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 First published in Overland Issue 228 27 September 2023 · Sport When the sport circus comes on Country Jenny Fraser The next huckster in the carnival of sport is the upcoming 2032 Brisbane Olympic Games. If we want aspects of it to be in line with Aboriginal protocol, we need action from across the four winds of the world. If it’s not done right we need solidarity and protest just the same. We are each other’s safety net in this theatre of sport. As a senior Aboriginal woman activist once told me, ‘we are all only as good as we negotiate’. First published in Overland Issue 228 25 September 202326 September 2023 · The university Solidarity but only among managers, or the future of the university sector Hannah Forsyth The process continued during Covid. Jobs were being cut due to the threats posed by the pandemic, yet more scholars were being recruited. Nice people, good at their job. But why are we doing this, we kept asking. Management kept telling us we have a funding crisis (which often turned to a surplus in the end), so why are we also on a hiring spree? All along it looked like it could end badly, for all of us.
