Category: 2014

Why I became a librarian   ‘You see, I don’t believe that libraries should be drab places where people sit in silence, and that has been the main reason for our policy of employing wild animals as librarians.’ ‘Gorilla Librarians’ Monty Python   Magnified on the high blank wall behind…

  The foxy young man on the escalator caught my eye when I was on a desk shift on the information desk. It was Library Week and I’d been given carte blanche to project quotations in large type on the white wall that rose two storeys behind the escalator. The…

Earth/Quake   Monday, Lyttelton benign buzz-cut hills, crater rim, turquoise sea shining, our limbs jasmine stroked on white sheets sun-dried     jandal flip flop the only sound below hillside hedge, which I hacked jagged for the view; sun’s fingers lingered in McCahon dark sky   Tuesday, did not come like a…

The Walrus   I sit in a room with glass boxes and draw the spiders that live in them. I am not scared because they are dead. Normal people are not in the museum. But we are in the museum. My dad is the cleaner. I come here at night…

Exceeding Expectations   I’m not all that you hoped for at all what you dreamed a little less than expected or different it seems   I took my time to reach milestones it took some time to teach milestones I’ll probably never get a handle on speech but I know…

1 | 2 | 3 Two Car Seat Covers for Twenty Bucks   I hear the brush of faux-fur covers, the demi-gods of her saloon. I’ve done my research too. Sugar Button I say, I want you to know I’ve rolled every stone, I’ve travelled every avenue.   The time…

1 | 2 | 3 What the Sea Knows   Even though she believes the world is not an oyster, she knows it has a crust, an incredulous centre. She filters sand through her brain, the tiny organisms sucked in. She breathes smoke from the fire pit, the cabbage and…

1 | 2 | 3 Geological Time   I first touched your breast accidentally in the meteor storm the swans swimming almost nothing of them under water.   Accidentally, I sent my fingers beneath your skirt the mist rising from the lake a still autumn morning.   Like an accident…

1 | 2 Mary Shelley attends a performance of ‘Presumption, or the Fate of Frankenstein’ It is the night before her twenty-sixth birthday. She wears a plain black velvet dress cut low to reveal her shoulders, the dark colour her only concession to the outward conventions of mourning. Her father…

1 | 2 The Flaneur In one street, a gallery containing a collection of gonflables. In another, silhouettes of balloonists, aerialists, circus performers. The words the omnipotence of dream, and the disinterested play of language are written along the base of the wall in thin gold letters. Walking past the…