252 Spring 2023 Buy this issue Overland 252 brings together the work of many, including writer Vivian Blaxell, Australian-Palestinian writer and educator Micaela Sahhar, and Greek-Australian anarchist poet π. o., to offer up fictional, poetic and scholarly reflections on place, resistance, memory, desire and activism—inherently political themes that have always concerned Overland writers and its readers. You'll also find new poetry from Eileen Chong, Emma Simington, Niko Chłopicki and Jini Maxwell, as well as new short fiction from Andrew Roff, Pierce Wilcox, Dorell Ben, plus loads more. Issue Contents Features The Disappearance of a.k.a. Victor Mature Vivian Blaxell Concrete Terra Nullius πO An idiosyncratic archive: Overland 169 & the Wolstonecroft years Micaela Sahhar On losing one’s way: Sophie Cunningham and the geography of desire Peter D Mathews Fiction Tautoga ne Tu’ura: dance of Tu’ura Dorell Ben Nails Chloe Hillary Performance Pierce Wilcox T3 Andrew Roff Poetry Red Honda Jazz Mitchell Welch Stitch Emma Simington I live in my hometown (not a hundred metres from where) Emma Simington Self-portrait as fox with Arctic hare Damen O'Brien Where it Lives Jini Maxwell Notes on flesh Joel Keith Balloch Eileen Chong A seagull covered in curry Niko Chlopicki The worst journey in the world j. taylor bell Editorial Editorial Evelyn Araluen and Jonathan Dunk Browse the issue: Features Published in Overland Issue 252 Spring 2023 · Writing The Disappearance of a.k.a. Victor Mature Vivian Blaxell The Aguila Azteca creaks out of Nuevo Laredo at twenty-seven minutes after nine. There is that desert in the night and there is this moon shedding silver from what always looks like a horrified face to me no matter what they say about beautiful or green cheese or rabbit (if you are Japanese) and there […] Published in Overland Issue 252 Spring 2023 · Writing Concrete Terra Nullius πO In May 2023 6 poets, Jas H Duke, Peter Murphy, thalia, Sandy Caldow, Arjun von Caemmerer, and myself, held an exhibition of concrete poetry “Wayword Forword” at the Nicholas Building in Melbourne, curated by Victoria Perin. It attracted a large number of people over its 3 weeks on the wall, and generated a lot of […] Published in Overland Issue 252 Spring 2023 · Archival response An idiosyncratic archive: Overland 169 & the Wolstonecroft years Micaela Sahhar The stumps under our floor are teetering and though not the cause it is nevertheless a cause for alarm, the weight of thousands of books we have partially shelved but also stacked in piles of varying consonance impossible to discard. Yet despite this number, it is the handful of books, missing through loans or misfortune, that haunt me. Published in Overland Issue 252 Spring 2023 · Writing On losing one’s way: Sophie Cunningham and the geography of desire Peter D Mathews Catherine’s geography teacher was right: the creation of any map is an act of implicit colonisation that gives rise to the treacherous belief that the geography of desire can be made to bend to the contours of the rational order. Fiction Published in Overland Issue 252 Spring 2023 · Fiction Tautoga ne Tu’ura: dance of Tu’ura Dorell Ben The Rotuman culture is rich in community, land, the spiritual and the physical. Various factors from colonialism to Christianity have left generational legacies that clash with Indigenous knowledges. Often such clashes leave cultural practices, like that of the Rotuman tattoo, on peripheries of a history. In between survival in a Western-modern world and the need […] Published in Overland Issue 252 Spring 2023 · Fiction Nails Chloe Hillary Her back is perfectly straight. She perches on a small black leather stool, her neck curving over the thin table in front of her. The fine bones of her shoulders are pinned back, her hands reaching across the table, to hold a stranger’s hand in her own, working fast. A white surgical mask stretches across her nose and mouth, elastic bands keeping it taut, tucked behind her ears. The sharp smell of chemicals seeps in anyway. Published in Overland Issue 252 Spring 2023 · Fiction Performance Pierce Wilcox You need to look at me. There were not enough words to explain. You need to look at me. He didn’t believe her yet. He wouldn’t even pretend. He could do that, for her, and maybe she’d get to believe she’d affected another person and he’d get to enjoy the gratitude she flung at anyone […] Published in Overland Issue 252 Spring 2023 · Fiction T3 Andrew Roff Light from a distant glass atrium loiters passive-aggressively, just on the other side of Adam’s closed eyelids. It’s a hue so warm it must be sunshine, but that implies day, and he really has no idea what time it is. He is parked on a moulded plastic seat, part of an armrest-linked row skirting a quadrangle of hog-bristle walls and patterned grey carpet. Poetry Published in Overland Issue 252 Spring 2023 · Poetry Red Honda Jazz Mitchell Welch An Elegy Carnival Red our brittle carapace charges eightlanes wide of Platzgeist Square, its on-board horn ejaculating in long formant wavefronts — a slur! Galvanised in canned entropic automation Crude, snorting obsolete injectables deep in the spider-fucking hours of cardboard cups and gluey eyes, we ride! To the degenerate hum of auxless shock jocks’ purple […] Published in Overland Issue 252 Spring 2023 · Poetry Stitch Emma Simington Night rains chafing through flyscreens, the dog gymnastic with love and all the things I said on the way to bed about helicopter doctors. Published in Overland Issue 252 Spring 2023 · Poetry I live in my hometown (not a hundred metres from where) Emma Simington A flower called SELFHEAL, in Latin begins GROSSE, meaning course. All afternoons: cross-legged, elbows crushing, blood cut off from that point down. Published in Overland Issue 252 Spring 2023 · Poetry Self-portrait as fox with Arctic hare Damen O'Brien The worm of white on white, the whey and milk of white, the chalk on milk and the bone, break of bone, egg-wash and acrylic, ash, soft drifts of ash, hoarse coughs of ash, snow also, laid lightly on snow, piled on it, blindingly bright, blanched, bled and white static, brushed pallid, Published in Overland Issue 252 Spring 2023 · Poetry Where it Lives Jini Maxwell By the totem of a rabbit In a week of ever softer landings On a sheet doubling as a projector screen As a flowerhorn swims into view Through the light that crouches in the corner While you are waking In that first morning waking up next to you In the part of me that once might have been polyester That fills tentatively with organs again Published in Overland Issue 252 Spring 2023 · Poetry Notes on flesh Joel Keith The bowl of citrus-scented Sicilian olives you ate one by one sucking the pips of until what you tasted was your own blood only demonstrates more clearly all one eats already soon will be oneself. Published in Overland Issue 252 Spring 2023 · Poetry Balloch Eileen Chong In the evening we walk past the ruined castle towards the loch. The sun is setting behind us. There is a walled garden full of rose bushes without a single bloom. It’s too late in the season. Published in Overland Issue 252 Spring 2023 · Poetry A seagull covered in curry Niko Chlopicki & millenials are like: born too late to own a house / born too soon to be a tiktok star born just in time to / have paid 99 cents for a ringtone & Gen X couples in covid are like: my partner out hunting and gathering (grocery shopping) while i hold down and protect the fort (smoking weed) & a billboard above a Greggs says: Be Brave Published in Overland Issue 252 Spring 2023 · Poetry The worst journey in the world j. taylor bell started with the car not starting, helms deep / being that great freeze of 2021 — powerless / as a tesla in lubbock texas, we lived off elbow / grease, canned peaches, and lean donkey meat Editorial Published in Overland Issue 252 Spring 2023 · Editorial Evelyn Araluen and Jonathan Dunk We confess that this is our second run of this editorial. In the first version, written as pieces were being finalised in late September, we wrote towards the uncertain result of the referendum; we knew our statements would likely arrive in your letterbox as a spectral gesture towards a future not yet calcified to the seam of meanness that often stains the grain of the settler heart. Previous Issue 251 Winter 2023 Next Issue 253 Summer 2023/4
