Published in Overland Issue 217 Summer 2014 · Uncategorized I wrote lines during a period of insanity, too Emily Stewart after Gig Ryan Flung them on the riverbed which flooded that week next. Not short of invectives, I cursed pebbles as flint, startling the public of Wagga Caravan Park like a goanna loosed under leaves. What rot, said some, and I did believe them – with the brute finality of a gum limb struck down for brooms. Good-bye seventh sister, with your holy plaintive wings. Good-bye this underdress of drenched silk Dear accomplice, I can’t stand this ratio. The timbre of lunatic meets. Let us choose a better mooring for slugging bottles next; let us be less regretful. When did time start angling in, so diagrammatic, so anodyne? I hunker with a slew of digressions, mostly physical, layabouts, greying husks, what-have-yous. This night of nights features one darling wedding then the next: a blouse and blooms revue, or instances awaiting a long car trip home where I’ll couch tomorrow’s ache as somehow edifying Emily Stewart Emily Stewart is a poet and freelance editor based in Sydney. More by Emily Stewart › 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 20 December 202420 December 2024 · Reviews Slippery totalities: appendices on oil and politics in Australia and beyond Scott Robinson Kurmelovs writes at this level of confusion and contradiction for an audience whose unspoken but vaguely progressive politics he takes for granted and yet whose assumed knowledge resembles that of an outraged teenager. There should be a young adult genre of political journalism to accommodate books like this. 19 December 202419 December 2024 · Reviews Reading JH Prynne aloud: Poems 2016-2024 John Kinsella Poems 2016-2024 is a massive, vibrant and immersive collation of JH Prynne’s small press publication across this period. Some would call it a late life creative flourish, a glorious coda, but I don’t see it this way. Rather, this is an accumulation of concerns across a lifetime that have both relied on earlier form work and newly "discovered" expressions of genre that require recasting, resaying, and varying.