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 poet and critic living in Takarazuka, Japan. His second full-length collection of poems is The Alarming Conservatory (Giramondo, 2018). 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 First published in Overland Issue 228 27 September 2023 · Sport When the sport circus comes on Country Jenny Fraser The next huckster in the carnival of sport is the upcoming 2032 Brisbane Olympic Games. If we want aspects of it to be in line with Aboriginal protocol, we need action from across the four winds of the world. If it’s not done right we need solidarity and protest just the same. We are each other’s safety net in this theatre of sport. As a senior Aboriginal woman activist once told me, ‘we are all only as good as we negotiate’. First published in Overland Issue 228 25 September 202326 September 2023 · The university Solidarity but only among managers, or the future of the university sector Hannah Forsyth The process continued during Covid. Jobs were being cut due to the threats posed by the pandemic, yet more scholars were being recruited. Nice people, good at their job. But why are we doing this, we kept asking. Management kept telling us we have a funding crisis (which often turned to a surplus in the end), so why are we also on a hiring spree? All along it looked like it could end badly, for all of us.
