Published in Overland Issue 248 Spring 2022 · Poetry Poetry | Forest fire // Walking with dinosaurs Jocelyn Deane It begins for the same reasons: spark, air and ready material, grassless under conifer. You study a wax diorama of the soon-to-be Antarctic jungle, ornithischian dinosaurs—eating a plastic fern—named after Qantas; you’re exhuming the bones of an Airbus A330 beside the Pteranodons, angelic actinofibrils stretched overhead like cherubs/principalities a model beak, a reconstructed lack of fangs. The sky is humid with not-dinosaurs, unseasonable amounts of methane in the troposphere, parting gift of the last mass extinction. Something lumpen provides matches like a teen rebel. The Diplodocus sniff the trail of smoke, audience thinks oh shit fire is still real, even here … The creche tastes the air —The erotic tension between a name and fossilising—You may watch skin/hair almost turning scaled in heat. Kenneth Branagh narrates Thanks to their size, the closeness of prehistoric forests they can only amble, as the red approaches. Jocelyn Deane Josie/Jocelyn Suzanne is a freelance editor/programmer living in Naarm (Melbourne). Their work has appeared in various journals, including Overland, Australian Poetry, SCUM magazine and Rabbit journal. They were one the recipients for the 2020 Queensland Poetry Festival Ekphrasis prize. They are non-binary. More by Jocelyn Deane 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.
