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 8 September 202315 September 2023 · Main Posts Announcing the 2023 Neilma Sidney Short Story Prize ($6500) Editorial Team Supported by the Malcolm Robertson Foundation, and named after the late Neilma Gantner, this prize seeks excellent short fiction of up to 3000 words themed around the notion of ‘travel’; imaginative, creative and literary interpretations are strongly encouraged. This competition is open to all writers, nationally and internationally, at any stage of their writing career. First published in Overland Issue 228 8 September 202326 September 2023 · Main Posts Announcing the 2023 Judith Wright Poetry Prize ($9000) Editorial Team Established in 2007 and supported by the Malcolm Robertson Foundation, the Overland Judith Wright Poetry Prize for New and Emerging Poets seeks poetry by writers who have published no more than one collection of poems under their own name (that is writers who’ve had zero collections published, or one solo collection published). It remains one of the richest prizes for emerging poets, and is open to poets anywhere in the world. In 2023, the major prize is $6000, with a second prize of $2000 and a third prize of $1000. All three winners will be published in Overland.
