Published in Overland Issue 223 Winter 2016 · Uncategorized There is repetition Fiona Wright In the dream, there is repetition In the dream, I cannot make them understand In the dream, my fingertips itch, and they redden – In the dream, there is the dream of colour. In the dream, I trap a pigeon in the ceiling In the dream they tell me don’t tell me your dreams In the dream the objects move when I’m not looking In the dream, I run a bath that overfills and in the dream, it leaves a tidemark like a sock around my ankle. In the dream, I watch them watch me In the dream, I speak of solitude In the dream I do not dare hold out my hands. In the dream, I am amphibious, I see my breath fog up the window. In the dream I know I dream but cannot wake. In the dream, I hide my face within the bathroom mirror In the dream the bed sheets twist around my ankle In the dream I cannot make them understand. Read the rest of Overland 223 – If you liked this article, please subscribe or donate. 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 17 June 2026 · The university Financial power in the public university: the case of ANU Beck Pearse The deeper problem is institutional. Universities have elaborate mechanisms for scrutinising knowledge claims circulating between staff and students. But we have remarkably weak mechanisms for scrutinising the financial assumptions through which executive power is exercised. 1 15 June 202616 June 2026 · Reviews Transubstantiations: Toby Fitch’s Or Grace Roodenrys The final trick of Or is that in the end it stages something utterly universal: the search for a momentary recognition of ourselves in language, the maybe-hopeless pursuit of those “very exceptional circumstances” in which something half-truthful might be said, the unending attempt to build something that feels real with the limited resources one has. This is a very old, a very sacred enterprise. We might call it poetry.
