Two poems
Ivy League
I wish I could wear
a polo shirt without
looking stupid, or ride
in a regatta without
my fringe flying up, revealing
my premature wrinkles
because I keep my eyebrows up
even at rest. The bad taste
of rich boys makes me
sweat. Sponsors’ names
make me sweat—foundations
which seem to me dark
endless aisles
of mood lighting.
I have wandered
the days searching
for myself in car windows.
I have spent
the years looking at you
like a country house.
Lines composed less than a metre from Jack’s Coffee Lounge, Hillcrest
Three months and a cyclone have passed, with the length
of a few long, long concerts, and my coffee card
is now fully stamped. The promise of that $7 reward
sits in my heart like an old heavy jet necklace.
Here again, standing with my roller bag, looking
at the children’s-book-red of the sign, bright
like a picture of a fire truck or a balloon,
I think of all the signs I may have received
and ignored, the choices and seasons that passed,
the lovers who I did or did not write sonnets about.
Sitting in Jack’s, all the slants of life seem to come
to half-light, to cameo, like some sort of sitcom, or the dreams
I have where people DM me asking if I have the key
to it all. Like it all could be unlocked as one unlocks a door,
a locket. In German, locket means to entice. I find myself
thinking in these sort of half thoughts these days, constantly
between languages. The pre-blurred faces of my friends, not yet
flattened into memories—still bright and 3D like a movie—
are verbing in many sorts of ways, telling many secrets
in the wet outdoor / chowdery indoor of the air.
Jordan’s name is really Benjamin; I can’t believe
all of the things there are to know about any one person
and how much is still unknowable, untenable as air.
You feel all this and yet know there are musts to be done,
that you must wake up for a class where you pretend
to speak, smashing feijoas into the street as you walk there
because the whole city is dripping with uneaten fruit.
You must wake up with the delusion that the sun
hasn’t turned itself inside out, that your friends
still like you, that you won’t get hit by a car
on your morning commute, that tomorrow is a thing
that exists. I always thought that Strauss song ‘Morgen’
was about morning, but it turns out it’s about tomorrow.
I suddenly liked it like I never had before, knowing
how each tomorrow needs to be a sunrise, despite doubt,
despite probability, sans eyes and teeth and everything—
wrong poet. I said that I would write my Wordsworth poem
and it sat unattainably in the back of my mind, a sort of
sore, a pay-phone call that would never come. It sits
on my teeth—the creamy Baroque of my longing,
and the various poets’ faces I paint on top of my face
which I see every morning as I paint my face on
for real, with mica and kohl and seed oils. I guess
I believe in some sort of lineage or something like that
but I know my face was forged of convenience,
both of the marriage and the store variety. I know not
if my belief is vain, vain like a mirror selfie or like a jilted
hope, but the stupidity of belief sometimes must be its feature.
Like how in English there are no words for different types
of love, and when I say I love the waffle I also must say
I love the friend who I bought it with, as if they are the same.
But in some way maybe they are; maybe drunk girls in bathrooms
had the right idea all along, handing out love as easily
as lipgloss / vape puffs / advice not to text your ex.
I text friends who are now in different cities to me.
Who are in different bodies and minds than mine.
How I’ll know that I’ll write another poem, that I’ll sing
another song—well, I won’t really ever. Instead, I pick up
Americanos because they are the cheapest and lowest-calorie
thing on the menu, spend a few hours talking of nothing.
Carrying around that old John Ashbery like a handbag
I feel I’m always talking to an old man. After many summers
in cities that held me in the thumb of their restlessness,
the land carries me into suburbia’s dream and holds me
in its concrete pastoral. People go to the Warehouse here
all the time. Always picking up something or another.
I think I might also pick up a thing or two; a mind, the right moment,
a chance. And a hope: that nothing may seem too out of reach
or too far beyond the signs that are being sent to me.
Cadence Chung is a poet, mezzo-soprano, and composer, currently one of the resident artists at Te Pae Kōkako—The Aotearoa New Zealand Opera Studio (TANZOS). She has released three books: anomalia (Tender Press, 2022), Mythos: An Audio-Visual Anthology of Art by Young New Zealanders (ed.) (Wai-te-Ata Press, 2024), and Mad Diva (Otago University Press, 2025). She also edits Symposia Magazine and the New Zealand Poetry Society’s quarterly magazine, a fine line.