Published in Overland Issue 223 Winter 2016 · Uncategorized Their talk Ouyang Yu Just around the street corner the sky heard The man say to the woman But that’s what this place is like They don’t trust friendship They don’t need it And the tree whom the two had just gone past heard The woman say They have their own people clustering around them And that’s more than enough And they don’t need any more people The street, meanwhile, let them walk the walk and talk The talk Without making a reply, exactly the way a street Behaves There were other things they talked about Such as their mutual agreement that They get used to the generally accepted cultural Segregation and their newly bred sense of aplomb And phlegm As for other things that might hurt if let out The sky, the tree and the trees, as well as the street Were willing to keep mum about So downtrodden by the wheels, the wind or the wings Like the two With no hopes of ever changing the Colour Read the rest of Overland 223 – If you liked this article, please subscribe or donate. Ouyang Yu Ouyang Yu is an award-winning poet and novelist. His first novel, The Eastern Slope Chronicle, won the 2004 South Australian Festival Award for Innovation in Writing. His third novel, The English Class, won the 2011 NSW Premier’s Award, and his fourteenth collection of poetry, Terminally Poetic (2020), won the Judith Wright Calanthe Award in the 2021 Queensland Literary Awards. He was shortlisted for the Writer’s Prize in the 2021 Melbourne Prize for Literature and he won the Fellowship from Creative Australia in 2021. His ninth novel, The Sun at Eight or Nine, was published in March 2025. More by Ouyang Yu › 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 17 April 2026 · Friday Fiction These old hands, they are still growing Sam Fisher It was an old house meshed in an unrelenting grid of brick and weatherboard. Its walls still stood stark, red brick. Paint like tender old sagging skin on the timber windows. A bastard of a garden surrounded it, ran up brick wall and concrete path. The lawn, dead that time of year, luminescent in the streetlight. In the center of that void, a sign, Auction. 15 April 202615 April 2026 · Climate politics The $67 billion climate betrayal: how Australia’s record fossil fuel subsidies fund global destruction Noa Wynn The contradictions aren't failures of implementation. They're the predictable result of a political system that has decided fossil fuel profits matter more than climate stability, more than the Great Barrier Reef, more than Pacific Islander lives, and more than the future habitability of the planet.
