Love Thy Neighbour

In childhood I was up the pear tree so often
& the soft bodies of butterflies bumped
against fermenting fruit flesh
& bees hummed sweetly
full of needles
& the platform smelt of rot
from yearly bumper crops
& I watched
patients of Joy, the Jungian psychologist,
trail down our shared driveway
clutching their dream journals.

Joy was a Catholic
& gave us apples at Halloween
& argued with dad about parking his old Audis
& he was forced to drunkenly detonate her letterbox
& she never found out it was him
& she still invited us over to look at her mother’s corpse
& we stamped the apples into the driveway’s tarseal with witchy heels.

Once Joy let us use her small pool for a whole summer
when she was away in Zurich pretending to have a PhD
& on her return accused me
of stealing her expensive goggles
& I didn’t care.

I had held my breath so long under tepid water trying to escape
that the chlorine dyed green the parts of me
already bleached by the ozone hole
& I didn’t care
if I was mutant or mermaid—
at least I was different.

III

It was some months after the brutal murder
of another neighbour
that the victim’s blue house over our white fence
got bulldozed.

It became a pile of splintered beams
& ghosts.

& I can still see Joy
careening down the drive cawing:
‘Free firewood!’

& she was a Jungian
& she was a Catholic
& I think it all
passed her by.

Hebe Kearney (they/them) is a poet from Ōtautahi who now calls Tāmaki Makaurau home. Their work has appeared in publications including Mantissa Poetry Review, Mayhem, Overcom, Poetry Aotearoa Yearbook, samfiftyfour, Starling, Sweet Mammalian, Symposia, Tarot, The Spinoff, and Turbine | Kapohau.