Published in Overland Issue 227 Winter 2017 · Uncategorized Beacon Corey Wakeling . A black sun lights the creases in capital’s night nightcrawlers prong. The congratulatory vanguardists can accept lyrical cinema, somehow, and get away with it. Many of the butterflies puppet impressionism too. The fingers shatter on the keyboard like icicles. It is Canada, last year. Here, dolphins have given up all hope of penetrating the distant bay. Tuna fishing an obscure south-western aesthetic policy. So, she goes on hegira to the obscurest west. Ambulances lubricate words before they mince them. Then we die, best of all. Better that than bedridden or the lawn’s pandering sprinkler, the particulates get in everywhere anyhow anyway, even a little further north of the campus. He really can see Russia from the horn, the lahar a spoil of war as the isthmus breaks off. Flotillas of people remind the accountants of the G20. We must do something urgently with our pockets, chimes the ID bracelet. Not kidding, my lint paradise is a correctional facility. The books on screams are being censored, inevitably, as we rack up debts in every other humanitarian redoubt on the ferocious globe. I am an ambulance, after all. Lights are peaking. When we leave Grey Gardens for the swamp, the two malingerers greet a distant beacon. Read the rest of Overland 227 If you enjoyed this poem, buy the issue Or subscribe and receive four outstanding issues for a year Corey Wakeling Corey Wakeling is a poet and critic living in Takarazuka, Japan. His second full-length collection of poems is The Alarming Conservatory (Giramondo, 2018). More by Corey Wakeling › 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 25 September 202325 September 2023 · The university Solidarity but only among managers, or the future of the university sector Hannah Forsyth The process continued during Covid. Jobs were being cut due to the threats posed by the pandemic, yet more scholars were being recruited. Nice people, good at their job. But why are we doing this, we kept asking. Management kept telling us we have a funding crisis (which often turned to a surplus in the end), so why are we also on a hiring spree? All along it looked like it could end badly, for all of us. First published in Overland Issue 228 15 September 2023 · Friday Features Activating the poetic spirit as friendship John Kinsella I’ve always had the aching feeling that—as a text to be shared among friends and maybe eventually ‘enemies’—the soul-body dialogue poem is a way of arguing towards spiritual certainty in the face of earthly corruption and doubt.