Published in Overland Issue 237 Summer 2019 · Uncategorized Tenor and vehicles Shastra Deo Fact: things are like other things. Supposition: liking tweets is like a simile. A house on fire. Like an inconsequence. My love is like a rose. A daikon radish. Birdsong like a car alarm. My love is like a transuranic element. Or a glass half full of milk five minutes from the refrigerator, suspended between palm, floor, and the condensation that coats it. Fact: some things are something else. A thought is a single -celled organism. Supposition: to speak is a rhizome. My love is a vowel sound. An assonance. A round mouth’s red. Fact: the poet tells me my bones are already ninety percent cold war detritus, which is to say the act of telling bears the fact, not the bones. Fact: a prophet is always a poet, but not the reverse. A prophet is an apocalypse. An apocalypse a sheet pulled off a rear-view mirror. A moment’s sun is days, minutes, or millirems. Accumulation a spending. My love is a spatial category. A semiotic decomposition. A childhood is a Kodak film canister, or a rawboned calf muscle in white knee socks. My love is a poet. My love is the face of a poet really which is the face of the hunter half transformed into stag or wounded dog. A doe is a laurel tree. My love is a baseball bat. My love is a wound -up clock spring, a temporal dissonance, a metaphor is conceit, my love is like my beloved is the species of dark and warmth that closes over hands in coat pockets in an air-conditioned room. Read the rest of Overland 237 If you enjoyed this piece, buy the issue Or subscribe and receive four brilliant issues for a year Shastra Deo Shastra Deo was born in Fiji, raised in Melbourne, and lives in Brisbane. Her first book, The Agonist (UQP, 2017), won the 2016 Arts Queensland Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize and the 2018 ALS Gold Medal. More by Shastra Deo › 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 18 April 202418 April 2024 · Education A Jellyfish government in NSW: public education’s privatisation-by-neglect Dan Hogan A private school that receives public money is not a private school: it is a fee-paying public school. The overfunding of private schools using public money is a symptom of a public service that has been rotted for a quarter of century by a political class with no vision beyond producing dubious, misleading statistics to deploy at the next election. 17 April 202417 April 2024 · Culture From the edge of the circle pit: growing up punk and girl in Indonesia Dina Indrasafitri Circa 1999, I sat on the floor in a poorly lit house on the outskirts of Jakarta, still in my grey-and-white high-school uniform. The members of the protest punk band Anti-Military were plotting their first album recording in the next room. Scattered around me were political pamphlets, zines and books touching on the subjects of anarchism, anti-work and anti-racism.
