Published in Overland Issue 245 Summer 2021 · Poetry Under the pink house Misbah Wolf It was pornographic science fiction inside you. You stretched yourself onto the bed and I was casually stationed as a headless fog. You undressed in the afternoon—the chimerical atmosphere where chatting women turn into chittering insects. I felt you scrape your tongue against my chin, the moment of vanishing inside you where I could leave the forms of your different faces and hear the conversation you really wanted with me. Your tits sent out whips that lassoed me to the bed, and your pussy adopted the same penetrating gaze, a cabalistic cipher where occult forces dimly sounded. Our lips strayed towards edges, idols and fiction, experience and fruition. The room was pinned with veils, resounding with lengthening shadows sweating through each syllable, each bluish charge against the inner thigh and neck, accepting that I was not the gentleman you wished me to be. In the centremost labyrinth of your labia, I unintentionally scried your future and saw echoes of tall trees in gentle winds, fingers turning pages of burning books with images of hungry baby birds that would be unlikely figures of your liberation. 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 8 March 20248 March 2024 · Poetry POETRY Gareth Morgan as if a poem were a person, me, i get up in the morning / i buy coffee in a can, and wait / you have to keep calm, “don't get upset” / or it fucks everything up. the bosses who tell me this / are wise but stupid troopers. this is a political poem First published in Overland Issue 228 16 February 202419 February 2024 · Poetry Two poems from 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem Nam Le But think about the children, super cute children, mute children, with uncommonly big eyes, children with hard eyes, eyes that have seen what no child’s eyes should see, children naked as the day wearing big smiles and no smiles, preternaturally wise, with mooned-out tummies and cleft palates and cataracts, deformities and birth defects ...