Published in Overland Issue 242 Autumn 2021 · Poetry / Judith Wright Poetry Prize Bidjigal double brick dreaming Brooke Scobie The smell of Jasmine Through white fibro walls Hiding Dad’s double brick Dreaming Pedestal fans wearing dust cardigans Click click click behind Mum’s door Moaning aircons in lounge room windows With frames painted shut Drown out subwoofers And fully sick burn outs Two light brown kids Sunscreen greased and Melting on summer pavement Public pool gobstoppers with Wet paper bags and Chlorine bleached hair Cicada shell brooches Nan’s voice kitchen-knife sharp Through the warm syrup of the day: Get down off the bloody tree You’ll break your bloody arm Chicken pocked skin And oven mitt hands Turn the dial on Ancient brown box tellies Spider web mesh of Shrieking screen doors Swing faster than Rottweilers down the road When they haven’t been fed Biting at your heels Salting chubby cheeks Those light brown kids with Scab adorned knees Painted with mercurochrome flowers Stringing buttons on thread Little fingers pricked with pins and Mouths full of condensed milk That’ll put proper fat on ya bones Nan’s voice butterfly hushed Through the brittle chill of the morning: Don’t tell ya bloody mum She’ll ring my bloody neck Read the rest of Overland 242 If you enjoyed this piece, buy the issue Or subscribe and receive four brilliant issues for a year Brooke Scobie Brooke Scobie is a queer Goorie woman, single mum, emerging writer, and community worker. She was born and bred on Bidjigal country in south west Sydney and now lives on Darkinjung land. Brooke is most passionate about telling stories that centre on identity, love and family using the imagery of country. More by Brooke Scobie 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 15 May 202326 May 2023 · Poetry Poetry | Two poems by Ouyang Yu Ouyang Yu You have to do it badly. If it is poetry, even more so, because there is no because. If you write like you were the best in the world, you are the worst because you pretend too hard. Too harsh, too. Why do you want to be the best? Is that because you are a lack or there is a lack in you that you feel like filling up all the time? Even when you are named the best, does that mean anything? 1 First published in Overland Issue 228 21 April 20232 May 2023 · Poetry Poetry can already be free Ender Başkan There’s a regime of logic that we can call Australia, that we can say on many fronts is also a fiction. Any poem that meets Australia within its logic, taking it at face value, will be boring and it might be competent. If you use an AI app, it will definitely be competent AND boring materially, but conceptually it’ll be amazing, in that it met evil (management speak/the invisible hand/terra nullius) with cunning, with another kind evil—amoral, not immoral.
