Category: Past issues

1 | 2 | 3 The same bedtime story   Horses, apparently. Other animals, house-rabbits, loyal dogs. Spinning around in circles quickly. No eating wheat, not drinking milk. Stopping your gut from leaking. Beating drums, tocking xylophones. Rubbing bare skin with a firm brush. Doing what you have to do to…

1 | 2 | 3 Hunker   I like master-keys. Any easy solution to locks.   Let me in. I have creaky needs.   My needs are in a 1950s atomic-bomb shelter. After a dull searching moment, they know to go down there.   People are selfish shits and fair-weather…

1 | 2 | 3 So much white noise   I get a ‘friend request’ from someone I have not seen for fifteen years. He says Hey, can we not do the fill-in-the-blanks part? So much white noise. Can we just carry on where we left off?   Can we?…

Finding Jesus   My sister and I went looking for Jesus one day. We took a packed lunch.   Mum had told us he was the son of God and that he lived up high. I didn’t know which one of our neighbours God was. I thought maybe he was…

1 | 2 River Confessions   I first pull the zip across, gently, lift the carbon-fibre rods out, and untie. Rub the greasy wax onto the tips of my fingers, smearing the joints to seal them, squeeze the pieces together, twist and set.   The reel, unpacked, locked into the…

1 | 2 Black Mamba   I’m your Black Mamba, Juicy Puff bag-bride light. Cus. Roll it, Bro’. Good, tight and fat. Wired, wasted, ripped and lit for the night.   It’s da WINZ special Thursday kronic flight. The Sugarman sweet as da creamy kat. I’m your Black Mamba, Juicy…

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…