Published in Overland Issue 226 Autumn 2017 Uncategorized Switch Omar Sakr my heart is a nude bulb. Or is it my cock? Both muscles are small & hard. Blink often, or at least wear protection, I repeated but you refused. Said light made all days a Pollock painting, spotted colours running each other over. You cupped the fluttering red of it made shadowed animals dance along my ribcage with your hands. I was dizzy beneath the beasts you made of me. Sometimes I let loose language that shot across our skins, erecting our hairs. Other times silence arrived in the mail, it popped out of phones, leaked from fanged sockets. I dribbled it in my sleep. I tried turning everything off, tried to find you in the dark & in the hush see your small muscles burst electric. Image: ‘City ribcage’ / Cydarianna Read the rest of Overland 226 If you enjoyed this poem, buy the issue Or subscribe and receive four outstanding issues for a year Omar Sakr Omar Sakr is the author of two acclaimed poetry collections, These Wild Houses (Cordite, 2017) and The Lost Arabs (UQP, 2019) which won the 2020 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Poetry. His debut novel, Son of Sin (2022) is out now. More by Omar Sakr 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 First published in Overland Issue 228 29 March 2023 Aboriginal Australia Standing in the dawn’s new light: truth-telling for settlers Anthony Kelly There’s a paradox about being a settler in a stolen country. No matter when we arrived, we inherited the bounty of genocidal violence. Many of us are the beneficiaries of the intergenerational wealth-building that saw English, Irish and Scottish settler families grow rich on the sheep, timber, wheat and resources provided by stolen land. We have a profound responsibility to dismantle the ‘lie-telling’ because it shores up this legacy and the systems of colonial violence that continue in our lifetimes. First published in Overland Issue 228 27 March 202328 March 2023 Culture Before ChatGPT, there was Rekognition: How Amazon’s algorithms control which books you see Claire Parnell almost fifteen years after approximately 57,000 books by and about LGBTQIA+ folks disappeared from Amazon’s search results, bestseller lists and sales ranks, the company’s algorithms are still unfairly targeting books by historically marginalised authors, including queer folks and people of colour, and controlling how readers can discover them.
