Published in Overland Issue 247 Winter 2022 Teaser / 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 First published in Overland Issue 228 16 December 202225 January 2023 Poetry Poetry | Wombats shit candy Michael Farrell To avoid treading on a snake, I stepped on a land mine. Did this really happen, in my dream? No. Is it a fiction, then? Yes and no. The time I spend looking for socks is insignificant: lie, irony, or philosophy? Wombats shit candy. Joke – hallucination? This is in fact a truth claim. My poems: litanies of truth claims. 1 First published in Overland Issue 228 14 December 202225 January 2023 Reviews The moral risk of taking things too seriously: on Gareth Morgan’s When A Punk Becomes A Spunk Elese Dowden In his review of Lucy Van’s The Open, Gareth Morgan writes that Van writes 'against the impulse to ponder dutifully about the sins of the past and present.' This fucked me up for some time. What is it to ponder dutifully? But perhaps more importantly, how do we ponder in a way that's more … metal?
