Published in Overland Issue 243 Winter 2021 · Poetry The coffee coffee drinks Dominic Symes ‘Fortis ut mors dilectio’ — from the Song of Solomon, as inscribed on a necklace my grandfather gave my grandmother on their engagement. love is as strong as death —this coffee is at least though when the flickering bickering of a lifetime is gathered up it is unable to fill even a single cup kept in the small heart-shaped chamber of the house you carry with you everywhere we’re as close as jeans & skin —like lint collecting one another from the airport a week apart we sit together now in the shuddering depths of night watching the staff head home exhausted from straddling time zones from being so polite joint like a bank account our money is the same money even when the interest rate is variable: where do I put it all? where does it fit this misplaced romantic intensity? the libraries are full & galleries preach a learned disinterestedness this will be an everlasting love sings the cartoon baby bird discovering its voice loving you makes me not believe in miracles but in life & death turning over like the pedals on your pushbike loudly declaring their decay & rust everything tastes sweeter in the dark that trust is earned —you learn not to ignore the symptoms but to relish instead your diagnosis: to love the love you know. Read the rest of Overland 243 If you enjoyed this piece, buy the issue Or subscribe and receive four brilliant issues for a year Dominic Symes Dominic Symes is a poet writing on Kaurna Country in Adelaide, South Australia. His poetry has featured in Australian Poetry Journal, Australian Book Review, Transnational Literature and Award Winning Australian Writing. He curates ‘NO WAVE’, a monthly poetry reading series at the Wheatsheaf Hotel in Thebarton. He was selected for Cordite/Australian Poetry's ‘Tell me like you mean it’ anthology and appeared at the Emerging Writers Festival in 2020. More by Dominic Symes 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.
