Published in Overland Issue 245 Summer 2021 Poetry Sapiens James Kelly Quigly Much of it was impasse— we were hefty, unglamorous, carried ourselves with grace and humility to the boucherie, ached in our bluesiness, modelled self-discipline when convenient, elected botulinum but refused the triple bypass, squinted toward Sol to salute our slain in their endless pre-dawn processions. We sat in separate dim rooms and remembered shaping adobe into brown bricks; breast milk; being doused in gasoline. We kept track of each other’s amputations and yellowcake uranium, watched our birdfeeders wither, our seatbelts hold firm, our iron lungs vamp on a theme. We bade farewell to the mosaics, flipbooks, stained glass windows, printer paper magazines, notes in erasable pen scrawled on slick palms, broadsides, galley proofs, murals, graffiti, caricatures, charcoal impressions, canoes dug out of fallen cedars, five-dollar erotica, psychedelic projections, abstract expressionist dripwork, latex moulds of dragonfruit and pomegranate, papier-mâché casts of neckline and scapula and armpit, sand mandalas, nocturnes, leitmotifs, grands jetés, soliloquies, smash cuts, and dissolves. It was either worship or waiting; waiting or winnowing; we knew and did not know. Read the rest of Overland 245 If you enjoyed this piece, buy the issue Or subscribe and receive James Kelly Quigly James Kelly Quigley is the winner of the Phyllis Smart-Young Prize in Poetry. He is also a Pushcart Prize and two-time Best New Poets nominee. His manuscript Aloneness was a finalist for the 2022 Brittingham and Felix Pollak Prizes in Poetry. He lives in Brooklyn, New York. More by James Kelly Quigly 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 7 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.