Published in Overland Issue 206 Autumn 2012 · Uncategorized Sunday poem Fiona Wright Rotate the potato. A labrador is happiest collecting kindling. While the football’s on in the other room we salt the pigskin: O, giver of gout. Brie suctions the wooden platter. Wisteria bruises on the patio. We’ll lock away the candles when the baby learns to crawl. There’s an eggplant outside for you. The stovetop coils sing. You have to take the batteries from the smoke alarms before it crackles. You need new shoes. The dogs haven’t had their breakfast. I haven’t used that bowl since Christmas She boils beans until they look like paper mâché. Ups-a-daisy-daisy-do! The leather lounges shriek when you sit down. Your bedroom still has stickers on the ceiling. He’s got good wrists for flicking teatowels. I’m still having trouble with my pannacotta. The cap of the sauce bottle has scabbed over. Six proteas sit in a cut-glass vase. Take a concrete tablet and harden the fuck up. There are sewing pins in the spice rack. My father’s fingers always get the crisp bits first. It’s been a big week. What’s this one infused with? Pass the gravy, fathead. Fiona Wright Fiona Wright’s new essay collection is The World Was Whole (Giramondo, 2018). Her first book of essays Small Acts of Disappearance won the 2016 Kibble Award and the Queensland Literary Award for nonfiction, and her poetry collections are Knuckled and Domestic Interior. More by Fiona Wright › 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 21 February 202521 February 2025 · The university Closing the noose: a dispatch from the front line of decasualisation Matthew Taft Across the board, universities have responded to legislation aimed at rectifying this already grim situation by halting casual hiring, cutting courses, expanding class sizes, and increasing the workloads of permanent staff. This is an unintended consequence of the legislation, yes, but given the nefarious history of the university, from systemic wage theft to bad-faith bargaining, hardly a surprising one. 19 February 2025 · Disability The devaluing of disability support Áine Kelly-Costello and Jonathan Craig Over the past couple of decades, disabled people in much of the Western world have often sought, or agreed to, more individualised funding schemes in order to gain greater “choice and control” over the support we receive. But the autonomy, dignity and flexibility we were promised seems constantly under threat or out of reach, largely because of the perception that allowing us such “luxuries” is too expensive.
