The Gift

The day you fly to Dunedin for a writer’s residency, you google a woman you knew from Otago law school. She’s just appeared in court for a man accused of taking something from a woman, which the woman said she didn’t want to give. That could have been you, you think, defending men who choose to do what they know they shouldn’t do. Appearing in court in front of a judge. A proper judge in a proper court—and you, a lawyer in lawyer shoes. You’ve spent the last twenty-seven years of your life making poems. The poems run out of your nose, even when you aren’t looking. The poems are like small children, waiting to be born in your snot. You honk poems into handkerchiefs; you blow poems into tissues and plant them in rubbish bins. The tissues bloom like snow flowers with stamens glistening wet. Sometimes you wear a mask, because you don’t want to sneeze and find a poem has blown across the café table and landed in the mouth of a friend who, not noticing, swallows the poem with a piece of her date scone. The next day, you run into her in front of the dishwasher in the work kitchen, stacking cups into the dish rack. Her cheeks are flushed with fever and a gleam of liquid shines around her nose. She does not know it yet, but the poems are coming for her. She has not yet met these poems, but the poems have already written her name on them. She does not yet know what is inside this gift you have given her.

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Johanna Aitchison lives in the Manawatū and never writes poems anymore, because she’s too busy learning how to be a high school English teacher.