Published in Overland Issue 218 Autumn 2015 · Uncategorized Be were: third place, Judith Wright Poetry Prize Kia Groom tonight the pigment will rise through your skin, form in fawn formations deer: your stockinged shanks hang now from half- open window & you slough off loose shoe it was a slow summer but now i crown you in the backseat: destructive diadem nestled in the thorns of your hair, stuck in a swollen wound that seeps a stream of blood i take it, what i’m owed, & crickets kiss your split lips with their sound: oh, whittled girlhood oh, crust of mud that shapes a foot to hoof. the sun sets on your thighs. you stumble out & eyes abandon pigment: sclera floods dark oil & in the road deer: you break open your insides burst with fur i want to plunge my hand inside again & taste beast coronation it was a slow summer but now i pick fine hairs from between teeth & watch you frail shake on roadside gore & glisten of damp girl & dearest that’s the thing, with men we always forget, when hunting for blood, first: flesh. Kia Groom Kia Groom grew up in Perth and is slated to graduate from the University of New Orleans in May, with an MFA in poetry. She is founding editor of Quaint Magazine, dedicated to subversive work from female-identified and non-binary writers. Her work has appeared in Going Down Swinging, Westerly and Cordite. She is online at www.kiagroom.com, and tweets at @whodreamedit. More by Kia Groom › 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 26 April 202426 April 2024 · Aotearoa / New Zealand “Ration the Queen’s veges”: Te Tiriti o Waitangi and the poetics of erasure Toyah Webb In Te Waka Hourua’s intervention, I read a refusal of this binary. By using black spray paint to erase all but a few words and phrases, the activists transform the figuratively white “backdrop” into the legible difference that stands out against the illegible redaction. Yet it is this redaction’s very illegibility that demands to be read — not as difference, but as a radical contestation of colonial world-making. 24 April 2024 · History Anzac Day and the half-remembered history of the Anzacs in Palestine Bill Abrahams and Lucy Honan Schools are deliberate targets for government-funded mystification about Australia’s role in wars. Such instances of official remembrance crowd out the realities of war, and the consequences of Australia’s role in imperialism. As teachers, we should strive to resist this, and we should introduce our students to a fuller understanding of the history of the Anzacs.
