Published in Overland Issue 230 Autumn 2018 · Uncategorized Lights of home Chris Brown Woke up stockinged blindfolded disarranged over Ashgabat – 2 ½ romances surely about lands us at the crawling border – Dulled unfaithful apples threatening the plague as you pay – There were spectacular grounds for mistaking it for home – Bold signs that read like mama and café like taxi and home – Like all the pictures and promises the exotic couldn’t keep – The camirror in the cam-era fronting the same procession – Except the pressures of capitalism were even greater here Like the famed sun much in one’s face and seemed to be Cursing then even stalking if soon ever after loving us – For who in the single diminishing instant we had become – Then the northern spring in bubble jackets our worlds – Comparable commensurable separable teased apart in Levels of address some time later in the fricative trill in Frescoes of the eucharist or prayer lost language in the Grammatical foundations and if we’re nurtured in a tri Angulated hearing on marbleveined stairs we bring that Piece of home with us that was waiting and cling to it Read the rest of Overland 230 If you enjoyed this poem, buy the issue Or subscribe and receive four outstanding issues for a year Chris Brown lives in Newcastle where he works as a teacher. bulky news press published his chapbook, slender Volume, in 2017. More by Chris Brown › Overland is a not-for-profit magazine with a proud history of supporting writers, and publishing ideas and voices often excluded from other places. If you like this piece, or support Overland’s work in general, please subscribe or donate. Related articles & Essays 11 June 2026 · Solidarity The zero-sum state: what the Royal Commission reveals on the future of Muslim life in Australia Sara Cheikh Husain The zero-sum logic that the Royal Commission’s witnesses have voiced through the IHRA definition is a colonial act of oppression. If the state succumbs to that logic, as every indication suggests it will, Muslim political solidarity with Palestine risks becoming not merely unrecognised but structurally criminalised. The full institutional protection of one community will come to be constitutively built on the misrecognition of another. 10 June 2026 · Rural Australia Left in place: how distance in Australia is political Emma Goldrick If we are to better understand inequality within Australia, we must begin with the recognition that disadvantage does not only reside in income brackets or postcodes associated with urban poverty. It is also embedded in the sheer physical scale of the nation and the political choices made about who gets connected to opportunity and who remains at the margins of it.