Poems
Freud
I had a housewarming in the country for not many people
Who did not know each other well
I made tamarillo chutney and spinach and feta fritters
Tony brought the wild pig which was female and not gamey
And briefly we had a party because it was all so delicious
In the photos I look unhappy and tight
Because I was not in love at all
Phoebe was in psychoanalysis
And visiting from Melbourne
She told Tony we all want to fuck our parents
And Tony was a nice Chinese man from Oamaru
Who loved his mother and was twelve years older than me
And he told Phoebe she was sick or maybe fucked in the head
Their faces were inches from each other when he told her this
As I sat in the corner trying to make the fatal decision about which parent
I would sleep with if I had to
If there was a cult where we were forced to have sex with our parents
Who would I have to do the least sensitive claim to ACC for once I escaped
And then I realised Phoebe is from Nelson
Both her parents are therapists
And she just can’t help herself
I am from Dunedin
I talk about normal stuff at a party
Like what happens when we die
We were walking to the edge
We were walking to the edge
Of the word wilderness
The world released from the sun
Like a tiger off its leash but darker
So nothing mattered
Not the hissing
Or the opal following you around
Oh how far across the desert we’d have to crawl
To lie human to human
But there are ants on the bench
Come back to me
To the page
To that terrible word
Wilderness
To the oasis
And the lost things hanging there
In the shimmer
There is such a quietness
No, not there
Here
Rhinestone Kaupoi
It’s Friday night in the unit
They do the zombie shuffle
Towards the tea trolley
Instead of Bethlehem
Zita has had her hair done
Like Elizabeth the First
Queen Victoria she says
No, Elizabeth
I say, the virgin ginge
It is up to me
To keep the facts straight
After tea Zita puts the music on
And hands out chips and lemonade
I waltz with Ken to
‘Rhinestone Cowboy’
Blind, but still
He’s a lovely dancer
It also means
He pisses in corners
Or squats on the lino
During meals
The others tell him off
But they are no better
After the dance
I take him to his room
To pull his pants down
And set his pad straight
For the night
There is
A photo on the wall
Of him with his wife
Who hid his blindness until she died
They are grinning
From the formica cavern
Of their kitchen, she looks like
Quentin Blake drew her
Into South Dunedin
And him, her
Satellite set loose
Into days whiter than milk’s skin
Led by strangers
Into dancing
Like balls in a Newton’s cradle
The brief silver tennis
Of our feet
To Glen Campbell
Polishing the desk of the world
The fact is I prefer Anne Sexton
I was meant to be teaching Sylvia’s ‘Daddy’ to students so young
they are still a mystery, but instead I was arrested. The last
time I was arrested I was staying at my mother’s, in Hamilton.
It is hard to live with your mother at forty and to have Hamilton
in a poem. Perhaps I should have had more shame and just
healed myself by visiting their world-famous public gardens.
I could have sat in Hamilton and pretended I was in Italy
or Egypt. I could have been composed as a sphinx, but I
was another kind of animal. Handcuffs make you feel like an animal.
Yes, I am including you in this. Right at the bone my wrists hurt
and I needed something more than arnica: I needed my father.
I stared at the light on the cell wall and said: Paul. I would never
call my father ‘Daddy’. I will never call anyone ‘Daddy’. But one day
I will visit the Hamilton Gardens and ask God why paradise is so bleak.
The facts are I deserved it. The fact is I bit her ankle like it was a drumstick.
The fact is we are all animals. Handcuffs are not optional.
The fact is I was being wrestled to the ground.
The fact is I was frightened. The fact is I don’t care for poems
about feeling turned on by fascists or your father.
But three days after I was arrested I thought about sex
for the first time in weeks. The fact is I am not much of a Plath fan.
I don’t like her method or her madness. The fact is it is hard to have
your children in a poem. It is easier to tape them out.
Easier to turn on the poisonous gas. It is easier to ride a horse and be coy
about Shakespeare. It is easier to imagine the spirit floating above
the body better than a balloon. But I don’t have this. I have never left my body.
I don’t want to rise with Lazarus and ride side-saddle into the burning moon.
I have never left my body. But now I don’t mind if I do.
I had shaved my legs for the first time in six months. Finally,
a useful intuition, because she made me strip and wear a green
padded suit that made me look like a Ninja Turtle. In my suit
I tried to frighten all the police by telling them I was a writer…
They all snorted, so I turned to one and said I see death
in your future. What lies! I know nothing about the future,
although in 2007 I knew someone’s name before they told me.
But I did not see this coming. Even when my heru broke
in my hair and spiders started crawling from my son’s head
I could not see it was coming. I knew something was coming.
Something is always coming. I realised I had made a mistake.
I thought Stevie Nicks would help me; I thought the grand
white witch would bless my manuscript. But ‘Rhiannon’
is a Māori song. The women take you anyway and why.
E hoa
Well, civilisation as we knew it is almost over
What a relief! How futile it is to fill the fridge with
Condiments no matter how much you love the children
Forget being civilised, I miss you every day, e hoa,
And I will love you longer and tighter
Than the anaconda hugs its prey, I will love you longer
Than Dolly Parton crooning into the always
E hoa, I will love you longer than my shame
And day by day I take stock of the things that are here
While you are not, like aqua as a treaty between blue and green
And the tiled fountains gleaming in another country
To be honest I don’t give a fuck about Morocco
I care if my hot chips have enough chicken salt
Which is to say I feel for the softness of you, and I want to hold on
To the icy body you have left behind, which is to say I fall asleep to atrocities
And hanker after your shy sweet example at my door
I don’t care if chicken salt is really made from celery
Knock knock, e hoa, I just want love to outrun time
Richard could not get enough of the rotting whale
Richard could not get enough of the rotting whale,
his retching where the words were meant to be. I don’t
mean to enter through the wound but it’s less painful here
with Richard gagging on a beach in Rakiura.
Pass the salt, pass the sin, he has to go back and look again.
Touch is just like this; I mean the risk gathers and clings like polyester,
to the left and at the small of my back your palm is like a sunfish
catching light through the water, what a big plate,
and your eyes, to remember them I open wider
than an apple, no watchers, no back and forth, no waist.
If I saw you now, I would scream, or lie underneath you where
you rear up like a horse and your neck turns to marble,
but Richard is on the beach, he cannot turn me over,
it cannot keep happening like this again and again.
I try not to think about it
He told me his first girlfriend kept thinking he was cheating on her so then he thought he may
as well.
He told me the woman who wrote to him in prison then accused him of raping her. This was
after he had to walk across the student common with her hanging onto his leg.
He told me his wife slept in the barn with the cats and that’s why there is a baby he might
have had with another woman.
He told me that when the other woman he was having an affair with wouldn’t leave her
boyfriend the bosses told him he was more important and they could just get rid of her.
He told me the next woman used to bring her kids to bed and was embarrassing when she
was drunk. He told me she turned up and tried to attack him with a corkscrew. He couldn’t
have that kind of thing in front of his children so he broke her ribs getting her out of the
house. He said she was built like an Amazon and I caught the first whiff of admiration. I used
to finger the hole in the wall where she’d missed.
He told me the next girlfriend was like sleeping next to a corpse and he had to go to the
doctor because he couldn’t get an erection. The doctor told him that since he was still
wanking it wasn’t a medical problem.
He told me about the woman who had unusually long vagina lips. He told me she suffered
from anxiety. I remember finding the letter where she begged for forgiveness for not being
sufficiently grateful.
He told me the mother of the groom at the wedding brought over chutney she’d made and
confessed her husband was beating her. He had to cut her off then because she might need
something other than anal sex.
He told me I was different.
Talia Marshall (Ngāti Kuia, Rangitāne o Wairau, Ngāti Rārua, Ngāti Takihiku) is a Dunedin-based writer. She has had work published in Poetry, Landfall, Sport, North & South, Mana, Canvas, The Spinoff, Newsroom, and Pantograph Punch. In 2020 she was the inaugural Emerging Māori Writer in Residence at the IIML at Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington, and in 2021 she won the Newsroom Surrey Hotel Writers Residency. Her first book, Whaea Blue, came out with Te Herenga Waka University Press in August 2024.