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 poet, writer and workshop facilitator. Bone Ink (UWAP), his first poetry collection, was winner of the 2017 Anne Elder Award and shortlisted for the Kenneth Slessor Poetry Prize 2018. His recent collections Our Tongues Are Songs (2021) and Nekhau (2022) are published by Recent Work Press. 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 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?