Category: 2013

I get paid well for this job   I get paid well for this job of looking after art objects   that don’t breathe, don’t complain, don’t have wet eyes, or the fear of eternity   that don’t need to be consoled, and don’t need to be told an answer…

On a good day   On a good day The voices of men are a church Maybe on a bad day too Confessions slide past lips Absolved once airborne Every ear a silent priest   On a good day The souls of men are a church A calm and empty…

1 | 2   Forest   Night shrunk to a scrape of fender; pinholed to a dog bark; chuff of wet-nosed animal, scuff of fence post itch of forelock.       Contents | Previous Author | Next Author | About this Author

1 | 2   Egress   A shuffle of reflective jackets: the body wound lifted from the car’s egress.   An orange cone perimeter sets its pall on the afternoon.   Someone will be preparing dinner – thinking through ingredients   looking forward or maybe not particularly thinking.    …

Excerpt from Where the Rēkohu Bone Sings   Mere is Ngāti Mutunga and Iraia is Moriori, the son of a slave woman who was brought to the mainland by Mere’s uncle. They have left Mere’s Queen Charlotte Sound home so that they can be together, travelling to Wellington by Ferry.…

The Roller Blind Goes Duhr-ack-ack-ack   The cupboards in the kitchen have In and Out Handles with the knobby button in the middle that I have to push in before I grab their outsides and pull. Some of them are on Bad Cupboards that I am not allowed into and…

1 | 2 | 3 | 4   You are it was         Contents | Previous Author | Next Author | About this Author

Little Bear   One of my mother’s names was Ursula. Mary Ursula. Consider that open vessel, that curved vase of a vowel in her books, on her library card. Think too of the fat cylinder of her orange fountain pen, its wide-ended, gold nib that signed her name. M.U. Cullen…

1 | 2   Roosters   My bro’s are over from WA for the Tawa College reunion. Flash hire car, flash motel. We drink and we drink. It’s all good. Mining pays well. There’s work on they say. I tell them about my poetry the slow process of writing of looking…

1 | 2   My boyhood favourite Toi   The white roads of Niue are empty lead to quiet villages, each one significant, the same but different. Across the malē, the village green where on Saturday they will play kilikiki someone appears from behind a house tips water out of a…