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…
His first gift for them both a pair of bicycles. She watches while he pushes up the street: posture, forearms. A beatto recognise each other’s bright and golden eye, then they’re pedallingand off. Cycle clips at his achilles, her skirts above her knees. The city is a macadam grid. The city is a weft of…
Phone sex! Are you fucking kidding?How would we get off on sound?I’m not free to splurt your biddingAll my family are aroundGod knows where these words are headingEarth is small and mean and round I’m not free to splurt your biddingAll my family are aroundNow an old in-joke is spreadingNow another drink is downedGod knows…
with the inward facing surface of her left hand the daughter touches her eyelids often imagining her fingers as guardians the kauri trees surround the house twenty or so the mother drives the daughter to a clinic where there is a sunporch and a sundeck the daughter grows anxious about the…
Ōtarahaka trachyte passage Tamatea’s exploded ashes scarred hills forestry’s slash remains scattered broom blossoms radiate like melted butter kōhatu fallen resemble ancient dolmen tombs remarkable dykes rock slabs climbing skyward Ariana Tikao is a Kāi Tahu artist of the sound and word variety from Ōtautahi Christchurch. She was a 2023 Ursula Bethell Writer in Residence at Canterbury University, and was awarded as a New Zealand…
a summer of toxic fumes coats your ribswith a vengeance and the new year that ismerely the other side of the old year burnsits way through your skull and you stumbleinto the coffee shop that is also a chemist that isa record store up the escalator and the a/cbreeze stretches your mind to the very…
Perfume I. The rose-song Alcaeus, the Ancient Greek, held his lyre like a creature, like a cat under his fingers. He—shade-eyed,curtailed, hair in vines—is a smear of oil paintat the Metropolitan Museum. I have only everseen him on a screen. They teach you to closea bottle of turps while using it, because the smellis so strong.…