Published in Overland Issue 224 Spring 2016 · Uncategorized Gods of my youth Caitlin Maling At night we leave the colony to go to the ballet: Balanchine, mixed repertoire, Tchaikovsky. It’s American Girl Night and the girls in pigtails and gingham carry dolls in pigtails and gingham, blondes with blondes, brunettes with brunettes. On stage the corps dances the garlands, such unison, such unison, while with poise and grace back in Perth my sister slowly bleeds out the last of what would’ve been a baby and at intermission I text her. On stage the man lifts the woman above his head the girls and the dolls gasp and sigh and I hear my country roar inside me. It’s important to have control. Caitlin Maling Caitlin Maling is a WA poet whose first collection, Conversations I’ve Never Had, was published in 2015. A follow-up collection is due in 2017. More by Caitlin Maling › 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 20 December 202420 December 2024 · Reviews Slippery totalities: appendices on oil and politics in Australia and beyond Scott Robinson Kurmelovs writes at this level of confusion and contradiction for an audience whose unspoken but vaguely progressive politics he takes for granted and yet whose assumed knowledge resembles that of an outraged teenager. There should be a young adult genre of political journalism to accommodate books like this. 19 December 202419 December 2024 · Reviews Reading JH Prynne aloud: Poems 2016-2024 John Kinsella Poems 2016-2024 is a massive, vibrant and immersive collation of JH Prynne’s small press publication across this period. Some would call it a late life creative flourish, a glorious coda, but I don’t see it this way. Rather, this is an accumulation of concerns across a lifetime that have both relied on earlier form work and newly "discovered" expressions of genre that require recasting, resaying, and varying.