Published in Overland Issue 248 Spring 2022 · Poetry Poetry | Flag mask Paul Magee The day I took my students to hear Question Time A Minister, Peter Dutton, said inhibited for inhabited but of course he’s not in relation to Operation Overarch and seventeen of the two hundred islands between Australia and PNG that might harbour agents of the COVID disease— that port that report. Obariginal. Parliamental privilege and keeping the them out of us. And I have always believed in protecting violence against protecting against violence against women, Mister Speaker, Mister Speaker! Paul Magee Paul Magee is author of Suddenness and the Composition of Poetic Thought (Rowman & Littlefield, 2022), Stone Postcard (John Leonard Press, 2014), Cube Root of Book (John Leonard Press, 2008) and From Here to Tierra Del Fuego (University of Illinois Press, 2000). He teaches poetry at the University of Canberra. More by Paul Magee 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.
