Six Poems

Without incident

I gave what I got. All my yesterdays folding into one discrete sentence.
I told the wind what to do with me. I told the fields how to hold me down.
I told the dandelion to hurt me in steps, to talk me through how to be afraid.
The barnhouse said just a short sting and the horse said get up slowly.
Only the hushed gloaming could still me. I lived for it to catch my hands,
to say something soft in a scene of angles. All these walls and plasterboard.
All the holes I made to frame the purple hills and the carrion birds
who watch from the power poles, waiting me out.

Invigilator 

And I am ghost to the saddening valley. Floating above the tōtara
a-click with coupling roaches, the sweat-green grasses that funk the sky.
I twitch the lone donkey, boomerang the bird calls
up and down the field, rattle the dog’s trough. Somebody will hear me.
Maybe they will say is anybody home? and pray to a metaphysics
founded on my clumsy bushwhacking. My two left feet.
And I might be carer to the moon’s sluicing, might move stars—
osteoblasts in the blood night, slur a meteor over the farmland.
Somebody will think of me, ex negativo … will find me
in the desolation of a clearing as they hunt something else.
Something brighter. It will hold without me: stars, moon, dog, tree.
Maybe they will say why would there be anything at all? while my two left feet
find the slop of yesterday’s frictions, and the world says something
so incredible only the twitch of the donkey can transmit it,
and only an invigilator, a simple no-one, can write it down.

Doc

They want to help, but you are Sagittarius with week-old mascara.
The doctor says: I want a story. So you tell her your flooded lawnmower
is a metaphor for mid-life, that you will be a better person
with Jupiter in your circle and that olanzapine is making you gamble,
and one day you might gamble a kidney or your dog. O,
the doctor says, the shape of a pill. You say you want a story too,
something with a man in it, one with the right sort of hat
and a kidney to replace the one you’re gambling. The doctor
inks a hieroglyph on the pink pad. Egyptian? you hazard,
but the doctor says it’s just a picture of your childhood,
the one you don’t talk about, with the house with two windows,
a door and a crayon chimney. And a tree because everybody
has a tree? Yes, says the doctor. And a letterbox, because everybody
is waiting. Waiting. 

Epigenetics

Fleas programmed to limp across lifespans, fieldmice that flinch
at the sick scent of cherries. What have we done to our fathers’ fathers,
insensitive to the violence that pooled in their wishes, their blank hope?
What skin in the game is this, us two stalagmites set against a pollination of stars?
Holding something up and not knowing what it is. Captions blue-lit and empty.
I am a strobe light and you will see snatches of what it is to bend
a chance into something broken. I am woodpile deliberating between smoke
and sawdust. You tell me this is my oyster. I am spent and sicker than you know,
but hauling out Hallmark greetings predicated on bluff. What am I doing
to suffer my ancestors, to sweat dreams from their tight bodies? Relax,
this will only hurt when I say so. This will only hold you by the nape of your grief,
just another wreck to fold and open like a garden. Look. A garden
keeps you in place, the bloodshot brain of a girl beset by mountains. Who said
you would degringolade, a half-actualised tree? Who lined up the children
whose chromosomes you will never haunt? Who pegged you with hands
into the structural integrity of a ruin you couldn’t rebuff?
The fleas limp beneath a wonder they can’t hack.
The fieldmouse settles to terror. 

Assembly area

Noon—and smoke drifts over the Denny’s restaurant,
over balconies set with starlings and guano,
while we hold hands in the burning apartment,
too spent to find a stairwell and too cynical to find
Hope in a window frame. I could use exit signage
and move past the concierge, take my balllessness
and crawl the sidewalk, catching the ash of a metaphysics
crude as towers. I could use somebody to talk me down
from ground level, an offering of luck predicated
on a life of simple wants. You are blue flame.
Tell me there’s something here. How hard can it hurt?
Tell me it was worth the balloons and the paper napkins,
wedding dances and all those dreams of nakedness.
Tell me I would run towards the fire like the sort of person
I’ll never be. Like, I would re-enter the building
looking for love. Like, I would hold my breath
for three minutes to find a soulmate in an elevator shaft,
and that’s the kind of sentiment that institutes a life
of nodding at dogs and shaking hands with courier drivers.
These days, my eyes meet with exposed aggregate and gum
because I watched it from a further street. A television—
saw the tower on my first flatscreen and didn’t lift the blinds
for the spooky glow of history retelling its creation.
Because I never did hold your hand or fasten dumb luck
with words. Because I never saw the blue flame wrap its elbows
around the cladding, a hug so soft it spoke to simple wants.
I never saw the starlings rise like birds and fall like stars.

How to write a compelling fiction

It’s hard to believe in what you don’t. Watch yourself, says the word count.
Every day I try a little harder to commit to a three-part narrative arc.
The hero’s journey gaslights me into crannies. I go foetal because all heroes
need to play dead once in a while. It’s a milestone: some days
I’m faking free will and everything is me extrapolated to a milky way out.
Watch yourself, says the undo button, and I try to pray but it’s just a pop song
about women and their wolfish hopes. I want to buy a version
of us where the rumble-strip on the roadside saves us from crashing,
where we shake the gates and get in based on our literary status and good looks.
Watch yourself, says the cursor, holding its head and agonal breathing.
I want to want to hand myself over. I’m doing my best to be relatable,
to be an every-man taking you with me, through Cicones and Lotus-Eaters,
to the witness stand of a moment we couldn’t vouch for. Me too,
says the moon, and all the pulp-forests sing: watch yourself, watch yourself.
And is the narrator reliable? All we can do is hope. 

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Elizabeth Morton is a yarn-teller, poem-maker, and neuroscience enthusiast from Tāmaki Makaurau. Her three collections of poetry are Wolf (Mākaro Press, 2017), This Is Your Real Name (Otago University Press, 2020), and Naming the Beasts (Otago University Press, 2022).