Published in Overland Issue 207 Winter 2012 · Uncategorized Maximum Security Fiona Hile Photocopied peaches taste sour in the afterthought of extricated blue. The relationship manager’s understudy is having a bad day. Same fax number and email but the second penalty always feels more authentic. Mud flaps flipping out in the Belanglo jangle of organ-harvest stand-up or syncopated starlings in the Treasury Gardens of psalm trees lapping at the difference between portent and disaster, one thing and the other leeching you out of that word you hate, dividing all strychnine things in two. I want to say I need you but the way to make friends and to keep them is to remain independent or at least to say you’ll appear Striving up the town hall staircase, rows of poets and schooners drug you into litigious states of horizon. It takes bones to make a xylophone, straggling into the Bedouin-end of Little New Castle, anthologised by starlings and the sack-limp starlight of the hystericised palm trees. Love is just the ‘misassignation of predicates’ though a member of the wedding in white chisel-toed patent would suit you, the bordello of the balustrade wilting to the Middle-Eastern trance of a delightful Turkish buffet. Leprechauns these days are all ‘auto-produce’. One family must die out for another to take its place. Stendhal? Or the waiter, in a Clean Well-Lighted Figurative? Back home, a pop song is a problem you can only solve in utero. A dream as big as a garden only takes up half the space. In love with the difference between sleeping and waking, it’s hard not to see why literature took off. The reality is our backyard’s full of Cecil Williams and children catapulting concrete calves and lungs. Come summer we plan to route our house underground. Architecture for a hidden life. Your invoice initiates the contract I didn’t know we’d signed. Credulous citations to appear summon a three-storey townhouse in the cavities of our one- man carpark. It’s a plan, it’s a start. It’s a garage revolution. We’re date-drunk and dropsy in the archives of potty-mouthed histories traced to the fulcrum of glittering one-liner blue. Outside the silo window the hotel hums. Fiona Hile Fiona HIle’s collection Novelties (Hunter Publishers, 2013) was awarded the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry. Her most recent book, Subtraction (Vagabond Press, 2018) won the Helen Anne Bell Poetry Award. More by Fiona Hile › 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 27 September 2023 · Sport When the sport circus comes on Country Jenny Fraser The next huckster in the carnival of sport is the upcoming 2032 Brisbane Olympic Games. If we want aspects of it to be in line with Aboriginal protocol, we need action from across the four winds of the world. If it’s not done right we need solidarity and protest just the same. We are each other’s safety net in this theatre of sport. As a senior Aboriginal woman activist once told me, ‘we are all only as good as we negotiate’. First published in Overland Issue 228 25 September 202326 September 2023 · The university Solidarity but only among managers, or the future of the university sector Hannah Forsyth The process continued during Covid. Jobs were being cut due to the threats posed by the pandemic, yet more scholars were being recruited. Nice people, good at their job. But why are we doing this, we kept asking. Management kept telling us we have a funding crisis (which often turned to a surplus in the end), so why are we also on a hiring spree? All along it looked like it could end badly, for all of us.