Published in Overland Issue 225 Summer 2016 · Uncategorized Egg tempera Charlotte Guest A grinding in your stomach, deeply felt, beneath the fleshy dunes your mother said would have been considered beautiful in the late 1400s. You rise and fall with the bars on your lover’s stereo. He hitches your wool skirt and ignores the hot tears that tour your face and make you think of your Renaissance sisters, stroked into existence. We girls, we bleeding, breathless girls, taking dumb solace in the fact our bodies have a long history, are politically charged, and would’ve been considered beautiful in the late 1400s. When it’s over you roll onto your stomach, inspect yourself with a period eye, and look to the site marked by tepid blots. Image: ‘Stereo’ / flickr Read the rest of Overland 225 If you liked this poem, buy the issue Or subscribe and receive four outstanding issues for a year Charlotte Guest Charlotte Guest is a writer and publishing officer at UWA Publishing. Her debut collection Soap is due out in late 2017. More by Charlotte Guest › 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 18 December 202418 December 2024 · Nakata Brophy Prize Dawning in the rivulet of my father’s mourning Yasmin Smith My father floats words down Toonooba each morning. They arrive to me by noon. / Nothing diminishes in his unfolding, not even the currents in midwinter June. / He narrates the sky prehistorically like a cadence cutting him into deluge. 16 December 202416 December 2024 · Palestine Learning to see in the dark Alison Martin Images can represent a splice of reality from the other side of the world, mirror truths about ourselves and our collective humanity we can hardly bear to face. But we can also use them to recognise the patterns of dehumanisation that have manifested throughout history, and prevent their awful conclusions in the present. To rewrite in real time our most shameful histories before they are re-made on the world stage and in our social media feeds.
