Published in Overland Issue 239 Winter 2020 Poetry Cockatoo Philip Neilsen We stop the Subaru in a town west of the Dividing Range where a café door is camouflaged by pink plastic streamers that don’t keep the flies out and the taciturn shopkeeper is wearing a Keith Urban t-shirt (Light the Fuse Tour 2013). There’s a commotion down the street, so my wife and I investigate, acting nonchalant and neutral, eating our slippery hamburgers. At the football field play has stopped because a huge mass of sulphur-cresteds has landed. It mills and flexes like white lava. Horns are honking, people are shouting, the cockatoos are shouting back, with an intensity that is winning the contest. A big guy with ink on his arms is yelling ‘shoot the bastards!’ while clutching his skinny girlfriend in front of him. She’s chewing gum, eyes fixed like lasers on the birds, but impassive, in control. ‘This fuckin’ drought’ someone mutters behind us, as if that explains it all, then the light gets brighter, hazy, all yellow like in a Peter Weir film, and you’d swear a time tunnel had opened up. We don’t want to be sucked in, so we hurry to the car thinking end days, thinking bush Armageddon. A flock of galahs calls after us sarcastically, the grey gums that surround the oval are suddenly judgemental, shrunk to two dimensions like the flattened kangaroos on the sharp road, the pink of ruptured flesh, mating rituals and Friday beer, footy trophies in the hall, salt taste of sex, algae bloom and a cracked sky, nowhere else to go. Read the rest of Overland 239 If you enjoyed this piece, buy the issue Or subscribe and receive four brilliant issues for a year Philip Neilsen Philip Neilsen’s sixth collection of poetry Wildlife of Berlin (UWAP) was shortlisted for the Kenneth Slessor prize in the New South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards 2019. More by Philip Neilsen 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 3 March 20233 March 2023 Poetry Poetry | 2 rat poems by joanne burns joanne burns the courtyard rat squatting on an empire of pizza boxes rainsoaked piles of stewing cardboard flattened packaging from long covid's eager merchandise anything to transcend an unimagined plague rat traps line the walls like doctors' obsolete portmanteaux from a much earlier decade First published in Overland Issue 228 10 February 202322 February 2023 Poetry Poetry | Inflorescence Jo Langdon History or myth—picture tulip bulbs, unburied like onions. An onion is the likeness Hepburn—in Gardens of the world—proffers in the purr & lilt of vowel, halt of consonant; annunciation that lifts ready from memory