Published in Overland Issue 248 Spring 2022 · Poetry Poetry | Noble rot Georgia Rose Phillips At night, the outline of the lake changes, the street hunches around the park as fruit bats click past like frenzied metronomes— most nights, I’m in Montmartre; the gully of your navel grazing above me, shadows collapsing, paint unpeeling. Or, the musty barn-house in Altstadt— your shoulder blades cutting through the darkness like a shark fin, hay stacks brighter than sauternes. A global pandemic has happened since you happening. A whole other monument to life, resurrected. They say a new world war is starting, that tomorrow has never been less certain, and normal is forever-gone. Only now can I write that desire melted the snow and stopped the blizzard. Or, that when you finally left, I paced from corner to corner of this sad city, with no end in mind and watched the sun rise into the embarrassment of people fleeing the terror of those who’ve loved them. Georgia Rose Phillips Georgia Rose Phillips is a PhD Candidate and a sessional academic in the Creative Writing program at the University of New South Wales. Her debut novel, The Bearcat, is forthcoming with Picador in 2024, and she is at work on her second novel. In 2018, her creative non-fiction novella, Holocene, was runner-up for the Scribe Nonfiction Literary Prize. In 2021, her short story ‘New Balance’ was a fiction winner in the Ultimo Literary Prize. In 2022, her short story ‘Beyond the Marram Grass’ was a shortlisted finalist in the American Association of Australasian Literary Studies Prize. More by Georgia Rose Phillips 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.
