Published in Overland Issue 232 Spring 2018 · Uncategorized Patternicity Shey Marque On a beach track at Two Rocks, a stone; its lime weighs down the sudden minute. I watch sand swarm like bees that I once saw in a market town. They sent people running into buildings for keys to lock their windows, some woman with a goose was saying just because they’re stripy doesn’t mean they are robbers. Honey bees covered the back of my shirt, tangled in my hair, me not seeing much caught in that apoidean storm. Still the sand spirals against my legs, its rough manner of being stings me into knowing again that cut grass from the old lawn mower spitting at me as it passed beside the path chalked in squares and numbers. Now the swarming grit stops mid flight a thousand little engines stalling at my feet. A specimen of limestone rock its interior carved out like a hive, the walls lined with tiny cavities, a nest abandoned, as if the sand had wings. Image: Pebbles / 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 Shey Marque Shey Marque is an emerging poet from Perth. A former medical scientist, she left her career in 2005 and completed a MA in writing in 2011. Her poetry has appeared in journals including Award Winning Australian Writing, Cordite, Meanjin, Westerly and Southerly. Aporiac, a chapbook, was published in 2016 with Finishing Line Press (USA). Her first full collection, Keeper of the Ritual, was shortlisted for the 2017 Noel Rowe Poetry Award for an unpublished manuscript, and recently accepted for publication by UWA Publishing forthcoming in 2019. More by Shey Marque › 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.
