Duc Dau is an award-winning author, scholar, and emerging poet from Boorloo (Perth). She is the most recent recipient of the Jan Dean Members Prize of the Newcastle Poetry Prize as well as the Annette Cameron Award for an unpublished poet in Western Australia. “The Sign” was shortlisted/commended in the 2025 Tom Collins Poetry Prize. An Honorary Research Fellow in the School of Humanities at the University of Western Australia, her latest academic book is Sex, Celibacy, and Deviance: The Victorians and the Song of Songs (Ohio State University Press, 2024). She also works in the research and evaluation team of an Aboriginal community-controlled organisation.
The sign
The holiday prematurely ended
sex toys still in our luggage
heading home along a slope of road
and a yellow sign says “soft shoulders”
outside us the rain turning to hail
hitting the gravel with exclamation marks
we stop
—waiting for the thundering to pass
you in the car beside me, shoulders stiff-
ening like weathervanes against the wind
our breathing fogging up the windows
blinding us. I run a hand across the passenger pane
look out at the bush, newly backburned
—blackened, its naked stumps becoming
jumbled limbs miming
precautionary signs on the way home.