Category: Past issues

1 | 2 | 3 | 4   Need   Under the mat of torn-off bracken, we foraged like a lover for a hot wet hole of a heart to put our fingers in. I was on the lower flank, you were on the rise. You said, make your fingers…

1 | 2 | 3 |4   Is it dark already?   By then, boys were afraid of horses and the empty skins slung on branches, their unsaddled backs broad as spindly mountain ranges. Surely you’d just slide down both sides at once until your brain, even your last central…

1 | 2 | 3 | 4   Return   when we were old for hours each day you would look out of the window as if I were coming towards you   from the other side of the sea     piercingly slow   like a knifing light lifting the lip of haze …

1 | 2 | 3 | 4   Call to arms (dance)   Now bending    now falling now   eagerly with a    whole fruit in the mouth.  Turn bitterly and swaggering    toward sodden and    crawling becoming more   violent and grasping the    torso. Tomorrow    tomorrow  narrated    today there is a scent of…

If I loved you   If I loved you I would bake a cake with yellow icing and bring you coffee, real coffee, as you sat in your La-Z-Boy. We would discuss news of the day, quietly and calmly as befits our age, then I would teach you how to…

Excerpt from Singing Home the Whale   1. The Chronicle I was born on a night the moon drew the sea high towards her face. As the swell lifted my mother I slid into the water tail first, the cord snapping as she nudged me skywards to the icy air.…

The hole   Around the time I was reading about Holocaust survivors who lived in Wellington after the war, I found the sculpture Rudderstone* in the Botanic Gardens in Wellington. The sculpture has two faces. The one facing the path shows the Old World as shiny black mica-flecked-granite. The black granite…

By the yellow gingham chair   there’s an apple core going brown by the books beside the empty glass of red wine, sediment like blood spilled   near your empty chair where you sat last evening reading and the sun is a white line on the windowsill   so still,…

1 | 2 | 3   they read rough maps of sky   drivers step outside their cranes to get more distance from their skeletons some wear the spines of mice others chant doves spires steeples in latin to stay more alert because the curve of the earth has no…

1 | 2 | 3   Son   Son /sʌn/n .1 [ of certain origin ] who inherits an occupation or quality 2. who man-hauls the open air/accepts scientific groupings: range maps ice joints/who opens the long hours of darkness with a shadow scale: then fusses over the evaporation of fuel/who…