henchmen
by Alison Whittaker
It was the mob on the production line out slitting sheep’s throats
and keeping cameras out
When the abattoir first industrialised
and no gubbas wanted to do it
I think of that when the other ones come join us
in the country town horror
at the threat of not otherwise being allowed
into this made-up colonial state.
The distaste is fine to deal with, but your hands go slippery numb. It’s cold, the pay is
shit, your body melts like a finely-marbled steak beneath you. Your friendships,
clumsily forged in there, your back forming a question mark under the burden
of feeding a continent. I hear the jokes are good — creepy and problematic — the Nescafe
is terrible. You get hungry. Your sleeps afterwards are fitful but deep.
How much of how we see to each other is shaped by some meathooks on their ball-bearing conveyors, urging some dead European sheep on? How much of how we relate to each other is this chance meeting in a flesh factory, dispossessed of land and family and money by the threat of not being here anymore?
They’re churning through them backs at the abattoir and fuming that no one will pick the fruit or the cotton. This subpar and bad-postured poet is working on a NAIDOC commission for a tech firm. She opens a door to an international student from UberEats who risked the question on his spine on a city road. They’re both second-gen abattoirists on someone else’s Country when, at the end of an action movie, the social workers descend. They knock on all the doors in our street to notify us who got blown up together in their shit jobs for evil gubs — whose guts are mixed together but who otherwise rarely spoke.
Alison Whittaker is a Gomeroi multitasker. She is currently a Senior Researcher at the Jumbunna Institute at UTS, and a PhD candidate in the Faculty of Law at UNSW. Her latest poetry collection, Blakwork, was published in 2018 and was shortlisted for a Victorian Premier’s Literary Award and won the QLA Judithe Calanthe Award for a Poetry Collection. She is the editor of the anthology Fire Front: First Nations poetry and power today.
