Published in Overland Issue 229 Summer 2017 · Uncategorized Serenade Jessica L Wilkinson Choreography: George Balanchine Music: Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky Wide open chords raise a blue night on the orange grove of crossed lines. We angle towards metaphor, as if art travels deeper through weird parallel: arms might be branches; a waltz persuades tenderness; that fallen woman has had too many affairs. Familiar tales lead us wide of the stage, gazing at craters on Mercury’s surface. What if we could see only dancers in motion to the music’s story? The arms move first, the feet will follow, picking up speed con spirito – this is a beginner’s lesson in stage technique. Observe kaleidoscopic particles, propelled through soft diagonal and peeling off, always resisting the poet’s remark. Can we keep up without the direction of stars, pulled firm into the orbit of a muscle’s tone? We must learn quickly to absorb the sweeping strings, the skewed vocabulary, these floating experiments in numerical design. There are no secrets here: accidents prove able punctuation in a current of urgent women, each one stretching hard toward light. Read the rest of Overland 229 If you enjoyed this poem, buy the issue Or subscribe and receive four outstanding issues for a year Jessica L Wilkinson Jessica L Wilkinson’s latest book of poetry is Music Made Visible: A Biography of George Balanchine (Vagabond Press, 2019). She is the managing editor of Rabbit and an Associate Professor in Creative Writing at RMIT University. More by Jessica L Wilkinson › 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 21 February 202521 February 2025 · The university Closing the noose: a dispatch from the front line of decasualisation Matthew Taft Across the board, universities have responded to legislation aimed at rectifying this already grim situation by halting casual hiring, cutting courses, expanding class sizes, and increasing the workloads of permanent staff. This is an unintended consequence of the legislation, yes, but given the nefarious history of the university, from systemic wage theft to bad-faith bargaining, hardly a surprising one. 19 February 2025 · Disability The devaluing of disability support Áine Kelly-Costello and Jonathan Craig Over the past couple of decades, disabled people in much of the Western world have often sought, or agreed to, more individualised funding schemes in order to gain greater “choice and control” over the support we receive. But the autonomy, dignity and flexibility we were promised seems constantly under threat or out of reach, largely because of the perception that allowing us such “luxuries” is too expensive.
