Seal Beach Each of my footsteps through the kānuka scrub over the abandoned pā site feels footnoted, its passage registered;while closer to the beach a shape resembling the tongueof an old shoe dried by the sunvibrates in sympathy,as if it has a heartbeat’s soft thump;and marks show where slitherings of flippers and tailhave pushed a seal pup…
I was at Auckland Airport.It was the late ’70s.I needed (needed!) something to readso I lobbed up at the newsstand. Unhopefully. But there it was.The youngish guy who sold it mesaid dolefully—‘There aren’t a lot of laughs.’ But as I said when I wrote to them—I get enough laughs alreadystuffing a mushroom. (Not that I ever…
i write a poem instead of an entry in my diary. it is a forfeiture of one kindof interiority, the impulse, or prejudice,of narrative. it is a kind of substitute for prayer, the imputed belief that aday and its woes, decisions, whispersare a form of dialogue. utterance fadesnot into an umbral heartbeat, in this edgeland of perpetual glow…
I’m watching myself watching a scene.I’m a camera in a kitchen.A shadow peeks past the kero heater into a dining room with its wedding furniture—blocky mid-century oak. My father has the five-year-old eat stew and she vomits and he has hereat the vomit. As a camera I have no emotion. I’m looking for answersto years of gut issues. No…
Robert Christopher Weissenberg is a writer and artist who resides in Central Texas. You can find him online as @mystigraphika.
‘I baked this for you.’ He presents me with a square metal tin, on its lid a photograph of a golden retriever. A friend of a friend, he is tall with dark hair and a goatee. We are in the kitchen of his flat near the University, our mutual connection in the next room with…
2:00 – I track the moon, waxed to a yellow half. Wide tonight, impossibly large, she oranges clouds like a candle to smoke. This, I think, is how I imagined frankincense and myrrh as a child; (noun) a nebulous something, seen through spider thin fabric and warm dream-lights. I am braless under my hoodie and…
Briar no longer had the answers for everything, just as she had no idea what had driven her husband away. Maybe it had been the night sweats. That was when Francis moved to the spare room. To give you some space; you know I’ve got work in the morning.’ And she hadn’t had to work…
Mum pulls the knotted loop off its hook and locks her eye in with the wheel at the top of the pulley. Passes chord through her hands—one over the other—and lowers the drying rack. The laundry comes down with the majesty of a show girl and I stand small beside the large, wooden table beneath.…
My name is Bambi. It’s a nice name, isn’t it? Maybe you are picturing that I am an adorable, svelte white girl with a pretty hair colour and rosy cheeks and startlingly memorable methods of seduction. Well, I’m not. I’m ethnically Filipino, but I don’t want to get into it because I have too many…