Rescue – by Toby Davidson

Poetry
Written By Toby Davidson
ISLAND | ONLINE ONLY

I hang out with what I suppose is your ghost

and call you by only the last of your names,

I in my new place and you in yours.

It’s waggling bliss before recall and what took you

snarl in combined from the teeth of an ocean

too broad to tear around, comical hound.

My ears prick up at your claw-on-lino patter

complete with the crash of a flyscreen door.

Your shape’s reassertions, stir-crazy with breeze,

run with the glossy-coated spirit of play

finding your fur which can’t be contained.   

Envious glints at the window pant, paw.

You lick, I lose touch with our stray afternoons,  

your mind to return. You’ve come from nowhere before.

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Image: Griffin Wooldridge - Pexels

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Toby Davidson

Toby Davidson is a poet and Australian poetry scholar living on Darkinjung Country on the New South Wales Central Coast and teaching on Dharug Country at Macquarie University. His recent works include the literary biography Good for the Soul: John Curtin’s Life with Poetry (UWA Publishing) and his third collection, The Grand Reopening, was published in 2025 by Puncher and Wattmann.

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a natural sort of being – by Miriam Jones