Published in Overland Issue 252 Spring 2023 · Poetry I live in my hometown (not a hundred metres from where) Emma Simington A flower called SELFHEAL, in Latin begins GROSSE, meaning course. All afternoons: cross-legged, elbows crushing, blood cut off from that point down. Sticky implements snicking vintage lithographs and silenced pistols from graphic novels. It turns out I write books by cutting them up. Unforgetting sexual molestations is done with long-lost Zooper Dooper scissors. Plum flowers from 1955 on a finger-dragged, white wall some feet from Cruelty’s yard. When I grow up, I’ll take to chalking the drive like the last time I saw her face / privates. By the time I’m ready to die SNOWBELLED BUCKTHORNED SELFHEALED you’ll be able to purchase me in markets, right by basil descended from my mother’s second crop and slim bouquets of Fife-gathered FORGET ME NOTS. Emma Simington Emma Simington is a poet living on unceded Yugambeh country. Her words can be found between the pages of The Moth Magazine and Australian Poetry. She has shortlisted for the Helen Ann Bell Poetry Bequest Award and the Thomas Shapcott Prize. Emma loves women, coffee and lemon pepper tuna. It is proud to be neurodivergent and transgender. More by Emma Simington › 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 5 November 2025 · Poetry Force posture agreement Miroslav Sandev The men of Darwin have all taken their rottweilers / out for a walk at the same time. / For our protection. Like Pine Gap: / all those big white eyes that scan / the darkening horizon. / The eyes stay woke, so that we may sleep. / Or so they say. 1 22 August 202522 August 2025 · Poetry starmight K.A Ren Wyld Ending genocide and apartheid is the story. Palestinian liberation is the story. / Aboriginal rights is the story. Truth, justice, treaties and land back is the story. / Global Indigenous peoples’ solidarity and joy is the story. Kinship is the story.
