Published in Overland Issue 206 Autumn 2012 · Uncategorized Sunday poem Fiona Wright Rotate the potato. A labrador is happiest collecting kindling. While the football’s on in the other room we salt the pigskin: O, giver of gout. Brie suctions the wooden platter. Wisteria bruises on the patio. We’ll lock away the candles when the baby learns to crawl. There’s an eggplant outside for you. The stovetop coils sing. You have to take the batteries from the smoke alarms before it crackles. You need new shoes. The dogs haven’t had their breakfast. I haven’t used that bowl since Christmas She boils beans until they look like paper mâché. Ups-a-daisy-daisy-do! The leather lounges shriek when you sit down. Your bedroom still has stickers on the ceiling. He’s got good wrists for flicking teatowels. I’m still having trouble with my pannacotta. The cap of the sauce bottle has scabbed over. Six proteas sit in a cut-glass vase. Take a concrete tablet and harden the fuck up. There are sewing pins in the spice rack. My father’s fingers always get the crisp bits first. It’s been a big week. What’s this one infused with? Pass the gravy, fathead. Fiona Wright Fiona Wright’s new essay collection is The World Was Whole (Giramondo, 2018). Her first book of essays Small Acts of Disappearance won the 2016 Kibble Award and the Queensland Literary Award for nonfiction, and her poetry collections are Knuckled and Domestic Interior. More by Fiona Wright › 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 10 April 202610 April 2026 · open letter Open letter: RMIT staff and students oppose disciplinary action against Gemma Seymour over video opposing links to weapons ties RMIT University Staff and Students Freedom of speech and expression is absolutely vital in academic institutions. Students who engage in activism should not be punished for doing so, and discipline procedures are not there to be abused as a tool of intimidation. We call for the disciplinary process against Gemma to cease immediately. 9 April 202610 April 2026 · CoPower Against the will to engineer: Richard King’s Brave New Wild Ben Brooker The response demanded of us in the twenty-first century must operate at the level of metaphysics as well as the material, addressing our underlying assumptions about the instrumentalisation of nature and what constitutes a meaningful life in the face of technology’s relentless advance. To neglect that deeper terrain is to concede, in advance, the very ground on which our resistance to the machine must stand.