Published in Overland Issue 241 Summer 2020 Poetry Lake Eucumbene Rico Craig Eucumbene has fallen below the stump our old lives lift their lips through the water surface to sip air. In the umbrage of our kitchen my mother is frying trout, there are crumbs on the bench, flesh sticking to the pan, butter smokes. She flips the fish onto a plate, cuts more butter into the pan it smooths to a quivering pool. She asks me why I’ve been so long. Adaminaby has risen from the water, my mother has told this story in bubbles since she passed. We know there are waves. When she walks from the room, I try not to follow. Outside her kitchen, there’s a crumpled church dying in the mud; the bag I packed has split open, my clothes have disappeared, five decades of silt has covered a stack of dinner plates. The parts we don’t need have been turning into clouds they open on other lakes break the surface. Rush into rivers, fall into the mouths of fish, buried in a stomach shaped by gills. We are fluid as broken promises, the water recedes before us. We walk into the mud, bare feet, graceless ankles, sliding, stones at our heels Read the rest of Overland 241 If you enjoyed this piece, buy the issue Or subscribe and receive four brilliant issues for a year Rico Craig Rico Craig is a teacher, writer, and award-winning poet whose work melds the narrative, lyrical and cinematic. Craig is published widely; his poetry collection Bone Ink was winner of the 2017 Anne Elder Award and shortlisted for the Kenneth Slessor Poetry Prize 2018. To find recent writing visit https://ricocraig.com/ More by Rico Craig 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.