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…
first quarter:there’s a poorly pruned fig tree growing off the side of our driveway.last year the tree-trimmers came knocking one too many times, and we trusted themtoo much. I worriedthe fig wouldn’t make itbut it retaliated, soaring to surpass original heightall in water shoots, as though having decidedwe don’t deserve the fruit anymorethey’re for the…
the teacher says he hasn’tdone any written work in three weeks the mother says the educational psychologist saysthat’s because the child is gifted the teacher says there are other words for itthe principal says the mother has given her child too much waterGod knows when she grows up she will burst through the swollen chestof…
in poor childhoods big macs grow on trees as high as heaven to humans who sin. whole neighbourhoods are full of fatness, not heart disease fatness but brand new baby fatness. it’sbecause we asked grandad what heaven was like and he said it was different for every human. that very afternoon the age of hash…
Taken aback by her daring disregardof social conventions about stopping distance,the cyclist laughed, refrainedfrom giving a lecture on mannersto the young woman with puffed sleeveswho stepped onto the crossingreading a book the old-fashioned waylike she’d stepped from a Jane Austen noveldetermined to make it clearshe was more interested in readingthan life itself, and nothing and…
I went to the shop to ask whether they sold Aunt Betty’s Yorkshire puddingsthat was shame enough having to tell a place with strip lighting and uniformsabout how the fat needs to be beef dripping not oil and needs to be so hotit’s smoking in the tin the oven so hot it hot glues your…
Rise in silent kettles, soft & round. Whispering within wai, stirring steam underneath pōhutukawa sky, where the boil-up billowing the slow rhythms of watercresslaces stories of tūpuna. Now fractured bysmog and lights, urban-gentry marshmallowhands reach for sweetness—froth-churneddreams sold with roasted syrup topping coffeecup lids of ivory tower minds. Dough buoys likethem rose by…
I trade in burner emails to try and fleece the advertisersthe lint trap comes off the dryer and microplastics fly unhingedthey told me the glitter was biodegradableanything is ephemeral if you wait long enoughI’m actually pretty busy worrying if I’m hot, anywaysat least some things are enduringbut each year the fucks slough off like skin…
I can live where a girl I was a sparrowmake room!appear but not for much longer, I think It was all ‘coloured glass, crushed into the skin / on her legs / and on the concrete before thatas she fell asleep / shining’ Orwas it ‘better to see a webthe world as it is and to tryshow upto arrive’? That…
I was working in my aunt’s wool shop for a season when a woman came in wanting unusual yarn for a wall hanging. Nothing I could show her tickled her fancy. Then I remembered my sister’s first wool. She had been learning to spin and several hanks of her beginner efforts were kicking around— crazy knots looping back onto themselves, then…