Category: Past issues

1 | 2 Stranger things The story of things that won’t be whipped, the stories which have tripped you like the baby on your doorstep. There was a stange noise, you’d opened, the dog’d strained nearly toppling the drawer in which it slept. Then the egg and the cream, and…

1 | 2 Hungry Planet Switches are turned off power refused a study of small island team players reports touch rugby and bullrush are likely. In a hurry who knows to the commuter train I fall on the thought that every dinner is the portrait of a household – my…

1 | 2 Skinless, boned   Mack comes back to me, picks me up from Rehab after the passing-out parade. He’s always there, like weather. He’s got a butcher shop. I feel like skinned meat, raw, no cover. Everything hurts: sky, tarmac, traffic. I don’t know how to negotiate television…

1 | 2 Carnifex   Cattle are stunned, slaughtered, bled and gutted then the carcass comes to me. Trade school called it exsanguination and evisceration. My Girl loves them words. She’s my tenderloin: the choicest cut, free from fat. I could cleave a carcass into its primal cuts with my…

A Hillside of Houses Leaves Steeped in weather the old wooden houses remember their bird-selves and unfold barely-jointed wings. Separating pleat from pleat weatherboard beaks gape door frames spring apart into the steeple shape of breastbones there is a woody straining then the clatter of press and lift and dozens…

1 | 2 I will now consider the creative act I have been the blank page. I have been the scrunched-up draft. I have been one more trip to the dictionary. I have been the perfect first line. I have been the winter storm. I have been the power cut.…

1 | 2 Don’t mention the war   The plot to pop the pope was perpetrated by the plutes. Right they were, they wrote, as they checked out all the routes. You bring the bomb, I’ll bring the broom. At the rate we’re going, we’re wrong about the room, but…

Finding your way in the dark I am a poet I blow smoke out the window and expect something to come back to me I have my dreams that keep me awake at night the whole world spins around in my head thinking I could drink my wine and fuck…

How fine it is to be surround by wood   What nets I need unknown inside this sea of numb As those before bore tackles, tools and gear. Against the coldest skies my silhouette, that crow That hoarse incompetence of body Scratch out its meanings at a mumbled distance As…

High Tide at Kuaotunu Respite for the river which slows to a halt and takes in the view   the thick clumps of toetoe the low hills caught in the morning sun   the whole beautiful world doubled.     Contents | About this Author