Published in Overland Issue 203 Winter 2011 · Main Posts Train Lines and the Power Lines Over Corey Wakeling We have set beasts up and walking but no one is paying notice to the trample. They lift whole train sleepers like toothpicks and interrupt train services for hours; like coins of resplendence, brains of Byzantine, or the fisherman’s knot. Beasts up and walking feast on the written recipe, yet the home cooks bereft of their preparations heeding nix of danger gloat over a gist of the imbricated stages, such as the proportions of water to flour. Glue, they keep making sopping glue, running like tears. The bugle is a whimpering sand bubbler, one of a fortune. It heralds the beasts’ success at disappearance not a telephone peal disturbs. We think to go trampling, but only ourselves do we maim. Train sleepers snap our fingers; trains dash our tunnel vision. Yet, some canny person has piled gravel and rubble into cairns, silent bugle threnodies choke in our dead throats. Tiny bubbles retreat from our cairns carrying the songs that map the trampled landscapes. Thus, there are only the beasts to sing to from our invisible reed exhausts guiding air bubbles skyward. Corey Wakeling lives in Melbourne. Published in journals here and abroad, he has work appearing in Famous Reporter and Australian Book Review © Adam Formosa Overland 203-winter 2011, p. 75 Like this piece? Subscribe! Corey Wakeling Corey Wakeling is a poet and critic living in Takarazuka, Japan. His second full-length collection of poems is The Alarming Conservatory (Giramondo, 2018). More by Corey Wakeling › 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 28 March 20249 April 2024 · Main Posts Why we should value not only lived experience, but also lived expertise Sukhmani Khorana In the wake of this year’s International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, I want to extend the central idea of El Gibbs’s 2022 essay on 'lived expertise' and argue that in media accounts of racism, analytical expertise and lived experience ought to be valued together and even in the same body. 5 March 2024 · Main Posts Andrew Charlton’s school assignment Alex McKinnon Australia's Pivot to India exists for three reasons: so that when Andrew Charlton is interviewed on the radio or introduced on Q+A, his bio includes the phrase "he has written a book about Indian-Australian relations"; to fend off accusations that he is another Kristina Keneally engaging in electoral colonialism in western Sydney; and to help the Albanese government strengthen economic and military ties with Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party.
