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 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.