Published in Overland Issue 244 Spring 2021 Poetry A tale of two crowds Joel Ephraims 1. A group of bronze teens are partying under an unclouded day moon facing off a clouded sun in the corona pandemic. Making complicit an eroding sea cliff whose cliff strengthening is paused with witches hats. Their boom box almost whispering. They look huddled, wavering in the unspoken uncertainty that they are potentially doing something catastrophically wrong. 2. Further down the stretch of beach, water closed because of four metre great whites attracted by a rotten whale quartered into a truck only a day ago, a white family of three stand vigil. Dressed in their best scarves with chests proudly puffed. Their best Lowes coats. Even having broken feud with the unpaid hound race debts of the bristled uncle. A scrap of the carcass that made the panel on The Project or just a fin of one of the great whites that dwarf speed boats. As though the sole guests of a jubilant wake or the only three secretly ushered to attend a hidden NRL grand final with scalped tickets. Read the rest of Overland 244 If you enjoyed this piece, buy the issue Or subscribe and receive four brilliant issues for a year Joel Ephraims Joel Ephraims lives on the south-east coast of NSW. He recently had a suite of poems published in The Red Room Company’s The Disappearing. More by Joel Ephraims 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 3 March 20233 March 2023 Poetry Poetry | 2 rat poems by joanne burns joanne burns the courtyard rat squatting on an empire of pizza boxes rainsoaked piles of stewing cardboard flattened packaging from long covid's eager merchandise anything to transcend an unimagined plague rat traps line the walls like doctors' obsolete portmanteaux from a much earlier decade First published in Overland Issue 228 10 February 202322 February 2023 Poetry Poetry | Inflorescence Jo Langdon History or myth—picture tulip bulbs, unburied like onions. An onion is the likeness Hepburn—in Gardens of the world—proffers in the purr & lilt of vowel, halt of consonant; annunciation that lifts ready from memory