Published in Overland Issue 203 Winter 2011 · Main Posts Train Lines and the Power Lines Over Corey Wakeling We have set beasts up and walking but no one is paying notice to the trample. They lift whole train sleepers like toothpicks and interrupt train services for hours; like coins of resplendence, brains of Byzantine, or the fisherman’s knot. Beasts up and walking feast on the written recipe, yet the home cooks bereft of their preparations heeding nix of danger gloat over a gist of the imbricated stages, such as the proportions of water to flour. Glue, they keep making sopping glue, running like tears. The bugle is a whimpering sand bubbler, one of a fortune. It heralds the beasts’ success at disappearance not a telephone peal disturbs. We think to go trampling, but only ourselves do we maim. Train sleepers snap our fingers; trains dash our tunnel vision. Yet, some canny person has piled gravel and rubble into cairns, silent bugle threnodies choke in our dead throats. Tiny bubbles retreat from our cairns carrying the songs that map the trampled landscapes. Thus, there are only the beasts to sing to from our invisible reed exhausts guiding air bubbles skyward. Corey Wakeling lives in Melbourne. Published in journals here and abroad, he has work appearing in Famous Reporter and Australian Book Review © Adam Formosa Overland 203-winter 2011, p. 75 Like this piece? Subscribe! Corey Wakeling Corey Wakeling is a writer, scholar, and translator living in Tokyo. In 2013, he was granted a PhD in English and theatre studies at the University of Melbourne. Corey has lived in Japan since 2015, currently working as an associate professor of English literature at Aoyama Gakuin University. His most recent poetry collection, Uncle of Cats, appears with Cordite in 2024. More by Corey Wakeling › 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 12 May 202512 May 2025 · Main Posts Somebody please just do it Sam Wallman Somebody please just do it 28 March 202528 March 2025 · Prizes Announcing the 2024 Judith Wright Poetry Prize shortlist Editorial team After careful consideration, the judges have selected eight outstanding poems to form this year’s Judith Wright Poetry Prize shortlist.
