#16 (Shall we try again with another year?) Well, it wasn’t quite the year I imagined – I did not imagine aglobal pandemic and to be locked down at home. ‘The presentbecomes the past through increments too small to measure;suddenly something that is becomes something that was, andthe way we live is not the way…
Just before Culverden she is thinking that he doesn’t smell like love anymore, chews at the air like a tooth aching dog, is driving hunched, too fast and sickeningwith every new twist, each mindless enunciation about ‘getting there’, the car aimed resolute at the darkening hills like a nail and the rain begins to fall … What…
I’ve been coming to terms with my dis ability lately the kind you have to touch me to understand could you raise your arms please one day I’ll need a stick to walk with oneday they’ll stick enough needles in me fine tuning the…
Dedicated to the Shekera family, my brave Ukrainian friends, who conduct their lives under a hail of Russian missiles. In the years preceding the signing of Te Tiriti o Waitangi, two significant private libraries were established in Northland: the Anglican mission libraries of Kerikeri and Waimate North. I was three-and-a-half years old when my family…
Tēnā koutou katoa, Kelly Ana Morey’s sudden passing leaves takahē magazine bereft of a voice that had only just begun to shape our pages. As our Essays Editor, she brought the same qualities that defined her fiction and criticism: wit, clarity, and an uncompromising eye, to the work of stewarding others’ writing. Kelly joined takahē…
Mondays at the slaughter is hardgraft, blunt rhythmic steel on bone.Sheep hang their heads; muted nowas final sounds washed from stone by bucket-slosh and scrubbing brushsend offal into the stream. Flaxline the banks, keeping the ritoclean and safe. The butcher, tongue-trussed like poultry, ties wordstogether, saliva pools on sounds unknown, skips and drowns with the splutter, the…
the bravest thing i’ve done is change your name in my phone.the pixels fold together, press us between slick graphics like flower petals.i fold for you every time. if i laid our texts end to endthey would wrap around the moon like blood vessels.our image unspooling as i archive, missing teeth in my highlights,both black…
I craved the time when I was aloneso much so it started to crave backweathered flowers and pale pollensettling in soft hollows and broken skin I felt myself sickenI felt myself starve I felt myself rot the mind is poor companybut I was a poorer friendI stood by and watchedthe spiders make it theirs Nina Tulloch is an artist and…
Cherubs Standing on a stool, looking for herbal teabags, teabags being a prop, a means to normality, newly home, our jackets not yet removed, my intimate’s arm has appeared around my hips, I glance down, back up and search for these teabags we aren’t interested in, a box of peppermint, a bottle of blackcurrant cordial,…
he asked if he could borrow twenty bucks i said no it’s taken me twenty years to forgive myself a week after my dad died a man told me he had seen a black spectre hovering over my dad’s body it’s taken me twenty years to forgive him a month after my dad died my stepmother skipped…