Category: Past issues

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…

spring   tin can chatter small thrusts of song   swing me up   on the collarbone of morning sun pours up nests dream   of spitting   startled chicks homeward and the upside down cerulean   dish of sky   is a cool-eyed mother holding watching      …

Forecast   A gale drags across the rooftops, peeling shingle, breaking tree limbs, as if the ether is taking back all it has previously given.   You had been told that this weather was coming, had been given many clues: His brow: the dark clouds at the furthest edge of…

1 | 2 | 3   The Storm   We left camp at Reefton – to the Waitahu – the single fishable river, still three days after the rain of logs and boulders had wiped out the railway bridge at Larry’s – and run the Coast to mud.   No fish in that…

1 | 2 | 3   Obi-Wan Kenobi goes to the Porirua Aquatic Centre   Not so far, far away – to be here and once again mortal, after Palpatine and Vader – all those years as just a ghost in The Force.   Old have you become in your grey togs, across…

1 | 2 | 3   The end of May   I can see the moon outside this office window –   it’s not even 4 o’clock but it’s big in the sky   half-waxed or waned chasing the sun’s narrow   slide across the wintering horizon.   There are so many…

1 | 2 | 3   Brooklyn Breech For A.D. O’Brien   I. Silent surgeon you who, cool as an eel, sleeps wrapped from crown to heel in your inverted patchwork.   Your mother, my friend, keens to you: To everything – turn, turn, turn. Beyond her thudding heart you hear the vacuum…

1 | 2 | 3   Nothing breaks   like a heart. The piano chants Bach from deep down in its crimson chest – carved like a trellis of arteries – Ave Maria, full of grace.   Ashes for coffee, the girl says, ‘No that café is not this one, that High…