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 15 May 2026 · Friday Fiction The structure Dominic Carew We made it to the park by eight. The winter sun was filtering through the far trees in a wan, lemon trickle, the thin clouds sheets of white. The cool sky a rubbed-at blue. The grass squelched beneath our feet and elsewhere, thinned from wear, the earth stretched grassless and muddy and, in some parts, released a thick mist. 8 May 202611 May 2026 · Nakata Brophy Prize The 2026 Nakata Brophy Prize for Young Indigenous Writers (Poetry) Editorial Team Please follow this link to enter the prize. Sponsored by Trinity College at the University of Melbourne and supporters, the Nakata Brophy Prize for Young Indigenous Writers, established in 2014 […]
