Category: 2013

Yesterday’s news   I hadn’t heard of Michael Jackson until he died. That’s when Mum bought his music and we started learning the moves, which is also when Mum broke her ankle. She downloaded on Saturday, the day after Michael Jackson died. He died on an American Thursday. Mum and…

Excerpt from Follow me   The day began with a clear blue, reaching from the foothills behind the house all the way to the high country of the south. A hint of winter in the snow-capped peaks. The sheep were already spread out across the sloping front paddocks, their noses…

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Hearing Voices   Lindsay and I went to see Gil Scott-Heron at the Brixton Academy in 1996. Gil looked like a wiry old pensioner, but in fact he must have been 47. Responding to a cry from the audience, he leant forward and cackled into the microphone ‘People are always…

1 | 2 | 3   THIS LOVELY HAND OF YOURS   The fine warmth and pulse of it – beauty gets a sounding in the oldest skin, it takes the flutterings of veins and chimes them through. The mind slows and alters – as in the grove of midnight you place a…

1 | 2   Intensive stocking   She walks along a road across a dry plain, turns off on the farm track leading to her cousin’s place. Battered races and pens crowd about in yards. A small sign carved with the family name belies their wealth. Her cousin walks toward her, driving calves: if…

1 | 2   Northern suburbs   I’m leaving the house in Tawa with two others – a kind, sharp-witted woman and a lively man, shut down for now. We’re going to the New World. I pack and repack; cash lies about, also my son’s hoody – he’s already at the place where…

Fries   It happened the night I met Wanda. I didn’t know it was going to be that easy. The night I met her I knew. There it was, plain as the white lines that run clean down the middle of the road, my life. ‘Honey, you didn’t know it…

The Zookeeper’s Shadow   Before At school the kids called Sally ‘Rabbit Girl’. She was born with a harelip, which early surgery had closed but left a scar and a twist to her upper mouth. She did not have the cleft palate too, but even so she grew to mumble…

Neighbourly   So I finally go over to Hamlin’s house. Been watching him avoid me since January after that time when I heard gunshots out back and then a pack of yipping and yowling coon dogs squirrelled up into my yard and put my cat under the deck and it…