Published in Overland Issue 232 Spring 2018 · Uncategorized Infelicity Jo Langdon Malapropos, my slow mind & mouth play cyclamen-chlamydia-Clytemnestra like a musical scale. It embarrassed you once when I only meant flowers, only then meant something of how things turn, on & against – Tender is the morning quiet, leaves gently offering their shapes open to small hands: hello. Here, gloss & flesh sudden in the glass; waves come through sails or sky; the cat turns to gull or glimpse of fox. The maiden a crone like some plain punchline. I knew this before I ever did. Image: Gabrielle Ludlow / flickr Read the rest of Overland 232 If you enjoyed this poem, buy the issue Or subscribe and receive four outstanding issues for a year Jo Langdon Jo Langdon writes fiction and poetry. She is the author of two poetry collections, Snowline (Whitmore Press, 2012) and Glass Life (Five Islands Press, 2018), and her recent fiction appears in journals including Griffith Review and Westerly. Jo lives on unceded Wadawarrung land in Geelong/Djillong. More by Jo Langdon › 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 13 September 2024 · Friday Fiction Hondachondria Tom Gurn Shortly after graduating from high school, Jack Goolbroom bought his first car, an old red Honda Civic, pocked with dents and dings more numerous than the acne scars spattering his pallid cheekbones. The red paint was sun-damaged, acid-washed to almost-pink on the roof, as if it had suffered third-degree burns in a housefire. 12 September 2024 · Reviews The jock and the farmboy, but not the sissy: sexual archetypes in Holden Sheppard’s Invisible Boys Liam Blackford Masculinity is an important and controversial topic in gay discourse, and Invisible Boys should be celebrated as an excellent document of the phenomenon as lived in regional Australia. Yet I lamented the absence of an effeminate gay character in Sheppard’s macho universe. A character for whom painted nails might not have just been “a punk thing.