Published in Overland Issue 219 Winter 2015 · Uncategorized Exhumed at Earth’s end Rachel J Fenton I dug out the porcelain bust of a doll, first; her cheeks the tickled-pink of rosehips, her nose, so small yet broken. Frost bit its comic end. Without arms, her hips, too, were frozen in the earth’s cervix, mid birth; unable to push herself free of it, she’d given up, suspended between the spit and swallow of orange clay. Her eyes, black dots beneath twice fired glaze, long since lost. Extinct. But her mouth, the diagram of a seal, was perfect. Rachel J Fenton Rachel J Fenton lives in Auckland. Finalist in the 2014 Dundee International Book Prize for her novel Some Things the English, she is also an award-winning graphic poet AKA Rae Joyce, and is co-editing the forthcoming anthology of women’s cartoons Three Words. She tweets as @RaeJFenton. More by Rachel J Fenton › 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 2 29 May 202629 May 2026 · Politics Zionism in real-time: insights from the Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion Nick Riemer While the Royal Commission sits, Israel continues to murder and starve Gazans as they try somehow to survive. Since the genocide is, indisputably, the necessary overarching context for a discussion of antisemitism in Australia at the present moment, it is perverse that the Commission has refused to hear from the Palestine solidarity movement. 27 May 2026 · Reviews Losing our sense of struggle: Fiona Wright’s Kill Your Boomers May Ngo The precarity described in Kill Your Boomers feels mitigated — more existential than material. It’s the precarity of being lost in your life, rather than the threat of having to sleep out on the streets.
