Published in Overland Issue Poetry in Lockdown · Poetry October monthly Adalya Nash Hussein my friend’s face is in a pile by the counter i compulsively reach out to touch it turn it over give her some privacy to observe that this is not what is usually meant by ‘covergirl’ is on the nose it’s beside the point the point is that i miss my friend the point is i see her everywhere later i decide i should buy a copy maybe one day i will want it i go back to the bookshop but she’s not there anymore no longer the current issue when bookshops return unsold magazines they usually just send back the covers proof that the innards weren’t sold i imagine friends’ and strangers’ hands tearing off my friend’s face i imagine her collected in an office in carlton that i once went to for a job interview it’s maybe a 15-minute walk from her home i had to proofread something about bees Read the rest of Poetry in Lockdown, edited by Toby Fitch and Melody Paloma If you enjoyed this special edition, subscribe and receive a year’s worth of print issues, the online magazine, special editions and discounted entry to our literary competitions Adalya Nash Hussein Adalya Nash Hussein is a writer and editor. Her work has appeared in Voiceworks, The Lifted Brow, Ibis House, Meanjin and Going Down Swinging. She has been an Emerging Writers’ Festival Melbourne Recital Centre Writer in Residence, a Wheeler Centre Hot Desk Fellow, and shortlisted for the Scribe Nonfiction Prize. She is the editor of Voiceworks and a co-editor at Liminal. More by Adalya Nash Hussein 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.
