Published in Overland Issue 220 Spring 2015 · Uncategorized Autumn poem Fiona Wright I am ankle-deep in leaves and though the days burn bright the fast-falling evening has a bite now: I watch a small child pointing with blunt fingers (yours are moon-like, soft, nails longer and lovelier than mine) at the desiccating leaves along the footpath, more rubbish! she cries, more rubbish! more rubbish! and I walk home past three damp-cornered houses in which I used to live: autumn is soft and slow and spacious. I think of how I curled away from my cold feet hooked behind your knees, each finger in between yours. I still fear that there’s a hollowness within me. For a moment on the freeway the next morning, a huge crow hovers in the middle of my windscreen. They too are smarter then they need to be, and I wonder if they feel it like I feel it, wing-dark and sinking. There’s a crack in the skin of things, the dry air. Fiona Wright Fiona Wright’s new essay collection is The World Was Whole (Giramondo, 2018). Her first book of essays Small Acts of Disappearance won the 2016 Kibble Award and the Queensland Literary Award for nonfiction, and her poetry collections are Knuckled and Domestic Interior. More by Fiona Wright › 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 7 December 20237 December 2023 · Food Righteous appetites: the dilemmas of the ethical omnivore’s diet Jaimee Edwards The pastoral is our setting for the good life that puts the 'ethical' in 'ethical sausage'. The websites for small-scale farms and ethical meat butchers around the world look like brochures for retirement living. Together, the happy animals, their conscientious handlers, and ceremonial butchers form a picture of aligned values. First published in Overland Issue 228 6 December 20236 December 2023 · The environment A sitting duck? Environmentalism and working-class recreation Scott Robinson Masculinity, like hunting, cannot on its own explain the persistent tensions between environmentalism and labour. Work itself dominates the formation of our relationship with nature, so that even in play and leisure we are shaped by the physical and mental techniques applied to us in employment.