Published in Overland Issue 205 Summer 2011 · Uncategorized One February or July DJ Huppatz Calling out in an underground parking garage in Ottawa or Montreal, but I tell you no-one was lost. At least I wasn’t. Then how was it we ended up on St Kilda beach later that morning, a gypsy bar that afternoon, while all the disenchanted world worked? “You can fly you know”. The gulls blinked – they’re used to such profundity and listened attentively. We gorged on sunlight impounded in Indonesian mangos as the ocean sculpted a sign legible only to two. But when the little one said roll over, it was hard to recall when we were young and no-one followed those tight silk pants but my hands. The temples are waiting, let them. I could clean the bathroom but there’s no sense setting the record straight. You know, it’s a long way to buy a decent key lime pie, we should just make one here. And a couple of mojitos. DJ Huppatz DJ Huppatz lives in Naarm/Melbourne, Australia. Recent fiction in Variant Literature, Menacing Hedge and Fugitives and Futurists. Author of two poetry books, Happy Avatar (Puncher and Wattmann, 2015) and Astroturfing for Spring (Puncher and Wattmann, 2021). More by DJ Huppatz › 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 June 2026 · The university Financial power in the public university: the case of ANU Beck Pearse The deeper problem is institutional. Universities have elaborate mechanisms for scrutinising knowledge claims circulating between staff and students. But we have remarkably weak mechanisms for scrutinising the financial assumptions through which executive power is exercised. 1 15 June 202616 June 2026 · Reviews Transubstantiations: Toby Fitch’s Or Grace Roodenrys The final trick of Or is that in the end it stages something utterly universal: the search for a momentary recognition of ourselves in language, the maybe-hopeless pursuit of those “very exceptional circumstances” in which something half-truthful might be said, the unending attempt to build something that feels real with the limited resources one has. This is a very old, a very sacred enterprise. We might call it poetry.