Published in Overland Issue 227 Winter 2017 · Uncategorized Beacon Corey Wakeling . A black sun lights the creases in capital’s night nightcrawlers prong. The congratulatory vanguardists can accept lyrical cinema, somehow, and get away with it. Many of the butterflies puppet impressionism too. The fingers shatter on the keyboard like icicles. It is Canada, last year. Here, dolphins have given up all hope of penetrating the distant bay. Tuna fishing an obscure south-western aesthetic policy. So, she goes on hegira to the obscurest west. Ambulances lubricate words before they mince them. Then we die, best of all. Better that than bedridden or the lawn’s pandering sprinkler, the particulates get in everywhere anyhow anyway, even a little further north of the campus. He really can see Russia from the horn, the lahar a spoil of war as the isthmus breaks off. Flotillas of people remind the accountants of the G20. We must do something urgently with our pockets, chimes the ID bracelet. Not kidding, my lint paradise is a correctional facility. The books on screams are being censored, inevitably, as we rack up debts in every other humanitarian redoubt on the ferocious globe. I am an ambulance, after all. Lights are peaking. When we leave Grey Gardens for the swamp, the two malingerers greet a distant beacon. Read the rest of Overland 227 If you enjoyed this poem, buy the issue Or subscribe and receive four outstanding issues for a year Corey Wakeling Corey Wakeling is a writer, scholar, and translator living in Tokyo. In 2013, he was granted a PhD in English and theatre studies at the University of Melbourne. Corey has lived in Japan since 2015, currently working as an associate professor of English literature at Aoyama Gakuin University. His most recent poetry collection, Uncle of Cats, appears with Cordite in 2024. More by Corey Wakeling › 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.
