Published in Overland Issue 240 Spring 2020 · Uncategorized Looms Elena Gomez are heavy to lug. think also of the weight of wool you crushed lichen & made a potion. There is bromine & it is a weakening agent the animals require care or Petter Dass & a sharp wit: a lamb’s head my large blue chest looms it blocks out the sun we scatter oral discs but there is a species at extinction bivalves cease to breed in the northern oceans ‘Swimming Inwards in Northern Norway’s Ocean’ Skyline, climate, badly Automated notions of colour Stylised & unrefined Relinquish a category, Supplement a movement Or its transformation A discovery as death Vegetable dye Spin linen Your bail in granular Beard lichen Spruce tree lichen Boil it briefly A pot of water at 80 degrees A madder root (for Hannah Ryggen) Read the rest of Overland 240 If you enjoyed this piece, buy the issue Or subscribe and receive four brilliant issues for a year Elena Gomez Elena Gomez is the author of Admit the Joyous Passion of Revolt (Puncher & Wattmann) and Body of Work (Cordite). She lives on unceded Wurundjeri country. More by Elena Gomez › 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 11 June 202612 June 2026 · Solidarity The zero-sum state: what the Royal Commission reveals on the future of Muslim life in Australia Sara Cheikh Husain The zero-sum logic that the Royal Commission’s witnesses have voiced through the IHRA definition is a colonial act of oppression. If the state succumbs to that logic, as every indication suggests it will, Muslim political solidarity with Palestine risks becoming not merely unrecognised but structurally criminalised. The full institutional protection of one community will come to be constitutively built on the misrecognition of another. 10 June 2026 · Rural Australia Left in place: how distance in Australia is political Emma Goldrick If we are to better understand inequality within Australia, we must begin with the recognition that disadvantage does not only reside in income brackets or postcodes associated with urban poverty. It is also embedded in the sheer physical scale of the nation and the political choices made about who gets connected to opportunity and who remains at the margins of it.