Published in Overland Issue 207 Winter 2012 · Uncategorized Your Bath Fiona Yardley Your bath is generous, impersonal, whitely curved, bloated with self-importance and scummed with a delicate rim of grime. There are scratches in the bottom from careless cleaning, cluttered shampoo bottles with last leavings, half-inches of pearlescent fluid; hairs of all thicknesses and lengths; and dust, and fluff from fresh-washed towels, and striped sunshine. I have left blood, skin, tears, in your bath, every cadence of my voice, sudden laughter. I have been ill, heaved coughing mucus out of heavy lungs, pissed dark streams after dark dreams into the cold porcelain of thoughtless hungover mornings while soaping moody feet. I have stood, washed, picked, scratched away at myself, rubbed skin and hair off my body, scraped razorblades past urgent throbbing veins on marble-white, deforested skin, to be smooth, left the short bristled leavings of ablution curved in gentle interrogatives around the plughole. I have left songs in your bath, so-fa-lahs and tumpty-tums, mellow chords and gentle hums, the echoes of our mingled voices spilling in generous swirls around and around and into the drain. I have cried in caught moments of pure and blazing passion, in joy, in utter despair, wrung out my heart into the sponge and the towel, curled gasping, fishlike, flank to flank with its porcelain sides while eddies of cooler water pool about my thighs and streams run into and out of my eyes. Fiona Yardley Fiona Yardley is a writer, editor, and cultural worker in Sydney. More by Fiona Yardley › 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 7 February 20257 February 2025 · Friday Fiction The gap between the trees Jenny Sinclair At first it was because I was angry. It might have looked like I was running away but I wasn’t. I was punching the earth with my feet. The faster I went — the harder my soles hit the ground — the better it felt. Because punching people is, you know, illegal. And wrong. But mostly illegal. 6 February 2025 · open letter Open Letter from Attendees of the National Anti-Racism Symposium at the Queensland University of Technology Delegates to the National Anti-Racism Symposium We urge QUT, politicians and others receiving pressure to not only resist these attacks on the intellectual freedom and academic integrity of the presenters, Carumba Institute and QUT, but, further, to condemn the racist, reactionary and divisive campaign that produced them. Anything less will be a capitulation to the most corrosively anti-intellectual forces in Australian society, which will ultimately harm not only Carumba and QUT, but all of us.