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 First published in Overland Issue 228 24 March 202324 March 2023 War Conga line to Armageddon: the rush to get us into a war with China Ben Brooker It shouldn’t need spelling out that Australia could not win a war with China in any sense that matters, even with the backing of the US and its allies. At best, such a victory would be a Pyrrhic one. At worst, we would be so utterly humiliated as to not even know what kind of defeat had been inflicted upon us. First published in Overland Issue 228 23 March 2023 Trans rights Why gender essentialism is a white supremacist ideology Maddison Stoff The idea that these neo-Nazis are just ‘cosplayers’, rather than the local version of an international and decades-long attempt by numerous lone wolves and paramilitary groups to seize control of multiple countries, is too dangerous to seriously contemplate. The better question might be: why do so many anti-trans rights activists, who often see themselves as left-wing or self-describe as feminists, tolerate or downplay the presence of Nazis in their circles? And, just as importantly, why do neo-Nazis show up to support them?