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My East Coast Table
thick butter on soft
bread a bed
for fried pāua
guts
served with sand shark,
plumbed
from the sea
gutted & filleted,
frizzled golden
served with
snails,
pulled from rocks still
immersed in ocean boil’d
in the big pot,
toothpicks,
a jam jar
of vinegar
a necklace of eyes
sweet
kina roe slathered
on rēwana
hungry fingers
hunting juicy
fat lamb
tails
seared among red embers
lip
smacking charcoal
treats
blue fingers gather’d green
watercress cooking
with big white
doughboys &
smoked
eel
suck and lick
sticky pig
trotters served salty
with pale boiled
cabbage gifted
hot with a
feather,
a game duck stuffed
with grave
prunes
Venison.
I can still smell the fight.
pricks & scratches traces
of blood
boil’d bramble
of rosehip
syrup wine
rolling
landscape holding
my east coast
embrace
Catherine English completed the Whitireia Diploma in Creative Writing in 2014 and went on to enjoy the six-week Iowa Poetry Workshop over summer at the International Institute of Modern Letters. Her writing naturally falls into some sort of food-vat of sensory description, more vivid the hungrier she is. She endures a love affair with pomegranate salsa.