Published in Overland Issue 226 Autumn 2017 Uncategorized Runner-up: Self-division: little song selections Lachlan Brown ‘Simplicity in our time is arrived at by an ambages.’ – (Ern Malley) Atchinson Road Cutback It’s weird to start at track two: cars glitching your streets with frame rates and small griefs, as if the weather gods and you could scan deep space for a clue to the new atmospheric sleep pattern. But Pino’s sitting deep and it’s all pocket in the rearview mirror’s sharp gaze, like a bus stop from your childhood, or the syringe your brother thought was a pen, its light still wickedly grinning off his snicked finger and the injury a micro-signature piercing skin. Flickpass Reformation You own that thick guilt, like the heat of a highway’s melted bitumen or an inbuilt conscience swirling the day from pentacle to free passage. There a hard drive search in operation but you can’t gauge anything right now. You lurch toward hope and its figured bass or those ads you accident- ally click on before the world explodes, showering content all over life’s screen. That’s track three right there (watch your back). General Revelation Ambulance Doppler approach, so tear the flyscreen door as it swings shut on First Ave where a Koel sings, recalling voicemail’s inner glow. The rabbit’s left foot nailed to the patio is another of his clipped warnings, like an ashtray spilling morning’s light. That injured prayer-chain ratio ghosts track five with auto-tuned forgiveness, and what we once believed in hangs, limp from silent lips. Now I see only dimly, for the power outage makes its business case in the hidden suburb’s palimp- sestic air, as mozzies swarm and sting me. Mindfulness Zombie Trust Exercise Omphagic colouring-in, like he’s organising a medicine cabinet in the first scene of the apocalypse. Have you heard the score yet? Have you even noticed much stuff around you, for example, that pattern radiating and unfilled? It’s enough to know that you’re in track seven, I reckon, the part where the empty sets of eyes line up and wait for someone’s intentionality to paint them immortal again, an inventive precursor to every kid who eats paper and becomes an anaphylactic saint. Out of Timers He’s jamming the scanner so that way a generational rift opens alongside Zara and poetic promotions. Sucks to miss the best aussie undertow again, but time’s moment may slow and your image will be lensed in the ocean’s geotagged photos anyway (the mentions are piling up on the beach, below). A social Medea now splices the incess- antly checked present with bits of the past: just eat everything, just own a fleet of yachts. Track seventeen is about making Ned poss- ible. Just get it to 88mph cause that’s fast enough to escape all their pesky screenshots. Read the rest of Overland 226 If you enjoyed this prizewinning poem, buy the issue Or subscribe and receive four outstanding issues for a year Lachlan Brown Lachlan grew up in south-west Sydney and teaches literature at Charles Sturt University. His poems have been shortlisted for the Newcastle Poetry Prize, highly commended for the Gwen Harwood poetry prize and longlisted for the Canberra Poetry Prize. More by Lachlan Brown 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 24 March 202324 March 2023 War Conga line to Armageddon: the rush to get us into a war with China Ben Brooker It shouldn’t need spelling out that Australia could not win a war with China in any sense that matters, even with the backing of the US and its allies. At best, such a victory would be a Pyrrhic one. At worst, we would be so utterly humiliated as to not even know what kind of defeat had been inflicted upon us. First published in Overland Issue 228 23 March 2023 Trans rights Why gender essentialism is a white supremacist ideology Maddison Stoff The idea that these neo-Nazis are just ‘cosplayers’, rather than the local version of an international and decades-long attempt by numerous lone wolves and paramilitary groups to seize control of multiple countries, is too dangerous to seriously contemplate. The better question might be: why do so many anti-trans rights activists, who often see themselves as left-wing or self-describe as feminists, tolerate or downplay the presence of Nazis in their circles? And, just as importantly, why do neo-Nazis show up to support them?