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Catherine English

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My East Coast Table

 

thick butter on soft

bread a bed

for fried pāua

guts

served with sand shark,

plumbed

from the sea

gutted & filleted,

frizzled golden

served with

snails,

pulled from rocks still

immersed in ocean boil’d

in the big pot,

toothpicks,

a jam jar

of vinegar

 

a necklace of eyes

 

sweet

kina roe slathered

on rēwana

hungry fingers

hunting juicy

fat lamb

tails

seared among red embers

lip

smacking charcoal

treats

blue fingers gather’d green

watercress cooking

with big white

doughboys &

smoked

eel

suck and lick

sticky pig

trotters served salty

with pale boiled

cabbage gifted

hot with a

feather,

a game duck stuffed

with grave

prunes

 

Venison.

I can still smell the fight.

 

pricks & scratches traces

of blood

boil’d bramble

of rosehip

syrup wine

rolling

landscape holding

my east coast

embrace

 
 
 
 
 
Catherine English completed the Whitireia Diploma in Creative Writing in 2014 and went on to enjoy the six-week Iowa Poetry Workshop over summer at the International Institute of Modern Letters. Her writing naturally falls into some sort of food-vat of sensory description, more vivid the hungrier she is. She endures a love affair with pomegranate salsa.

 

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