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 11 June 2026 · Solidarity The zero-sum state: what the Royal Commission reveals on the future of Muslim life in Australia Sara Cheikh Husain The zero-sum logic that the Royal Commission’s witnesses have voiced through the IHRA definition is a colonial act of oppression. If the state succumbs to that logic, as every indication suggests it will, Muslim political solidarity with Palestine risks becoming not merely unrecognised but structurally criminalised. The full institutional protection of one community will come to be constitutively built on the misrecognition of another. 10 June 2026 · Rural Australia Left in place: how distance in Australia is political Emma Goldrick If we are to better understand inequality within Australia, we must begin with the recognition that disadvantage does not only reside in income brackets or postcodes associated with urban poverty. It is also embedded in the sheer physical scale of the nation and the political choices made about who gets connected to opportunity and who remains at the margins of it.
