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 poet and critic living in Takarazuka, Japan. His second full-length collection of poems is The Alarming Conservatory (Giramondo, 2018). 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 First published in Overland Issue 228 11 November 202211 November 2022 Main Posts On the last day of Subscriberthon, our amazing online editor gives you one last (very good) reason to subscribe Editorial team What's in store for the last day of Subscriberthon? First published in Overland Issue 228 10 November 202210 November 2022 Main Posts On the second-last day of Subscriberthon, our favourite editor-duo give you reason #1002 to subscribe to Overland Editorial team What's in store for the second-last day of Subscriberthon?