Published in Overland Issue 215 Winter 2014 · Uncategorized Desire Luke Best After Song of Solomon Desire consumes me in this, a dream: I’m flat on my back ’neath the tower of David. Spring is pregnant to Winter. The sky is a bladder, stretched and sewn at its edge. I search for clouds though there is nothing in my pockets or up my nose. Before me you take form; cloud-like. Unlike Cirrus, you are not a puny wisp, nor like Stratus; pubescent tufts of fluff. You are Cumulonimbus; a great risen plume over Mt Zion. My son is in your womb. He has not yet learnt the contours of this planetary mess nor felt the rage that is necessary to drown it. We’ll see that he does – You lower yourself to me. Your gown slips from your back like the tent curtains of Solomon. Your hair is a hessian veil. Your lips drip with myrrh. Your waters break. Luke Best Luke Best is a poet from Toowoomba, Queensland. More by Luke Best › 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 13 September 2024 · Friday Fiction Hondachondria Tom Gurn Shortly after graduating from high school, Jack Goolbroom bought his first car, an old red Honda Civic, pocked with dents and dings more numerous than the acne scars spattering his pallid cheekbones. The red paint was sun-damaged, acid-washed to almost-pink on the roof, as if it had suffered third-degree burns in a housefire. 12 September 2024 · Reviews The jock and the farmboy, but not the sissy: sexual archetypes in Holden Sheppard’s Invisible Boys Liam Blackford Masculinity is an important and controversial topic in gay discourse, and Invisible Boys should be celebrated as an excellent document of the phenomenon as lived in regional Australia. Yet I lamented the absence of an effeminate gay character in Sheppard’s macho universe. A character for whom painted nails might not have just been “a punk thing.