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 writer, scholar, and translator living in Tokyo. In 2013, he was granted a PhD in English and theatre studies at the University of Melbourne. Corey has lived in Japan since 2015, currently working as an associate professor of English literature at Aoyama Gakuin University. His most recent poetry collection, Uncle of Cats, appears with Cordite in 2024. 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 25 May 2026 · The university Behind Craven’s audit Jeff Sparrow In November 2025, when antisemitism envoy Jillian Segal announced that Emeritus Professor Greg Craven would head what she called the “University Report Card Project”, the media referred to her plan as an “audit” of higher education’s response to antisemitism. It was never anything of the kind. 22 May 2026 · Friday Poetry Judas goats Caitlin Maling Because goats can climb / and cave, clamber to find cover / in the bushes of what they can’t eat / which isn’t much.