Category: 2012

1 | 2 | 3 Mary in the colonies The hills bother me, until I notice the quarry, and Mary poking up like a tadpole totem, a white telegraph waisted in trees praying to a radiata hillside being scoured of topsoil by a yellow grader, the black mud. What kind…

1 | 2 | 3 Red Squirrel (Lesvós)   In the house you have rented the bathroom faces the valley, you open the window wide when showering, light on the hills, a daily iridescence. It is good to scan the long field of figs, the trees warped with age, the…

1 | 2 | 3 Between Tzidrá and Hídera (Lesvós) April sweats in the olive groves their deceptive flowers as camouflaged as the trunks’ true fruit grey backed basin of leaf (black of fall nets just memory) peasant feet packed in stone. Donkeys vanish in dappling shadows thin and bracketed by…

1 | 2 Excerpt from Waiata of waiting ono we forget the beds where we were smacked to life we sleep with a velvet body beneath our feet to energise our knees, and we know to fold them up rising out of the real; as we entered all spirits separated; it…

1 | 2 Polar drift We flew south, as far south as possible over virgin paper snow, time’s blank to a region where every point leads north and peering through obscurity in that eternity between Oh and Look! a three-headed dog appeared; all the snakes of his perfect tail undulated,…

the night is steel blue   the night is steel blue wind-wild, unquiet i turn my face to you there are hundreds of ways to show mercy       relinquish light the night is steel blue if i could surrender too one thread as gracefully as day pranams to…

1 | 2 The Terrace On The Terrace there are no crosses holding roses outside the Colonial Café where office girls talk of dry cleaning and the boss’s hands after his regular with the Minister, their cigarette butts clean in the drains downhill to The Reserve Bank and The Treasury…

1 | 2 SSRI withdrawal For Rebecca I wasn’t depressed eh – just a little anxious, couldn’t sleep. DOCTOR said I can ease off now, SLOWLY. So last night I was a seven-year-old Jedi child being chased by Darth Vader in an old brown Suzuki Swift. The night before, a…

A landscape of shining leaves All the way from the airport the autumn sun touches leaves. They are the dominant feature.   One leaf, one tree. Then they are everywhere. Little blazing shields, little stalwart soldiers. Morals that are so pure they blaze the sunlight back into the air  …

Salt I am a well-nourished New Zealand woman who is thoroughly immersed in waves. Infinite numbers of waves come and go   turn shine like sardines headed for the coast. I float motionless limbs extended in sapphire water like some sort of strange echinoderm.   I hold my breath my…