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 24 March 202324 March 2023 War Conga line to Armageddon: the rush to get us into a war with China Ben Brooker It shouldn’t need spelling out that Australia could not win a war with China in any sense that matters, even with the backing of the US and its allies. At best, such a victory would be a Pyrrhic one. At worst, we would be so utterly humiliated as to not even know what kind of defeat had been inflicted upon us. First published in Overland Issue 228 23 March 2023 Trans rights Why gender essentialism is a white supremacist ideology Maddison Stoff The idea that these neo-Nazis are just ‘cosplayers’, rather than the local version of an international and decades-long attempt by numerous lone wolves and paramilitary groups to seize control of multiple countries, is too dangerous to seriously contemplate. The better question might be: why do so many anti-trans rights activists, who often see themselves as left-wing or self-describe as feminists, tolerate or downplay the presence of Nazis in their circles? And, just as importantly, why do neo-Nazis show up to support them?