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 First published in Overland Issue 228 8 September 202312 September 2023 · Poetry Poetry | Games Heather Taylor-Johnson Days pinch and lately I’ve noticed every time I look in the mirror I’m squinting—maybe it’s a grimace. Without trying I’ve mastered the façade of a Besser block threatened by a mallet, by which I mean maybe the world won’t kill me but it’ll definitely hurt and I’ve got to be ready. First published in Overland Issue 228 31 August 20236 September 2023 · Poetry Verbing the apocalypse: Alison Croggon’s Rilke Josie/Jocelyn Suzanne ‘This again?’ and ‘why now? Why not years ago?’ are the two questions raised in each new translation of a non-English piece of Western Canon. There’s an understanding—of course a poetic cycle like the Duino Elegies is incomplete in English, there are endless new readings—and a simultaneous sense of wounded pride/suspicion: what was missing the last time around? What were you concealing from me? What are you concealing now?
