Published in Overland Issue 213 Summer 2013 · Uncategorized Marrickville Fiona Wright Later that night, I cut the plastic boning from the bodice of my dress: no need for structure, over summer. There were bruises on my knees I didn’t recognise. I saw us all that day, all day projected on a big screen: the bathtub underneath the orange tree, crushed grass imprinted on my shins, your cat-like eyeliner, the warm sangria out of mugs. My feet grew numb beneath my hips. Saturation. I still felt overseen when I walked home, alone and shouldered. A black light flicked behind a balcony, a woman, neon-lit, crushed out a cigarette and turned to kiss, to give a kiss. This wasn’t meant to sound like romance. But it’s not ironic, either. 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 20 December 202420 December 2024 · Reviews Slippery totalities: appendices on oil and politics in Australia and beyond Scott Robinson Kurmelovs writes at this level of confusion and contradiction for an audience whose unspoken but vaguely progressive politics he takes for granted and yet whose assumed knowledge resembles that of an outraged teenager. There should be a young adult genre of political journalism to accommodate books like this. 19 December 202419 December 2024 · Reviews Reading JH Prynne aloud: Poems 2016-2024 John Kinsella Poems 2016-2024 is a massive, vibrant and immersive collation of JH Prynne’s small press publication across this period. Some would call it a late life creative flourish, a glorious coda, but I don’t see it this way. Rather, this is an accumulation of concerns across a lifetime that have both relied on earlier form work and newly "discovered" expressions of genre that require recasting, resaying, and varying.