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 Flash Cove, Otoliths and Dance Research. 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 4 First published in Overland Issue 228 1 February 20233 February 2023 Reviews This is where the rat bastard poem comes in Dan Hogan Rats will be found wherever nonsense presented as sense becomes the authority. Such is the cornerstone of anything organised along lines of capital: bureaucracies, workplace hierarchies, real estate, aspiration culture, institutions, ruling class artifice, governments, etcetera. Wherever there is capital there are rats—hoarding creatures, capital’s henchmen. First published in Overland Issue 228 16 December 202225 January 2023 Friday Poetry Poetry | Wombats shit candy Michael Farrell To avoid treading on a snake, I stepped on a land mine. Did this really happen, in my dream? No. Is it a fiction, then? Yes and no. The time I spend looking for socks is insignificant: lie, irony, or philosophy? Wombats shit candy. Joke – hallucination? This is in fact a truth claim. My poems: litanies of truth claims.