Published in Overland Issue 248 Spring 2022 · Poetry Poetry | Call in sick Gareth Morgan call in sick, 6:06 … a long cold walk in the dark body tense like the animal spirits the hand’s invisible twerk wrenching at all of it power lines and lit-up cranes liven the dock i feel old as filth. images stack up sheen gulls larrikin the dawning carpark letterboxes on the waterfront put my foot in it woosh goes the water, up curr the gulls’ errata linfox, dank palms, i feel like a minicooper deranged and orange, shiny in morning meat pie dinner with peas, gravy and mash sunrise slow like a forklift, then yellow on that hill but later maybe try cycling yeah get a mission get a journey he used to jog from preston to work in the city mon–fri this morning i saw ducks, ducklings while you all were out PB’ing found a lack of citrus amongst the new builds i too felt decorative, perforable ‘decorating each alienation’ saw a little distressed weatherboard and scrapey grey walls. thin, allergic to the world. a good stupid wall cheap and lonely and effective oh yeah but yes. tired, 7:07 climbing undistressed steps, sluggish going up a myna’s safety yellow beak and feet on the nature strip rosellas on the power line kissing, sharing breakfast i buy coffee and am knocked out solemn backyard wreckage Gareth Morgan Gareth Morgan is a poet and co-director of Sick Leave. His chapbook ‘Dear Eileen,’ was published by Puncher and Wattman as part of the Slow Loris series. More by Gareth Morgan 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 15 May 202326 May 2023 · Poetry Poetry | Two poems by Ouyang Yu Ouyang Yu You have to do it badly. If it is poetry, even more so, because there is no because. If you write like you were the best in the world, you are the worst because you pretend too hard. Too harsh, too. Why do you want to be the best? Is that because you are a lack or there is a lack in you that you feel like filling up all the time? Even when you are named the best, does that mean anything? 1 First published in Overland Issue 228 21 April 20232 May 2023 · Poetry Poetry can already be free Ender Başkan There’s a regime of logic that we can call Australia, that we can say on many fronts is also a fiction. Any poem that meets Australia within its logic, taking it at face value, will be boring and it might be competent. If you use an AI app, it will definitely be competent AND boring materially, but conceptually it’ll be amazing, in that it met evil (management speak/the invisible hand/terra nullius) with cunning, with another kind evil—amoral, not immoral.