Published in Overland Issue 206 Autumn 2012 · Uncategorized Sonar Toby Fitch From a drunken cruise on the harbour comes a bouncing melody: I wanna have sex on the beach. Anyone can see it on everyone’s mind As the summertime trees nod assent In the Botanic Gardens, Their scent wafting up the nostrils Of skyscrapers breathing in fumes, Pumping out bucks, Relaying UV to the ant-sized joggers Who bound up and down along the shoreline On sand grains jostling for legroom. Above them, birds, checking out the goods Of a small grey woman staring at the bridge, Thinking: I wanna walk across water Like sound, as her skin remembers a distant Prickling, another season, A sun and a wind that lifts her hairs. Toby Fitch Toby Fitch, living on unceded Gadigal land, is poetry editor of Overland, a lecturer in creative writing at the University of Sydney, and the author of eight books of poetry, including Sydney Spleen and Where Only the Sky had Hung Before. More by Toby Fitch › 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 18 June 202518 June 2025 · Palestine Those to whom evil is done Yahia Lababidi What we need now is not more weapons or false neutrality. We need a reckoning. And we need imagination: a vision of coexistence built on equality, not exclusion. The idea that one people must disappear for another to thrive is a lie that has cost too many lives already. 16 June 2025 · Palestine Gazan stories: Palestinian resistance to the reduction to bare life Norman Saadi Nikro Palestinians are quite capable of photographing themselves, employing resources to represent and narrate not only their circumstances, but how they creatively engage their relationships to their circumstances. Neither numbers nor abject subjects of violence, they continue to disturb and challenge the Israeli onslaught by resisting their reduction to bare life.
