Published in Overland Issue 216 Spring 2014 · Uncategorized poem | Ann Vickery Ann Vickery What if Persephone remained a hard woman? An ethics of care turned towards oneself. Love’s harvest, the halves of intimacy in these latitudes. A climate of change revealed as cycle of constant return, how to reconcile, farm my inadequacy for yours or simply distract. Let’s just say for argument’s sake, let’s just say pugilism is always political, platforms cropping hay, the field of absolutes you might travel to. I distil the brackish dark, listen low over the lees, liar strings laid flush to decider core. Store of regrets, bare-knuckled figs, a desire to fall foul. Your rallying jig as jubilant plucked yew. Cross-dressing Orpheus to your Eurydice, I discover I want as a mode. To provoke the strike back, for you to tell me that the light is yours, and it is I who have disengaged song, who must feel my way through the ever-burdened earth. To be called a muffler, bobbing compliment. Ann Vickery Anny Vickery teaches at Deakin University. She is the author of Leaving Lines of Gender: A Feminist Genealogy of Language Writing and Stressing the Modern: Cultural Politics in Australian Women’s Poetry. She is also co-author of The Intimate Archive: Journeys through Private Papers and co-editor of Manifesting Australian Literary Feminisms: Nexus and Faultlines. She has published poetry in a range of national and international journals. More by Ann Vickery › 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 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. 29 January 202529 January 2025 · Palestine The demonisation of the Palestine movement fuels anti-Muslim racism Mariam Tohamy and Miroslav Sandev The spate of anti-Muslim racist attacks around the country are being fuelled by the anti-Muslim and anti-Palestinian policies of mainstream politicians. Political attempts to undermine the Palestine movement and bipartisan support for Israel’s genocide are causing this.
