Published in Overland Issue 229 Summer 2017 · Uncategorized After the festival Fiona Wright I tend to judge the wildness of a night by how often you say bitches. There always used to be a car, at least, on fire. There’s that obsession with morbidity: I’m fed up with poets today. Spell megalomania. Spell acquiesce. You pretend to be all hardcore but you’re just a bruised apple. I escaped to buy toilet paper. Mine is reverse-cycle. How fucking dare he make us fucking feel this way? The abstract noun of a concrete noun. You had the mushrooms last year. I’m not sure if it’s a changing of the guard. That’s overzealous cleaning, anyway. Read the rest of Overland 229 If you enjoyed this poem, buy the issue Or subscribe and receive four outstanding issues for a year Fiona Wright Fiona Wright’s new essay collection is The World Was Whole (Giramondo, 2018). Her first book of essays Small Acts of Disappearance won the 2016 Kibble Award and the Queensland Literary Award for nonfiction, and her poetry collections are Knuckled and Domestic Interior. More by Fiona Wright › 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 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. 18 December 202418 December 2024 · Nakata Brophy Prize Dawning in the rivulet of my father’s mourning Yasmin Smith My father floats words down Toonooba each morning. They arrive to me by noon. / Nothing diminishes in his unfolding, not even the currents in midwinter June. / He narrates the sky prehistorically like a cadence cutting him into deluge.