Published in Overland Issue 215 Winter 2014 · Uncategorized Departures, arrivals Stu Hatton Airport of the future. Devoid of take-offs, landings. Derelict hub. The passenger era having followed the strip-lights to the exit. Heat of steel, glass. Kids barefoot on tarmac. The encampments were quick to spread here. Spaces once open. Signs no longer apply. Former meanings, functions. Arrows lead to nothings, nowheres. Proliferation of tents, tarps, improvs on a theme of shelter. ‘Temporary’ uttered less and less (palliative word). Fires throw the only night-lighting. The thinning. Safeties, sanitations (relativities). Sustenance amounts to sprouts in water. Seeds once saved. Harvesting water from the slants of roofs. A hangar become hothouse, an airliner become home. Hierarchies trampled (what of hierarchies of need, triage?). Travel is but a story. The endless elsewhere. What was once a city’s intersection of complexity (flightpath web). That ancient theme of waiting. Stu Hatton Stu Hatton is a poet, editor and researcher. He works in mental health at the University of Melbourne. His books are available from www.lulu.com/spotlight/stuhatton; he sometimes posts at outerblog.tumblr.com. More by Stu Hatton › 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.