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 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?