Published in Overland Issue 243 Winter 2021 Poetry Backseat driving Sam Morley on the carpet at the rear of the family car juddering engine our throats to the night sky with mum green in the face from the dash light long roads thrum bodies still heads flung in stone whiplash the skirts of trees sway left then right nothing lurid in the arbour the bulk of our skulls tom-peeping at cauliflower blooms of eucalypt swelling and trailing leaf calligraphy stars clicked on and wincing at how trees flare like a hall being passed through Read the rest of Overland 243 If you enjoyed this piece, buy the issue Or subscribe and receive four brilliant issues for a year Sam Morley Sam Morley is an emerging poet living in Melbourne. His work has been published by Cordite Poetry Review, Red Room Poetry, Hunter Writer’s Centre and shortlisted in the ACU Poetry Prize 2020. More by Sam Morley 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 16 December 202225 January 2023 Poetry Poetry | Wombats shit candy Michael Farrell To avoid treading on a snake, I stepped on a land mine. Did this really happen, in my dream? No. Is it a fiction, then? Yes and no. The time I spend looking for socks is insignificant: lie, irony, or philosophy? Wombats shit candy. Joke – hallucination? This is in fact a truth claim. My poems: litanies of truth claims. 1 First published in Overland Issue 228 14 December 202225 January 2023 Reviews The moral risk of taking things too seriously: on Gareth Morgan’s When A Punk Becomes A Spunk Elese Dowden In his review of Lucy Van’s The Open, Gareth Morgan writes that Van writes 'against the impulse to ponder dutifully about the sins of the past and present.' This fucked me up for some time. What is it to ponder dutifully? But perhaps more importantly, how do we ponder in a way that's more … metal?
