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 September 202312 September 2023 · Poetry Poetry | Games Heather Taylor-Johnson Days pinch and lately I’ve noticed every time I look in the mirror I’m squinting—maybe it’s a grimace. Without trying I’ve mastered the façade of a Besser block threatened by a mallet, by which I mean maybe the world won’t kill me but it’ll definitely hurt and I’ve got to be ready. First published in Overland Issue 228 31 August 20236 September 2023 · Poetry Verbing the apocalypse: Alison Croggon’s Rilke Josie/Jocelyn Suzanne ‘This again?’ and ‘why now? Why not years ago?’ are the two questions raised in each new translation of a non-English piece of Western Canon. There’s an understanding—of course a poetic cycle like the Duino Elegies is incomplete in English, there are endless new readings—and a simultaneous sense of wounded pride/suspicion: what was missing the last time around? What were you concealing from me? What are you concealing now?
