Five Poems - takahē

The Night of Nine Manhattans

double-parked my cocktails
marked me empress of the open bar

while bridesmaids tussled
in the firing line

yet I was borne toward the thrown bouquet
quick enough to call it mine

and when I took that posy
such a rage rose in me

to want what everyone did
and be made a woman by it

those dethorned roses
soft to the lips as your wrists

I bit hard on my victory
those blushing heads

swallowed
and kept swallowing

choking back the raptures
of secondhand romance

by the time you called after the party
I was being violently sick

your voice on speaker by the flowers
wilting on the hotel sink

white petals and half-chewed cherries
bobbing in my bowl of bitter sugar

I sobbed as you sang gently
knowing why you could not be with me

but when that bouquet
sailed across the crowd

like a puppy to a frisbee
love—

I will admit
I leapt for it

Trophy Fish

Cold sores
again
glisten
unkissable.

         My life
         with you
         is no longer
         my life.

The fish swims on
against the rapids,
hook still blazing
in its lip.

Apocalypticarnival

apocalypse of apples, cores cysted with lacy polyps, which bore
before it the apocalypse of corals, seals and salps and
algae’s toxic calypso in the pale slop of wasted colonies,
apocalypse of aloes splayed soppy in the playa rain,
a soapy mud that kept the pyre players in their place, so pray
a veiling over the age of palaces for apes, the papacy
proclaiming yea their cloying cope, pleas of orca pealing
solo through the spacey deep, palpitating sap that weeps
from all the posied petals of the copse, and what appeals
we raise against the grey apocalypse of coal, azure apocalypse
of cobalt clay, cost calculations appalling the landscape,
solar powers out of scope, our eyes closed on the future that is
always already here, portentous opals cracking in the glare

Contaminant Grace

That harbour was so beautiful in rain
the city’s sewers poured their raw hearts out to it.

I had watched kelp sashaying in the tide
and thought that surely I could move that way.

This was the idea that finally made me money
in briny nights purveying suppleness. One bad shift

at the strip club brought me to shoreline. I could have walked in
to the deep, my sparkly garter-belt weighed down with stones,

but when I was fished out with the waking day
which of my stage names would the papers say?

And where waves threw themselves on concrete mercy
a bloom of algae shimmied brilliant blue amid the breakers.

The water knew most things before I did. Of the ceaseless
spill of shit. And yes—shit yes—the bioluminescence.

Greenstone Devotional

Again I dreamed of deadheading the rose
that set its roots through your buried placenta.
At home, these would be whenua—the living land
and the first place you met your mother.
Between countries of buried blood and seeds
we kissed on worn linoleum. Lay down
on the floor of your childhood kitchen.
Singing in the wind outside,
the for sale sign.

When your mother, dying, could not speak
we sat and watched the artist threading leaves.
His thread of fallen days spooled serpentine
along the surface of the creek. The artist
bit icicles into shards, let them thaw
and freeze into new forms between his fingers—
sculptures catching the sunlight
that would unmake them.
His driftwood nests unfurled
in rising tides. He said
his medium was time.
Stone and water, blackened
bracken, wool from newborn lambs …
Red clay on calloused hands,
reaching into a pocket full of thorns.

A cross spills from your collar
falling silver as the first tear
that arrives before the rest of sorrow
opens like a hurricane sky.
Your skin on mine
claps like a windblown flag
against its pole. American percussion
while my heavy greenstone pendant
beats a new time zone between our chests.

On string, my prayers sleep
safe outside my throat.
All my oaths are stored in stones
fished from the tributaries
of past lives. Tangiwai
pounamu chimes green music
pure as glacier-water; sharp
as fishhooks for the heart.

In the hollow of a river boulder
the artist plants a pool with dandelions.
Hopeful faced turned up to the sun.
Their snapped necks
letting bitter milk into the snowmelt.

My last lover returned to me
the nephrites we once wore for loyalty.
Their cords released, jades floated
from my hands like boats of leaves
then went to rest on braided riverbeds
while I continued drifting
far downstream.

Some days I can barely speak
of the sweetly freezing rivers
that bore me. Tongue stumbling
in the Hakatere’s shallows
where once I waded, neck bent
like a heron. Agate-hunter’s eyes
cast down for clots of cold volcanic light.

Still I am a waterborne thing, caught eddying
between the temperate streamlets in your wrists
while you pull gently from my grip
as you stand to lead the choir at the service.

Your mother is gone. Where? On screen
the artist lies still for a little while
then walks away. His body remains,
the shape mapped on dry earth by rain.

I need to come from somewhere
I can hold. Once I flew over oceans
with my pockets full of stones
from home: common opal,
rhyolite, rings of petrified beech.
And jades—swept out to sea
washed up on beaches to be found
and polished by the oils of searching hands.

While their parents sing
the new cherubs are aiming
their paper planes over the pews—
stomping up and down the aisles
in brand-new light-up shoes. So sure
that they will always have a home.
Each one yet to know
the sound of breaking bones.

If it were all song and dance
I could believe. Instead I fill my mouth
with velveteens. These rose petals
and heresies. The only vow
that I know how to take
goes green green green.

Rebecca Hawkes is a painter-poet from a farm near Methven, now living in Te Whanganui-a-Tara. She is the author of the poetry collection Meat Lovers (Auckland University Press) and the chapbooks Softcore Coldsores (part of AUP New Poets 5) and Hardcore Pastorals (published in Cordite). She edits Sweet Mammalian, and holds an MFA in yearning from the University of Michigan and an MA in half-truths from the IIML. Her new chapbook HIDE, an illuminated manuscript of narrative verse, is arriving soon with ngā pukapuka pekapeka in Aotearoa, and her next full-length collection Fool’s Spring (from which these poems are drawn) is forthcoming from Yes Yes Books and AUP in 2027.