Feral Camels Unsettled the Land, Tossed Down and Rolled Like Dice

by
Sarah Sorensen

In the Australian Outback, the feral camels ate thorns. They repopulated the blankness they were abandoned to, a place not their home. When they found a verdant spread, they devoured it. I know what it means to gorge before sudden bounty and to subsist on pain. I dream of the outback camel, generations deep in forgetting. He’s like a golden candy, hard and beautiful in the sun. His strange displacement suits him. My queer body is still seeking blankness, still fumbling in the sands that shift and alter. I slid my ghost into another’s and disappeared for years. She came back to me like a stranger and I fed her thorns. How else could she have known that I love her?


Sarah Sorensen (she/her), MA, MLIS is a queer writer based in the Metro Detroit area. Sarah has been published over 70 times in lit mags, but her most recent work can be found in The Jet Fuel Review, In Parentheses, The Route 7 Review, and Another Chicago Magazine. Sometimes she daydreams about rescuing every shelter dog in Metro Detroit, but she just has one tiny fireball of barks and an unstoppable cat son.