Callow Country with Indoor Bloodsuckers After Joanna Margaret Paul, Barrys Bay: Interior with Bed and Doll (1974), oil and watercolour on paper and hardboard Boy, this one’s a scorcher. The whole landscape prowls, panting, just beyond the front gate. In the maw of your mangy peninsulathe horses mow down scuffed-up grasses—browntop and cocksfoot—and rub their matted…
Big Fat Brown Bitch #23: She receives an election year visit from Christopher Luxon If you are sitting in a garage in South Auckland with your two brothers, tell your sisters to stand outside on the street, flag down flash cars and check for gang members or members of parliament. If you are sitting in…
![Industrial Camouflage [The Chaos of Hope]](https://www.takahe.org.nz/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/T108-cover-ruff-545x720.jpg)
By Claire Chamberlain Sefton Rani describes himself as a maker who uses paint as his material of choice to create contemporary Pacific art. Rani produces work that exists outside hackneyed tropes of palm tree-fringed sunsets or other touristic motifs, yet still holds strong connection with the art, history and spirituality of the southernmost of the…
1 Down South Lane, tucked away behind Oxford Street, was Jenny’s memory parlour. A remorseless stream of traffic cut through Levin down State Highway 1, beating it into place — lest it slink off when no-one was looking. Few of these travellers ever made it the short hop over to South Lane, though. As the…
“What about me seems Dutch?” I asked my husband, thinking he’d say something like ‘you’re a hard worker’ or ‘fairness is important to you’ or ‘you’re an innovator’. He thought for a moment. “Well, you’re quite tall,” he said. Another thought came to him. “And you like cheese.” * I have an indistinct memory of a…
Sometimes it seemed as if Eugene was bigger than his body. When he swept his wings past the shelves in the lounge, books fell to the floor and startled him. When he chuff-chuffed around the dining table, his foot caught on a chair leg and sent him sprawling. Sometimes, burning round the racetrack from the…
The first time she slipped into your mouth, she was passing you a plum stone to swallow. Only after she’d stripped the flesh, of course. Fingertips on your tongue, tilt your head back and swallow. You have to remember, she’d said as though she had any idea how it felt, it’s always easier to get…
Cleaning day on the 115th. From the observation window the crickets look like brown beads. Two farmers shake them from their old containers and they crawl over each other to get the grain, grown under lamps upstairs and scattered in fresh, clean boxes. I press my ear to the observation window, hoping to hear their…
It was only February, night flowers still out, that she’d last pushed into trainers that didn’t need lacing. Escape had meant running from the neighbourhood of packed-in, tucked-up houses and bowed street lights. Past the dairy, the bus stops, well past any capacity she had imagined until, hours later, the yolk of morning broke on…
[Content warning: maternal mental health] It’s been so many years, now, that sometimes Gina doesn’t fully clock what month it is, until the dream returns. It cycles back like a weather pattern, a relapse. In the dream, she has left a small baby out on a summery back lawn. The daisy-starred grass soon swoops with…