Published in Overland Issue 227 Winter 2017 · Uncategorized River of crumbs Sumudu Samarawickrama They are eating the photographs Because there is no bread The photographs proliferate Your excavated back looks suspended we are looking down on you And you are caught on the crumbs of buildings we are standing on that which stood on you The space between the crumbled parts of which you are a part exists For your ashen powdered self is Dimensional and recognisable I lifted a city off your face My little ash-boy My little dust-puppet Of concrete grey and dusted edifices Your black eyes are curious Your toes are lifelike Your black eyes are liquid Your cheeks curve like apples Your black eyes are alive As we try not to see Image: Damascus / Игорь М Read the rest of Overland 227 If you enjoyed this poem, buy the issue Or subscribe and receive four outstanding issues for a year Sumudu Samarawickrama Sumudu Samarawickrama was born in Sri Lanka though she’s never lived there. She is an emerging writer currently part of Footscray Community Arts Centre’s West Writer’s Group. More by Sumudu Samarawickrama › 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 20 December 202420 December 2024 · Reviews Slippery totalities: appendices on oil and politics in Australia and beyond Scott Robinson Kurmelovs writes at this level of confusion and contradiction for an audience whose unspoken but vaguely progressive politics he takes for granted and yet whose assumed knowledge resembles that of an outraged teenager. There should be a young adult genre of political journalism to accommodate books like this. 19 December 202419 December 2024 · Reviews Reading JH Prynne aloud: Poems 2016-2024 John Kinsella Poems 2016-2024 is a massive, vibrant and immersive collation of JH Prynne’s small press publication across this period. Some would call it a late life creative flourish, a glorious coda, but I don’t see it this way. Rather, this is an accumulation of concerns across a lifetime that have both relied on earlier form work and newly "discovered" expressions of genre that require recasting, resaying, and varying.