Published 6 May 202230 June 2022 · Poetry / Friday Features / Friday Poetry Poetry | Three poems by Jarad Bruinstroop Jarad Bruinstroop Silent Film You’re asleep in the next room. I watch Genet’s Un Chant d’amour. A prisoner is in love with the murderer in the next cell. He kisses the concrete between them. The guard is jealous. The prisoner threads straw from his mattress through a hole in the wall— blows cigarette smoke into the mouth of his beau. When the guard attacks him the prisoner dreams he escapes and chases the young murderer through flowering woods. They drop, noiseless, on the grass while I listen to the private sounds you make in sleep. Nude with Boots After Larry Rivers’ O’Hara Nude with Boots (1954) Not the man you got into the ring with but a statue: mean and modern. Somewhere between a lamp and a window stands a monument to excess love in his lover’s combat boots and nothing else. Hands clasped on his head, arms splayed to make a cobra’s hood. An Irish massimo contrapposto to give you the full view, each pink and cream inch. Remember this body? How it jabbed and hooked and rolled over. How we were both surprised in the end by a prize fighter, one foot hoisted on a cinderblock, saying look— here is everything you didn’t want or only wanted sometimes. She sent him a handwritten note: I’m sure you remember me. My fans would feel cheated if they didn’t see how I look in my hospital bed. after Peter Hujar’s Candy Darling on Her Deathbed (1973) Frame after frame a reclining woman works it out. To be beautiful, rich & married in this incarnation you must make up for the past, provide for the future, languorous as an ampersand. In her presence he composes chrysanthemums, shaggy as cheap wigs, & settles, like a newborn, one long-stemmed rose on the sheets. He comments on the blooming offerings. A goddess? No, a goddess is someone who is worshipped for her unreality. She gathers her gown over black negligee. Vulgar sunflowers banished out of shot. Overland’s Friday Features project is supported by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund. Jarad Bruinstroop Jarad Bruinstroop is a writer, PhD candidate and sessional academic at QUT. His work has appeared in Meanjin, Island, Westerly, Australian Poetry Journal and elsewhere. He was the runner-up in the 2021 Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize. He is the 2022 Fryer Library Creative Writing Fellow. @jbruinstroop More by Jarad Bruinstroop › 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 First published in Overland Issue 228 8 March 20248 March 2024 · Poetry POETRY Gareth Morgan as if a poem were a person, me, i get up in the morning / i buy coffee in a can, and wait / you have to keep calm, “don't get upset” / or it fucks everything up. the bosses who tell me this / are wise but stupid troopers. this is a political poem First published in Overland Issue 228 16 February 202419 February 2024 · Poetry Two poems from 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem Nam Le But think about the children, super cute children, mute children, with uncommonly big eyes, children with hard eyes, eyes that have seen what no child’s eyes should see, children naked as the day wearing big smiles and no smiles, preternaturally wise, with mooned-out tummies and cleft palates and cataracts, deformities and birth defects ...