Published in Overland Issue 248 Spring 2022 · Poetry Poetry | War poems Janet Jiahui Wu brick poems solid poems prick poems concrete poems keep out poems rest in peace cat of edward street mossy paperbark poems bluegum carpark poems sold gold fish with pond plants poems squished poems and tied-up poems ropes and boats poems killer poems whales poems shark attack faulty fishing nets poems lick poems and dick poems pussy crisis and mardi gras poems cricket stadium poems penciled poems moving boxes poems cleaning paint off walls poems lichen poems and grassy plains poems keys to the letterbox poems jelly poems and jolly poems poems to the gods and poems to the dying old wasted love poems new sordid bad poems like poems and unlike poems massive weapons of destruction poems exploding across the page of poems after poems someone in Russia is writing poems Pushkin poems and Joseph Brodsky poems Sergei Yesenin poems and Vladimir Vysotsky poems Yevtushenko’s power station still churning out poems poems without homes poems without borders poems without nations or flags adulterated and dull beyond hope poems like poems that are no longer poems berries ripe only for crushing April poems succeed wet summer poems birth poems after Nazi poems god takes place inside a poem bodies sawn apart in a poem poem shooting another poem down every poem like a bloodstained sunflower poem after poem dies poem after poem survives poetry crawls and glides like the refugees poem after poem discarded without trial medal poems and liberty poems assassin poems and ambassador poems president poems foreign minister poems poems rising to the moon crashing into buildings setting fire to tanks poems like windows that cannot be shut poems like mouthpieces attached to asses poems braying: not another poem! languished poems tired poems fatal poems cantankerous poems poems rushing on like incessant rain poems flooding cities creeks and rivers poems that are too much for us never cease night poems day poems guitar string on a balcony poems so many cloud and trousers poems like bombshells in the sky poems cliché poems and sitcom poems silence poems zero-sum porno velvet and dust poems baking ashes into blood Janet Jiahui Wu Janet Jiahui Wu writes and makes art. She has published in various publications of literature such as Plumwood Mountain, Cordite, Rabbit, SFPJ. She lives in Sydney, is part of the LGBTQI+ community and she acknowledges and pays respect to the Gadigal people. More by Janet Jiahui Wu 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.
