you giving him up?’, she asks,
‘Yes, I’m giving him up’, he says—
like there was something more to
be given up than the disgrace of a violence
that’s become factory-farm automated.
- Georgia is an award-winning writer who publishes fiction, non-fiction, poetry and scholarship. She works as a Lecturer, Creative Writing at The University of Adelaide. In 2018, her creative non-fiction novella, ‘Holocene’, was runner-up for the Scribe Non-fiction Literary Prize. In 2021, her short story, ‘New Balance’, was a fiction winner in the Ultimo Literary Prize. In 2022, her short story, ‘Beyond the Marram Grass’, was a shortlisted finalist in the American Association of Australasian Literary Studies (AAALS) Prize. Her debut novel, The Bearcat, is forthcoming with Picador in 2024. She is currently working on a book length collection of poems, The Languid Hours, and her second novel, The Aesthete. Read more about Georgia Rose Phillips at her website, Here.