I’m losing touch with our air war–sharp words scratching their vapour trails across a touchy sky, distantly launched with the trajectories of all missiles, arrows, stones, the physics of anger incongruous next tothe softness of cloud. So many criss-crossing streams of spent fuel, tired antagonisms. Now, we areoften just droning. I’m losing direction, and the infrastructure of offence to thrust new…
Introductory Frame 1 My mother slings her speech bubble from the front of his Renault Dauphinto us kids in the back while we wait in the car at Kaitangata, Riverton, Balclutha, Oamaru, Milton. My mother sings her speech bubble;Meerzeedotes an dozeedotesan little lamseedivya kiddleedivy too wouldn’t youuu? Her bubble of inheritance passed back until we grew sick of hearing it.One…
To understand her, you need to understandthe strangler fig. It begins when she finds herselfnestled in the arms of a handsome man,or a kind man, or some kind of man who holdsstill long enough for her to settle. Such asmall, insignificant weight! Under his gazeshe flourishes. Soaks up all the sun he lets spill her…
I scoff, pooh-pooh at the legionsof camera-roll pictures of your children. Willy-nilly they’ve run amok—chomping sand,chomping the bit,sculpting crenellated towers(with baby teeth missing) to say: my God,this is my mother. Look at her. I have driven myself too,a motherless horsestraining at the bit. I have stood on the windlass pondasking for a cracked moonaxed through…
The Makeover A mild evening walking late to my tent, almost casually, as if this was already my life. Another good man has died. There’s nothing casual about packing what I need to walk alone into places I fear, even as I lookforward to the sublime.My first night in the tent in a friend’s garden, sheltered on soft grass—like…
The flesh of the almond is sweet; its milk nourishes and sustains, and its oil brightens my skin. No two almonds are quite alike: the folds, the veins, make it its own. My grandfather had an almond shell, hinged together, and inside, a sprung spider: a delight from the second opening. You know, your almond and my peach share a few things in common; they’re…
What would it change to know? Not the futurebut its mouthfeel. Not the scripture but its zealots,hospital bacteria flipping birds in the carotid. My mother’s father was curtailedby bypass, then infection that spiked outwardfrom his heart. After we returned him to the soil I watched his wife curl inward like an index finger,months in the…
Sometimes, walking the trackwhere the gorse thinsand the fern breathes its damp breath,I feel it rising in me— that old, strange longingfor the soft-footed onesto step out of the shadowsand choose me. To nuzzle my open hand,to look up with the moon-wide eyesof the doe, the rabbit, the wary bird,as if I were some benevolent…
Banjara by Shana Chandra. Hachette Aotearoa New Zealand (2026). RRP: $37.99. PB, 336pp. ISBN: 9781869718411. Reviewed by Neema Singh. Banjara, the debut novel by Shana Chandra, brings to the forefront the very real history of the Girmitiya, the Indian people who were brought over to Fiji to work the sugarcane fields as indentured labourers under…
Between Dreams: Resistance and Representation in Asian Aotearoa edited by Grace Gassin. Te Papa Press (2026). RRP: $50.00. PB, 288 pp. ISBN: 9781991165589. Reviewed by Brannavan Gnanalingam. In Priyamvada Gopal’s radical book, Insurgent Empire: Anticolonial Resistance and British Dissent, Gopal looked at the history of anti-colonial struggles as not simply being one of struggles from…