Published in Overland Issue 245 Summer 2021 Poetry Je te veux house Misbah Wolf The house stretched like a big turd that’s been freshly shitted from a gigantic brick beetle and was almost 9351 km from Tibet. You were really into Buddhism, so much so you ate dahl and planned to travel back to Tibet. One end of the house was where your mother lived, and you were at the other. You worked for Brisbane City Council and had just broken up with your girlfriend, her name was a ribbon-like body of water, but it may well have been Ravine. We swallowed the dust together from Mongolian riders, and the shape of your dick close-up made me think of these same riders trampled underfoot in a marble frieze. I travelled far back into the past, with the shaft of your dick in my mouth, a puppet master pivoting before your petite mort, adopting an expression of horror as our borrowed bodies laboured in our separate solitudes. In the night a ribbon-like body of water called you and I realised from the tone that there was now a ravine between us. I zipped myself up, as you lied to my face, 4am in the middle of Boondal where you told me it all ends. You had claimed so much land already with your adventuring that I felt devastated for Tibet even more so. I imagined a giant, but kind, dung beetle coming to roll me up. I thought about your colony of settlers, civilisations dying on the bedsheets, horsemen underfoot wanting a quick death, the pockets of Tibetan green obsidian visible in my mouth, and the Yarlung Zangbo river between my legs. Read the rest of Overland 245 If you enjoyed this piece, buy the issue Or subscribe and receive Misbah Wolf Misbah Wolf is a Melbourne based poet. This new poetry forms part of her second fulllength collection of prose poems, Carapace, out through Vagabond Press. More by Misbah Wolf 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 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. 1 First published in Overland Issue 228 14 December 202225 January 2023 Reviews The moral risk of taking things too seriously: on Gareth Morgan’s When A Punk Becomes A Spunk Elese Dowden In his review of Lucy Van’s The Open, Gareth Morgan writes that Van writes 'against the impulse to ponder dutifully about the sins of the past and present.' This fucked me up for some time. What is it to ponder dutifully? But perhaps more importantly, how do we ponder in a way that's more … metal?