Published in Overland Issue 207 Winter 2012 · Uncategorized Wireless David Prater The tower was locked (its future being chained to the mast like a breeze crossed with water from the past tense (that immense wall of sound’s collage (its anagram eye, loveless wireless) abstract but intact. Your childhood lies like party lines populated by ghosts (some Fenian, others pulled from the CSIRO telephone directory. The first email (never sent cced Gaia but bounced. So it goes … (that manual exchange inside a powerhouse (a museum exhibit etched in charcoal rides the lightning (killing composers, developing in still-life. Meanwhile, father’s crystal set gathers dust in a council tip. The volume & tuning knobs had fallen off anyway, replaced by one cent coins (also obsolescent. A smell it gave off when ‘live’ could trigger memories you never knew you had back then, in the then when events unfolded in a logical fashion, proceeding to their happy ending, or a lesson (the Masonic Temple’s front yard littered with broken glass, dead weeds (ah that crazy guy who ran screaming down the street (that joke about Oddfellows isn’t so funny now, in his aftermath, the grey dawn of dead things screwed into the sky (that line of furrows from the ground wavered across his forehead, an object of ridicule allowed one last laugh (surprised to end up on someone’s thrown-away camera (your soul locked inside a mangled memory chip (just an SD card away from rapture (or was it repatriation? as shards of laughter escaped from the abandoned sun memorial (a sound came out of the blue sky like, as if from nowhere (a disembodied voice he thought he’d heard on the antique television set describing Vietnam was God (turned out it was the government (calling him up. David Prater David Prater was managing editor of Cordite Poetry Review from 2001 to 2012. His first poetry collection, We Will Disappear, was published by papertiger media in 2007, and Vagabond Press published his chapbook Morgenland in the same year. He lives and works in Stockholm. Visit his website http://daveydreamnation.com More by David Prater › 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 25 November 202425 November 2024 · Reviews Poetic sustenance: a close reading of Ellen van Neerven’s “Finger Limes” Liliana Mansergh As a poem attuned to form, embodiment, sensory experience and memory, van Neerven’s “Finger Limes” presents an intricate meditation on poetic sustenance and survival. Its riddling currents exemplify how poetry is not sustained along a linear axis but unfolds in eddies and counter currents. 22 November 202422 November 2024 · Fiction A map of underneath Madeleine Rebbechi They had been tangled together like kelp from the age of fourteen: sunburned, electric Meg and her sidekick Ruth the dreamer, up to all manner of sinister things. So said their parents; so their teachers reported when the two girls were found down at the estuary during a school excursion, whispering to something scaly wriggling in the reeds.