Published in Overland Issue 248 Spring 2022 · Poetry Poetry | Platform games Alan Fyfe You feel the ancient cobblestones under your work boots, steel toe for kicking evil away. In the dripping, humid passage, you see a flicker of red and white. A mushroom speaks, Thank you, Mario, but our princess is in another castle. A week ago, you were a plumber. Your hero’s journey was only the smile a frustrated burgher offered when the pipes ran clear. Home on time to eat a warm dinner in front of the news. Weekend with the phone off for clean hands on a Sunday. It was sly chance that made you something different. Fifty paces on, the air is dense and each breath thick as custard. Sweat collects over your moustache and you almost trip on another mushroom. This one has a voice too, Thank you, Mario, but the princess has rescued herself; all princesses are now self-rescuing. The chord of a story snaps around you. This or that, blue collar labourer or knight of the realm. Level up or drop the last life you have. When you sense a thinner atmosphere, when you can breathe the way you like, you make a choice for yourself. You pull the useless coins from your pocket and drop them in a rain of chimes and brass-sparks. One hits a third mushroom, who says, Thank you, Mario, but the old world is dying and the new world is struggling to be born; now is the time of monsters. You ignore all three mushrooms, there is a light ahead. Alan Fyfe Alan Fyfe is a winner of the Karl Popper Philosophy Award, was shortlisted for the Judith Wright Poetry Prize, won second in the Tom Collins Poetry Prize, and has been selected as a Four Centres Emerging writer for 2022 / 23. His first novel, T, received shortlistings for both the T.A.G Hungerford Prize (Australia) and the Chaffinch Press Aware Prize (Ireland). T is published by Transit Lounge. Alan’s poetry collection, G-d, Sleep, and Chaos, was awarded silver for the Flying Islands unpublished manuscript award and will be published with Gazebo Books in 2024. Most recently, T was shortlisted for the West Australian Premier’s Award. More by Alan Fyfe › 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 6 September 20246 September 2024 · Poetry Debts of the robots Corey Wakeling Repaying the debts of robots, / I see me in your screen fatally, which is / to say oozed certainty across a whistle of craft. 16 August 202416 August 2024 · Poetry pork lullaby Panda Wong but an alive pig / roots in the soil /turning it over / with its snout / softening the ground / is this a hymn