Published in Overland Issue 216 Spring 2014 · Uncategorized A portable crush Fiona Hile Riding on such instruments as a large aluminium hemisphere, syndicated falconry of gifts and predilections propose dilutions of solemn music played through ploughs of lidding ink and fare renderings of infinite tapping bells. Tyrannised by the fastidious machinations of the filigreed demotic, I gurgle ‘blatant hatred’, caterwaul the demonic logic of wild horses at the mouth of a raging neddy. But what if love unfolds with the synchronous cruelty of your lips, the parameters of unlikely incisions gelded to private property and the right to that property? What if I see you from the place from which you see yourself, otherwise lodged, the fishbone throat raging or striking against the other turned to shame? Inequality is a mode of death. Was there ever a woman who felt herself attached by a generic marker? The hostility of a loveless assault casts a vegetable aura across the timpanic register of your filth, syndicated. Nostalgia hotwires judicious piecemeal fabrication. All of your thoughts entwined, the nexus of a single desiring sing of the mandatory mast enforcing a lifetime of concealed movement, held in place by the ache of a portable crush. Your orbital, creaking fixations, stupefying the apropos. Given time, obligations repulse me, become plentiful and take hold. These are your wanderjaehre, the creak of wooden steers, the hull of the drop-away safety lever. This immateriality of the living body conjures the self outside in the world, the illegality of charm, harm min., an agonised alterity in flight from the apothecary, the pleasure of which this song has suddenly become. Wake your fray, the lanolin is leeching from the wood. If you want to vanish your lover find a use for the whip of imperfect probabilities. Assign yourself to a class in Advanced Dream Logic and give me the day each day from a different bed. Make yourself that conglomeration of symptoms that only death can cure. Or lead your frothing team to the edge of Overflow, arrest the giant hills that distend the swarming sea, unsettle the necks of your live stockings – And save me a piece of Wedding Cake Island to feed to the horses when we give them back their heads. Fiona Hile Fiona HIle’s collection Novelties (Hunter Publishers, 2013) was awarded the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry. Her most recent book, Subtraction (Vagabond Press, 2018) won the Helen Anne Bell Poetry Award. More by Fiona Hile › 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.