Published in Overland Issue 243 Winter 2021 Teaser / Poetry The saltpan Yasmin Smith I am grilling the gills of mackerel where their bodies line up like salt-dipped lungs. I am licking salty plum fingers under the mangrove roots of shallow reef and mud. When the coral cleanses itself the colour of coconut flesh covers the coastal strike from eye to eye, and sulphurous feet remap the home of my grandmother’s mother. Winter has come as pink and cyan sitting at borders with one another. Yellow-crested cockatoos peak perched at the top of the pine, spitting splinters of cone on our skulls and the tidal moon stays cold, at midnight. In the fire pit we cling to cockleshells and hymns, brew bitter tealeaf in liquorice coal. The after-thought of sweet potato skins unfurling beneath our fingertips. Inside the canopy where my sister sleeps under mosquito gauze, I too, look for you, where once I found the pit of a peach in the papasan shaped like a wentletrap. I return your body in August, sweet melon, pale iris tapioca, harpoon. You sleep in the vacant undertow with scalloped eyes and catfish hues. I split the skin underfoot on shucks of oyster shell, breathe in the rim of the saltpan, and wash my feet in early prayer. Read the rest of Overland 243 If you enjoyed this piece, buy the issue Or subscribe and receive four brilliant issues for a year Yasmin Smith Yasmin Smith is a poet of South Sea Islander, Kabi Kabi, and English heritage who was short-listed for the Judith Wright Poetry Prize 2020. She has worked as a black&write! editor in Meanjin. She currently works for University of Queensland Press (UQP) and lives on Turrbal and Jagera Country. More by Yasmin Smith 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 6 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 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.