Published in Overland Issue 235 Winter 2019 · Uncategorized Sapphic legacy Siobhan Hodge Marble braced – you are fed on the offerings loved by women. Tender sheets, beloved breast and curving hip. Aphrodite’s call was yours to issue. You are softness, pleasure and the push. You take all that we still give. Dark eye and proud brow. Took the name and made it foreign, home and whole. To make love as the women from Lesbia used to mean a very different thing. You took that too and made crushed violets of sweet longing. I can only roll apples for a glance – we were made for each other – time apart. Maybe you would have cursed my eyes, damned my step and broken my every tooth in your open, pulping mouth as you did those girls before. Image: Thomas Kelley on Unsplash Read the rest of Overland 235 If you enjoyed this poem, buy the issue Or subscribe and receive four brilliant issues for a year Siobhan Hodge Siobhan Hodge has a PhD in English. She won the 2017 Kalang Eco-Poetry Award and 2015 Patricia Hackett Award. Her poetry and critical work has been published and translated widely. Her new chapbook, Justice for Romeo, is available through Cordite Books. More by Siobhan Hodge › 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 27 September 2024 · Poetry Because a wind blazes Dženana Vucic Because after autumn there are / other autumns, / we learn to eat the wind. / This is what we shall do / with all our anger. 25 September 2024 · Art The desire of others: on the struggle around the building of ATSIAGA in Alice Springs Kathryn Gilbey and Beth Sometimes There is an older chapter to the originating mythology of this saga that has been obscured. We write to register these ghosts in the architecture and alert a farther-afield readership to the latest wave of grassroots protest happening now.