Published in Overland Issue 247 Winter 2022 · Poetry Poetry | on arriving in australia, 27 december 2000 Pooja Biswas as if numbers can measure how dark immigrant skin is dark enough to be blue under strobe lights carnivorous jellyfish dirt-brown blood an ignition of nightmares & sweat the machine of the body deserves to know that it isn’t real that none of the measuring amounts to anything & that man or woman there is a salt in our blood that poisons us like seawater & that only in the drowning will we awaken Pooja Biswas Pooja Mittal Biswas is the author of nine books of fiction, poetry and non-fiction, with her ninth book, a collection of poetry titled Hunger and Predation, due to be released by Cordite Books in 2023. She has been reviewed and interviewed in the Age, the Australian and ABC Radio National’s The Book Show, and has been anthologised in both Best Australian Poems and The Best Australian Poetry. Pooja has been widely published in literary journals and is currently pursuing a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Sydney. She was awarded the Stanley Sinclair Bequest Scholarship for poetry and was longlisted for the British Science Fiction Association’s Best Non-Fiction Book Award. She is a sessional academic teaching Creative Writing at multiple universities. More by Pooja Biswas › 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 8 March 20248 March 2024 · Poetry POETRY Gareth Morgan as if a poem were a person, me, i get up in the morning / i buy coffee in a can, and wait / you have to keep calm, “don't get upset” / or it fucks everything up. the bosses who tell me this / are wise but stupid troopers. this is a political poem 16 February 202419 February 2024 · Poetry Two poems from 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem Nam Le But think about the children, super cute children, mute children, with uncommonly big eyes, children with hard eyes, eyes that have seen what no child’s eyes should see, children naked as the day wearing big smiles and no smiles, preternaturally wise, with mooned-out tummies and cleft palates and cataracts, deformities and birth defects ...