Category: 2013

Excerpt from The Crying Sea   Awhina touched Verity’s shoulder. ‘So what’s the reason you’re here?’ Verity took her eyes off the eels a moment, looked at her. She nudged Robbie with her elbow. ‘I came to reinvent myself.’ ‘Helluva place to try to do that.’ Awhina rolled her eyes.…

Excerpt from Found   Carla’s studio was on the same street as the bookstore. Prime real estate off Spring Street. A real artist would have killed for a quarter the space. Nathan held the lease on it and Carla created illusions in it, expensive ones for magazines. It was February…

1 | 2 | 3   JOYRIDE   We’re entering softer country, he says.   I ease down in to the fluvial new – small hills, toetoe, their clumps of reddish plumes held-light.   Gone, the places we’d pitched and stiffened – hard roads of gravel, stone – coming to sheer   drop-offs…

I ate my brother   1. I ate my brother. I was always fond of him, looked up to him. He was older than me. I measured myself against him. We stood back to back. At first I only came up to his shoulder, and then I realised in that…

Vana’s life, as directed by Krzysztof Kieślowski and Ray Harryhausen   Between each step is a space of one hundred years or five seconds   I breathe in in one millennium and exhale in the next   I am walking backwards along the sand of Island Bay so I can…

1 | 2   sweatshirt   that worn blue-grey sweatshirt you wear around your waist over your shorts which are over your trousers which are tucked into your gumboots which are filled with your thick warm socks which are … but I digress.   That sweatshirt – I have never…

The Travelling Corsetière   understands the geography of breath and blow hole   she travels with sailors, nothing she does is a random act   her itinerary includes The London School for Young Ladies   a Busk and Boning manufacturer in Berlin   he offers her watch springs and feather…

Phoebe   Phoebeebeebee, Phoebalicious, Phoebershire, your name invites my tongue up on trapezes.   I watch as you fly onto the dusty family mantelpiece sparkle it up, a diamante in our midst, a stud on your nose.   Have I ever thanked you for that generosity? For your willingness to…

star language   you are now an usu one of the brightest my eyes squint to see you nanmadau o beyond the reef   you were fearless you men of the ocean usually are trusting the currents, wind, birds smell of the rain schools of fish comforted by danger home…

He kept saying luscious   New grass. His mother’s churned butter.   So many tuis with no space between. Tasty wood pigeon.   His crumpled old mouth pushing wet words out.   Again: His mother’s churned butter. New grass.       Contents | Previous Author | Next Author | About this Author