Published in Overland Issue 213 Summer 2013 · Uncategorized Northgate Adam Formosa A cigarette bud sits at my windscreen creased left napping I can write your name in Arabic, I know its heavy smoke curls, its language if I carve the space you left with a cigarette I’d find baklava and garlic or eggplant on rye peeping fig-trees, weighted Davidoff Adventure lurking pastirma or bastirma sipping arak, pistachio rinds cooked in wooden mould, I’d find a gold cross hung around the sun anchored on its centre burning into its skin drop me to the bottom of your thoughts to where sandstone sings evaporates heat to its point bleached like bones from the sun, to our first language Adam Formosa Adam Formosa is a NSW South Coast-based poet, whose best work comes out while listening to Deadmau5. More by Adam Formosa › 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 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. 21 November 202421 November 2024 · Fiction Whack-a-mole Sheila Ngọc Phạm We sit in silence a few more moments as there is no need to talk further; it is the right place to end. There is more I want to know but we had revisited enough of the horror for one day. As I stood up to thank Bác Dzũng for sharing his story, I wished I could tell him how I finally understood that Father’s prophecy would never be fulfilled.