Published in Overland Issue 227 Winter 2017 · Uncategorized Faulkner Cassandra Atherton My mother is a fish. I have buried her three times already, but the water table is high and she floats to the surface. I cleaned her, using scissors to cut anteriorly through the bones attached to her pelvic fins, but I can’t cross the river while her cloudy eyes are directed at the sky. The tackle box is full of the rusty hooks of untried catches. I take a pitted sinker and use the fishing line to weigh down her fleshy isthmus. There is water in my shoes but I can feel the stones rise beneath my feet. Image: Fly fishing tackle box next to stream / Chesapeake Bay Program Read the rest of Overland 227 If you enjoyed this poem, buy the issue Or subscribe and receive four outstanding issues for a year Cassandra Atherton Cassandra Atherton is an award-winning poet and the poetry editor for Westerly. She has been a Harvard Visiting Scholar, and a Visiting Fellow at Sophia University, Tokyo. Cassandra has published eight books, most recently the three-volume Sketch Notes. She has a Creative Victoria grant to write a prose poetry graphic novel on the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. More by Cassandra Atherton › 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 10 April 202610 April 2026 · open letter Open letter: RMIT staff and students oppose disciplinary action against Gemma Seymour over video opposing links to weapons ties RMIT University Staff and Students Freedom of speech and expression is absolutely vital in academic institutions. Students who engage in activism should not be punished for doing so, and discipline procedures are not there to be abused as a tool of intimidation. We call for the disciplinary process against Gemma to cease immediately. 9 April 202610 April 2026 · CoPower Against the will to engineer: Richard King’s Brave New Wild Ben Brooker The response demanded of us in the twenty-first century must operate at the level of metaphysics as well as the material, addressing our underlying assumptions about the instrumentalisation of nature and what constitutes a meaningful life in the face of technology’s relentless advance. To neglect that deeper terrain is to concede, in advance, the very ground on which our resistance to the machine must stand.
