For Emilie Collyer the poet who is not the poet but is reading someone else’s poetry despite being a poet in their own right is bent over on the stage that is actually a staircase or perhaps a stairwell not bent over exactly but rather bending toward the light (or is the light bending toward…
Friday afternoons of my childhood are a vivid trinity;black, white, and Sister Tarcisius. On Hush Puppy cloud, her binary-hued habit floats, welcomes. Barely two octaves tall, with arms flung wide beaming, she wraps me, wholly. She greets in whisper,guides through the convent hall.All polished glory, perfect in its pureness,but for me not a note out of key. The door opens to…
in intermediate school i wrote my own creepypasta. my self-insert with a bow and arrow made of shadows was close personal friends with Slenderman, who helped her take revenge on all who had ever wronged her. in Minecraft, on my best friend’s server, i built a cobblestone tower which i’d climb at pixel sunset to shoot zombies and spiders across the grassy…
In old age my parents lived like teenagers.They stuck things on the wall with Blu Tack,collected fluffy toys and cute cat pics.Their glassware came from op shops.They hung old sheets on the curtain rails. They let the trees overgrow the deck,fed leftover meat to the birds.They had their dinner at nine pm,sat watching TV hours…
Waitati diss track I have to get out of the swampwith its converted churches and artichoke smellwashing barrel roasters and cottage gardensdepruned roses freaking in the windcommunity hot tub orgies and whisper newslettersgeodesic veggie domes and homogeneously vegan potlucks a swamp is surrounded by mountainssea lions and water rats alike born every night at the…
Central Otago Out of the hill line, out of kilter, stack, pillar tilt of a wing in stone as if hand-tooled by a playful buildernot finished yet—moves in the freeze and thaw beyond eye-range, shedding and still lifting from within the way a grief might go through its stages having to come to the core again dark varnished to the perishing…
Seal Beach Each of my footsteps through the kānuka scrub over the abandoned pā site feels footnoted, its passage registered;while closer to the beach a shape resembling the tongueof an old shoe dried by the sunvibrates in sympathy,as if it has a heartbeat’s soft thump;and marks show where slitherings of flippers and tailhave pushed a seal pup…
I was at Auckland Airport.It was the late ’70s.I needed (needed!) something to readso I lobbed up at the newsstand. Unhopefully. But there it was.The youngish guy who sold it mesaid dolefully—‘There aren’t a lot of laughs.’ But as I said when I wrote to them—I get enough laughs alreadystuffing a mushroom. (Not that I ever…
i write a poem instead of an entry in my diary. it is a forfeiture of one kindof interiority, the impulse, or prejudice,of narrative. it is a kind of substitute for prayer, the imputed belief that aday and its woes, decisions, whispersare a form of dialogue. utterance fadesnot into an umbral heartbeat, in this edgeland of perpetual glow…
I’m watching myself watching a scene.I’m a camera in a kitchen.A shadow peeks past the kero heater into a dining room with its wedding furniture—blocky mid-century oak. My father has the five-year-old eat stew and she vomits and he has hereat the vomit. As a camera I have no emotion. I’m looking for answersto years of gut issues. No…