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 19 April 2024 · Friday Fiction Stilted J.E “Mahal” Cuya One hour after midnight. Everyone in rooms. Living room – dark. Table look like monsters. Like death. TV on stand. Netflix Logo. No one watching. Residents asleep. They have dementia. 18 April 202418 April 2024 · Education A Jellyfish government in NSW: public education’s privatisation-by-neglect Dan Hogan A private school that receives public money is not a private school: it is a fee-paying public school. The overfunding of private schools using public money is a symptom of a public service that has been rotted for a quarter of century by a political class with no vision beyond producing dubious, misleading statistics to deploy at the next election.