Published in Overland Issue 239 Winter 2020 · Poetry Ocean Alan Fyfe Remember when you wrote that poem? On the first line you levered two ideas in five words. On the second line you decided it was a holiday. By the third line you sold your ego to the universe. But the fourth line had you phoning for travel insurance. You broke on the stanza and made a love letter by gluing cardboard shapes together. You were open as a country gate to start again. The fifth line went for seventeen pages. You decided this was free verse. The sixth line took a year and you celebrated with a cake. The next two lines came out together. Paired and twisted. You worked so hard to make them not rhyme. The rhymes defied all phonics and stuck to the blank spots. You broke on the stanza and had three children and four jobs. Did it need four-line stanzas in the first place? The ninth line was your finest work. There was no answer in the tenth. The eleventh line was a naked lie. The twelfth was an infection. The thirteenth saw the welt spread. At fourteen lines it split open. Cloudy liquor-puris blotted the page. You broke on the stanza and sent a stern email to the council. You were only fourteen and so damn lonely. You wrote to the shadow behind the picture frame. You gave up on the seventeenth line. The manuscript had grown too fat to lift. All authority borrowed from immortality had expired. You broke before the stanza and cooked a familiar meal. You sat with your favourite drug, sleepy on the patio at six, watching the long night roll in off the ocean. 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 3 November 20233 November 2023 · Poetry our neighbours poem Ender Başkan our neighbours face appears above the fence – hello. our neighbours have a chat with us. our neighbours learn our names. our neighbours become our friends. our neighbours landlord thinks the market is ripe. our neighbours are told to leave. our neighbours try to buy their house at an exorbitant price to keep their kids in the school zone. our neighbours are denied. First published in Overland Issue 228 25 October 202325 October 2023 · Poetry The inhabitants Elif Sezen I died today, among many others, my grandpa died too, and our neighbours, / my best friend, the one with braided hair yes, and our sweet sweet doctors, / our motherly nurses... We heard a blast, then a whoosh of some kind, / and all gone.
