Published in Overland Issue 239 Winter 2020 · Poetry Eulogy for Hasan Alan Fyfe My grief wakes up and phones a small town in Turkey. My grief accepts bribes in fresh fruit. My grief beats its imaginary friend. My grief calls out for food from the concrete factory. My grief owns a Citroën but won’t tell anyone. My grief sends angry letters to dead politicians. My grief scratches the four-letter word tattooed on its knuckles. My grief is an ibis scrabbling through trash looking for comparison. My grief is under the credit card in the wallet of a flea beneath its wing. My grief is the bird’s call which remembers Egypt. My grief can’t hear me or the waterfall we’re standing next to. It can’t see the cascade soaking the worn volcanic rock. But it can climb down the uneven face, careful in its cheap shoes, drink the clean water that runs over the lowest stones in its cupped hand, plunge in up to the wrist, and flex its digits feeling for angel’s teeth in the sand at the bottom. Read the rest of Overland 239 If you enjoyed this piece, buy the issue Or subscribe and receive four brilliant issues for a year Alan Fyfe Alan Fyfe is a Jewish writer originally from Mandurah, the unceded country of the Binjareb Nation, whose verse and prose can be found in Westerly, Overland, Australian Poetry Journal and Cottonmouth. He was an inaugural editor of UWA creative writing journal Trove and a prose editor for the American web journal, Unlikely Stories. His first novel, T, published by Transit Lounge in September 2022. Alan is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Western Australia, where he is writing a novel in chiastic structure. More by Alan Fyfe › 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 September 202312 September 2023 · Poetry Poetry | Games Heather Taylor-Johnson Days pinch and lately I’ve noticed every time I look in the mirror I’m squinting—maybe it’s a grimace. Without trying I’ve mastered the façade of a Besser block threatened by a mallet, by which I mean maybe the world won’t kill me but it’ll definitely hurt and I’ve got to be ready. First published in Overland Issue 228 31 August 20236 September 2023 · Poetry Verbing the apocalypse: Alison Croggon’s Rilke Josie/Jocelyn Suzanne ‘This again?’ and ‘why now? Why not years ago?’ are the two questions raised in each new translation of a non-English piece of Western Canon. There’s an understanding—of course a poetic cycle like the Duino Elegies is incomplete in English, there are endless new readings—and a simultaneous sense of wounded pride/suspicion: what was missing the last time around? What were you concealing from me? What are you concealing now?