Published in Overland Issue 243 Winter 2021 · Teaser / Poetry / Kuracca Prize Kuracca Prize Runner-up | The grief tourist Yeena Kirkbright They called you nameless, but you are my many named where foreground, midground, background fold in on one another like black hole time, black time, bush time, way out back that way time we wash down from locked up wastelands, cradled in your sandy basinet lighting up for homing waters here in the in-between air of waves we are coalesced and all made by currents boulder water lathes too your feldspar thighs pillow soft, bleached and filtrating skin like hips that have never seen a baking sun. But your sandstone palms have seen every sun since heat and fuel and oxygen ignited life ants make art in water table shallows, on the underside of barking honey eaters, commence one hundred years of sculpting wombs in trunk hickory wattle skin patinas where sap bakes to ebonite and lichen crusts bees frantic your geebung, weaving wind through flax lily sacs while I walk in childhood Country, dreaming of the overhung strangeness, freshness of alpine and tropics birthing bell birds and ferns here for meeting always since the time of no time, hollowed wood winds black and breathless, the thrum of terror, rage and loss rock bed deep bubble through ancient stratum passed a land of no language, of moiety lost against hills of vitiligo as far as the eye can see, here in our meeting place time semibreves deep where karrikins terraform grief and death where silent singing hangs in air once full of microbial mischief I think about our cities, about the highways I crossed to get to here I think about the miracle of water on earth, of consciousness formed from dust, tendered by time and chaos and love and ancestors what will show in a century from now but black tarred grief authored on your liesegang and I wonder who will purchase this trauma from me when I return to trade in the land of coin and commerce. Yeena Kirkbright Yeena Kirkbright is a Wiradjuri woman living on Gadigal Land, who grew up on Country in Central West NSW. She uses poetry to document her personal journey, exploring gender, identity, place, cultural displacement, and decolonisation. More by Yeena Kirkbright 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.