Published in Overland Issue Print Issue 199 Winter 2010 · Writing / Main Posts There's a bomb on this train of thought Cameron Fuller Loaded with raw materials: colons, commas, fragments of broken grammar. This poem is wired with faulty rhetoric and ideas strapped to the author’s chest. Sensitive to sudden movement, it won’t reach the final station and its metaphors won’t survive the ride to their logical conclusions. It is not afraid to shout in MAXIMAL CAPS or exclaim emotions are explosive! But it stays silent, containing its secret until the end. It believes poetry is full of risk and targets innocent readers. It spurns the ease of paraphrase and the violence of bullet points. But it can’t afford the precision of laser guided imagery. All it has is the shrapnel of language, the lingua franca of blood connecting the heart and brain. This poem is a dirty bomb. It is designed to detonate when your eyes reach the final word. Cameron Fuller Cameron Fuller is based in Adelaide but has lived in Brisbane, Sydney, Cairns and Canberra. He is a PhD student at the University of South Australia and a poetry co-editor of Wet Ink magazine. More by Cameron Fuller › 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 July 202417 July 2024 · Writing “What is it that remains of us now”: witnessing the war on Palestine with Suheir Hammad Dashiell Moore The flame of her poetry scorches the states of exceptions that allow individual and state-sponsored violence to continue, unjustified, and unhistoricised. As we engage with her work, we are reminded that "chronic survival" is not merely an act of enduring but a profound declaration of existence. 28 March 20249 April 2024 · Main Posts Why we should value not only lived experience, but also lived expertise Sukhmani Khorana In the wake of this year’s International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, I want to extend the central idea of El Gibbs’s 2022 essay on 'lived expertise' and argue that in media accounts of racism, analytical expertise and lived experience ought to be valued together and even in the same body.