Published in Overland Issue 241 Summer 2020 · Poetry ice skater Monique Lyle She loved to look like lovers and to be dressed all in white. The hems of her trousers tolling out like great balloons and with the waist pulled tiny tight, she sprang up high into the sky like that. She stretched up her little arms and continued across the ice with the force of a smooth wind. Bending in half she saw her reflection, salt-crust and snow for lashes. She noticed big trees and tusks in the pond. She scooted across one more time letting bracelets and rings, pearls and diamantes, cuff brooch pendant and pin fall and clankle on the ice. It was a pleasure to watch her sprite back and forth bending and turning dipping and sipping rising and surmising— chasing everything that had fallen. Monique Lyle Monique Lyle is a writer and improviser. She is currently completing a PhD with the Writing and Research Centre at Western Sydney University. Recently her work has appeared in Overland, Cordite, Flash Cove, Otoliths and Mascara Literary Review. More by Monique Lyle › 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?
