Published in Overland Issue 233 Summer 2018 · Uncategorized Reserve Corey Wakeling From where we stood, careening quiet. The knives of shepherds slit the lambs. Later, the huge apparatus. When. When but before us, another district militarised in boredom, another hotplate oiled for serfdom; handles on everything near. City, your embrace is untold, and you are no Westminster Bridge. After all, it is still a twenty-first century. Still paper and violence. One poppy in the sidewalk mud adoring everybody. The lunar scar makes him reluctant to smile, especially during glacial melt. Wow – put a barrier between me and flare. Port Island, destination and warm home, discloses the ghosts of ferry dead in dither. The snow spangles with each touch. Sanctimony of the Reserve Bank announces its amazed press conference. Bank’s warning repeats last quarter’s: ‘the insistent voice cuts the long grass’. Can radiation help. Can Canberra. Image: Christopher A Dominic / flickr Read the rest of Overland 233 If you enjoyed this poem, buy the issue Or subscribe and receive four outstanding issues for a year Corey Wakeling Corey Wakeling is a writer, scholar, and translator living in Tokyo. In 2013, he was granted a PhD in English and theatre studies at the University of Melbourne. Corey has lived in Japan since 2015, currently working as an associate professor of English literature at Aoyama Gakuin University. His most recent poetry collection, Uncle of Cats, appears with Cordite in 2024. More by Corey Wakeling › 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 17 January 202517 January 2025 · rape culture Neil Gaiman and the political economy of rape Emmy Rakete The interactions between Gaiman, Palmer, Pavlovich, and the couple’s young child are all outlined in Shapiro’s article. There is, though, another figure in the narrative whom the article does not name. Auckland city itself is a silent participant in the abuse that Pavlovich suffered. Auckland is not just the place where these things happen to have occurred: this is a story about Auckland. 20 December 202420 December 2024 · Reviews Slippery totalities: appendices on oil and politics in Australia and beyond Scott Robinson Kurmelovs writes at this level of confusion and contradiction for an audience whose unspoken but vaguely progressive politics he takes for granted and yet whose assumed knowledge resembles that of an outraged teenager. There should be a young adult genre of political journalism to accommodate books like this.
