Year of the Ox

by Andrew Brooks & Arvind Rosa Brooks

 
Expanded drawing of an ox
 
Text of the poem, which can also be found for screen readers in text below

Year of the Ox

Today is the ninth day
of winter, my least favourite season
even though the light is special and hot
showers are pretty great. Lentil stew
with tahini and feta and toasted
seeds is also excellent. I wore two
pairs of socks and my feet felt trapped.
Even though I know it’s gauche to complain
about the weather, I do it anyway. But this
poem doesn’t care about the weather; this poem
cares about blackberries, which are sour and
delicious, and garden spiders who weave delicate
webs, and broccoli pasta with pickled chillies
and parsley, and the song ‘Brimful of Asha
(Fatboy Slim Remix)’ playing on the stereo,
which is to say it cares about what is good
as narrated by Arvind Rosa.

I was born in the year of the Ox, a beast
with a broad back and generous spirit who carried
the rat (and everything that critter carried, like gossip
and dreams and perversions, like handfuls of toasted almonds)
across the line. Before I was born, the last time
it was the year of the Ox was 1973, which gave us
‘Crocodile Rock’ and the first global
oil crisis, which also marks the beginning of the end
of US hegemony, even as some got high
huffing the fumes of circulation as if they were huffing
tulips in bloom. ‘Crocodile Rock’ is terrible song
that is perfect as a harbinger of doom. Later that year
Sly and Family Stone would release ‘If You Want Me
To Stay’, a song that feels so good you wish
you could live inside it, and you can, if only for
a moment. The alchemy of the three minute
song is that it is a container for all that is
uncontainable, like ‘clouds, big ones oh it’s
blowing up wild outside.’ Two tides: ‘Crocodile Rock’
and ‘If You Want Me To Stay’. Is this what they
mean by the dialectic?

 

A Note on the Images
‘The images require a small amount of explanation: for stanza one, I asked Vinnie to draw and tell me things she loves some of which made their way into the poem (spiders, broccoli pasta, 'Brimful of Asha (Fatboy Slim remix)', blackberries). Stanza two is much more straightforward—an image of an ox and a rat.’
—A.B.

Arvind Rosa Brooks is four years old. She is into playing, music, the beach. She lives with her parents and cat on unceded Wangal country and if you come over to her house she’d like to show you her toys. Her current favourite snack is an anchovy straight from the jar.

Andrew Brooks lives on unceded Wangal land and lectures in Media Cultures at UNSW. He is a founding member of the Infrastructural Inequalities research network, one half of the critical art collective Snack Syndicate and a co-editor of the publishing collective Rosa Press. He is the author of Homework (2021), a book of essays on art and politics co-written with Astrid Lorange, and the poetry collection Inferno (2021). His current favourite snack is a kimchi toastie.

@rat_steak
@snack_syndicate

Repeat pattern image of Arvind Rosa's flower drawing
Leah McIntosh