Published in Overland Issue 221 Summer 2015 · Uncategorized Night air Vanessa Kirkpatrick In memory of my grandmother The full moon washes the garden in light. Bare branches of elm, a tumble of ferns, each stone on the path from my mother’s house to the door of your own. In the notes of the mopoke’s song descending again and again, I fall through night air. Think of your hands, still warm, reaching across the bed as you close your eyes. High winds shunt the ragged clouds so it seems the moon is skating backwards. I want to keep holding the hand that held my own as a child. Loss is a pure tone released from the body. A note in the darkness descending again and again. Vanessa Kirkpatrick Vanessa Kirkpatrick lives in the Blue Mountains. Her first collection, To Catch the Light (2013), won the inaugural John Knight Memorial Poetry Manuscript Prize and was commended for the 2013 Anne Elder Award. More by Vanessa Kirkpatrick › 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 13 September 2024 · Friday Fiction Hondachondria Tom Gurn Shortly after graduating from high school, Jack Goolbroom bought his first car, an old red Honda Civic, pocked with dents and dings more numerous than the acne scars spattering his pallid cheekbones. The red paint was sun-damaged, acid-washed to almost-pink on the roof, as if it had suffered third-degree burns in a housefire. 12 September 2024 · Reviews The jock and the farmboy, but not the sissy: sexual archetypes in Holden Sheppard’s Invisible Boys Liam Blackford Masculinity is an important and controversial topic in gay discourse, and Invisible Boys should be celebrated as an excellent document of the phenomenon as lived in regional Australia. Yet I lamented the absence of an effeminate gay character in Sheppard’s macho universe. A character for whom painted nails might not have just been “a punk thing.
