Published in Overland Issue 240 Spring 2020 · Uncategorized (next to nothing) Pam Brown the money printers showed up hadn’t seen anyone for months maybe everyone was broke by now couldn’t know what kind of system is this our desires battered by empty shelves these are the people who used to laugh at Moscow GUM — Interpassive & flattened by repetition a languid scroll elides donate now to help beirut — maybe now you can begin to care — minimalism hides so much weirdness if you want to get away with it the interstices the nearest thing to nothing — what to produce from a language always insinuating rationality? (not a snicker nor a smile) — spitting chips into what for what? wait a minute what about faking a collective two faced & turning on a debit card Read the rest of Overland 240 If you enjoyed this piece, buy the issue Or subscribe and receive four brilliant issues for a year Pam Brown Pam Brown has published many chapbooks, pamphlets and full collections of poetry, most recently Stasis Shuffle (Hunter Publishers, 2021). She lives in a south Sydney suburb on reclaimed swampland on Gadigal Country. More by Pam Brown › 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 1 15 June 202616 June 2026 · Reviews Transubstantiations: Toby Fitch’s Or Grace Roodenrys The final trick of Or is that in the end it stages something utterly universal: the search for a momentary recognition of ourselves in language, the maybe-hopeless pursuit of those “very exceptional circumstances” in which something half-truthful might be said, the unending attempt to build something that feels real with the limited resources one has. This is a very old, a very sacred enterprise. We might call it poetry. 11 June 202612 June 2026 · Solidarity The zero-sum state: what the Royal Commission reveals on the future of Muslim life in Australia Sara Cheikh Husain The zero-sum logic that the Royal Commission’s witnesses have voiced through the IHRA definition is a colonial act of oppression. If the state succumbs to that logic, as every indication suggests it will, Muslim political solidarity with Palestine risks becoming not merely unrecognised but structurally criminalised. The full institutional protection of one community will come to be constitutively built on the misrecognition of another.
