Category: Past issues

1 | 2 | 3 | 4 My first mini-series Some white people were trying to help some black people get civil rights. I saw them all get shot dead down a dark shingle road. In art we learnt white is the mixing colour. Even if I stay out of…

1 | 2 | 3 | 4 Alina I ache to be your indigo dress flowing over snow. Ivories from your music box, bone singing through the cold house.       Contents | About this Author

Capital Lightning (at Bar Bodega) Electric finger tips light up the Pōneke night sky, my solitude embraced – tahi, rua, toru, whā.   Bodily vessels rhythm to orange cabled chords, heavenly anchored to a Nord red, black and white.   A trinity of bass, drum and guitar pulsating feet to…

Waiting for an answer You are not the conversation whispered to a sleeping one nor the razor from the back of the cupboard you could be the stovetop before the coffee comes. Instead I hope you are the avocado ripening on my window sill. Next week ready to eat.  …

Disraeli Street   Ben Disraeli never knew he named the street I lived in, before the Empire struck out.   Draughty villas faced the front, mismatched teeth with green between; red roofs, green roofs; no one had thought yet of blue – why would they?   Trees truncated, hedges honed…

TUBABABY   Sleeping with the tuba her one small predilection its old brassy hump and battered valves   coil upon coil of intestinal tubing for that low sound her call to arms   how she loved its wide open bell as it spouted oompah like an elephant with bilge on…

Memoir II   Preparing for death is a wicker basket. Elderly women know the road.   One grandmother worked in munitions, brown bonnet, red stripe rampant. The other, a washerwoman: letters from the Front would surface, tattered.   You must take the journey, ready or not. The old, old stream…

1 | 2 Souvenir Sundays   Chickens scratch the same dirt a clock ticks off the hours. The flush of a passing car then a silence that turns my head. I settle back into green vinyl back to Sunday Times distraction. Smiling photos from WOMAD drummers, tall flags flapping a…

1 | 2 Mangaia, the oldest island in the Pacific   A friend told me her family lived on Mangaia for a year when she was young. Her mother   rode her scooter into a taro swamp chasing Stubby the pig. Taro swamps were everywhere   she said and blimmin’…

Working the Tang, Birsay These women are wrapped for the weather. The fleece of long-nosed black sheep so knitted into their skin, when their men undress them there is often a little blood.   The weather wraps them in gales of Arctic ice. They gather seaweed: tremendous heaps of tang…