Published in Overland Issue 216 Spring 2014 · Uncategorized A portable crush Fiona Hile Riding on such instruments as a large aluminium hemisphere, syndicated falconry of gifts and predilections propose dilutions of solemn music played through ploughs of lidding ink and fare renderings of infinite tapping bells. Tyrannised by the fastidious machinations of the filigreed demotic, I gurgle ‘blatant hatred’, caterwaul the demonic logic of wild horses at the mouth of a raging neddy. But what if love unfolds with the synchronous cruelty of your lips, the parameters of unlikely incisions gelded to private property and the right to that property? What if I see you from the place from which you see yourself, otherwise lodged, the fishbone throat raging or striking against the other turned to shame? Inequality is a mode of death. Was there ever a woman who felt herself attached by a generic marker? The hostility of a loveless assault casts a vegetable aura across the timpanic register of your filth, syndicated. Nostalgia hotwires judicious piecemeal fabrication. All of your thoughts entwined, the nexus of a single desiring sing of the mandatory mast enforcing a lifetime of concealed movement, held in place by the ache of a portable crush. Your orbital, creaking fixations, stupefying the apropos. Given time, obligations repulse me, become plentiful and take hold. These are your wanderjaehre, the creak of wooden steers, the hull of the drop-away safety lever. This immateriality of the living body conjures the self outside in the world, the illegality of charm, harm min., an agonised alterity in flight from the apothecary, the pleasure of which this song has suddenly become. Wake your fray, the lanolin is leeching from the wood. If you want to vanish your lover find a use for the whip of imperfect probabilities. Assign yourself to a class in Advanced Dream Logic and give me the day each day from a different bed. Make yourself that conglomeration of symptoms that only death can cure. Or lead your frothing team to the edge of Overflow, arrest the giant hills that distend the swarming sea, unsettle the necks of your live stockings – And save me a piece of Wedding Cake Island to feed to the horses when we give them back their heads. Fiona Hile Fiona HIle’s collection Novelties (Hunter Publishers, 2013) was awarded the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry. Her most recent book, Subtraction (Vagabond Press, 2018) won the Helen Anne Bell Poetry Award. More by Fiona Hile › 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 4 December 20234 December 2023 · Climate politics Where is the Australian climate movement’s solidarity with Palestine? Alex Kelly Let this be a line in the sand. Let us learn our history. Let us listen to liberation movements around the world. Conflicts for land and water will shape the decades to come. Showing up for each other and building power to demand justice is our only hope for a humane future. First published in Overland Issue 228 1 December 20231 December 2023 · History ‘We’re doing everything but treaty’: Law reform and sovereign refusal in the colonial debtscape Maria Giannacopoulos I coined the concept of the colonial debtscape while working to understand the relation between debt and sovereignty in the wake of the 2007 Global Financial crisis. Despite the referendum held in Greece in 2015 where the people voted against austerity, austerity as punishment, was imposed anyway. As this was a colonising move, that is, the imposition of an external and foreign law on local populations against their will, it was to Aboriginal scholars here that I turned to begin to put the pieces together.