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 8 March 20248 March 2024 · Poetry POETRY Gareth Morgan as if a poem were a person, me, i get up in the morning / i buy coffee in a can, and wait / you have to keep calm, “don't get upset” / or it fucks everything up. the bosses who tell me this / are wise but stupid troopers. this is a political poem First published in Overland Issue 228 16 February 202419 February 2024 · Poetry Two poems from 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem Nam Le But think about the children, super cute children, mute children, with uncommonly big eyes, children with hard eyes, eyes that have seen what no child’s eyes should see, children naked as the day wearing big smiles and no smiles, preternaturally wise, with mooned-out tummies and cleft palates and cataracts, deformities and birth defects ...