Published in Overland Issue 248 Spring 2022 · Poetry Poetry | Platform games Alan Fyfe You feel the ancient cobblestones under your work boots, steel toe for kicking evil away. In the dripping, humid passage, you see a flicker of red and white. A mushroom speaks, Thank you, Mario, but our princess is in another castle. A week ago, you were a plumber. Your hero’s journey was only the smile a frustrated burgher offered when the pipes ran clear. Home on time to eat a warm dinner in front of the news. Weekend with the phone off for clean hands on a Sunday. It was sly chance that made you something different. Fifty paces on, the air is dense and each breath thick as custard. Sweat collects over your moustache and you almost trip on another mushroom. This one has a voice too, Thank you, Mario, but the princess has rescued herself; all princesses are now self-rescuing. The chord of a story snaps around you. This or that, blue collar labourer or knight of the realm. Level up or drop the last life you have. When you sense a thinner atmosphere, when you can breathe the way you like, you make a choice for yourself. You pull the useless coins from your pocket and drop them in a rain of chimes and brass-sparks. One hits a third mushroom, who says, Thank you, Mario, but the old world is dying and the new world is struggling to be born; now is the time of monsters. You ignore all three mushrooms, there is a light ahead. Alan Fyfe Alan Fyfe is a Jewish writer originally from Mandurah, the unceded country of the Binjareb Nation, whose verse and prose can be found in Westerly, Overland, Australian Poetry Journal and Cottonmouth. He was an inaugural editor of UWA creative writing journal Trove and a prose editor for the American web journal, Unlikely Stories. His first novel, T, published by Transit Lounge in September 2022. Alan is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Western Australia, where he is writing a novel in chiastic structure. More by Alan Fyfe 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.
