Published in Overland Issue 213 Summer 2013 · Uncategorized Northgate Adam Formosa A cigarette bud sits at my windscreen creased left napping I can write your name in Arabic, I know its heavy smoke curls, its language if I carve the space you left with a cigarette I’d find baklava and garlic or eggplant on rye peeping fig-trees, weighted Davidoff Adventure lurking pastirma or bastirma sipping arak, pistachio rinds cooked in wooden mould, I’d find a gold cross hung around the sun anchored on its centre burning into its skin drop me to the bottom of your thoughts to where sandstone sings evaporates heat to its point bleached like bones from the sun, to our first language Adam Formosa Adam Formosa is a NSW South Coast-based poet, whose best work comes out while listening to Deadmau5. More by Adam Formosa › 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 4 February 20254 February 2025 · Indigenous Australia Teaching Palestine on stolen Indigenous lands Charlotte Mertens Refusal is not only possible, it generates different worlds. Refusal insists on the possibility of alternative anti-colonial futures and ways of being. Refusing the University’s erasure of Palestine involves a collective effort in thinking on how we will teach Palestine, the ongoing settler colonial violence and what this means for a place like Australia. 31 January 202531 January 2025 · Racism The QUT Symposium: holding the line against rising racism Elizabeth Strakosch, Jordy Silverstein, Crystal McKinnon, Eugenia Flynn, Natalie Ironfield, Holly Charles, Priya Kunjan, Roj Amedi and Lina Koleilat Last weeks's QUT Symposium met in the staunch tradition of the Brisbane Blacks, who have fought for sovereignty, land rights, liberation and an end to racial violence for decades. It was a gathering of Elders, academics, organisers and frontline community workers who speak, theorise and embody the truth about race and racism in this place. It refused to clothe itself in multicultural platitudes about tolerance, or to speak about racism only in terms of individual prejudice.
