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 Her first full collection, Keeper of the Ritual, was shortlisted for the 2017 Noel Rowe Poetry Award for an unpublished manuscript, and recently accepted for publication by UWA Publishing forthcoming in 2019.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 First published in Overland Issue 228 4 December 20234 December 2023 · Climate politics Where is the Australian climate movement’s solidarity with Palestine? Alex Kelly Let this be a line in the sand. Let us learn our history. Let us listen to liberation movements around the world. Conflicts for land and water will shape the decades to come. Showing up for each other and building power to demand justice is our only hope for a humane future. First published in Overland Issue 228 1 December 20231 December 2023 · History ‘We’re doing everything but treaty’: Law reform and sovereign refusal in the colonial debtscape Maria Giannacopoulos I coined the concept of the colonial debtscape while working to understand the relation between debt and sovereignty in the wake of the 2007 Global Financial crisis. Despite the referendum held in Greece in 2015 where the people voted against austerity, austerity as punishment, was imposed anyway. As this was a colonising move, that is, the imposition of an external and foreign law on local populations against their will, it was to Aboriginal scholars here that I turned to begin to put the pieces together.