Just before Culverden she is thinking that he doesn’t smell like love anymore, chews at the air like a tooth aching dog, is driving hunched, too fast and sickeningwith every new twist, each mindless enunciation about ‘getting there’, the car aimed resolute at the darkening hills like a nail and the rain begins to fall … What…
I’ve been coming to terms with my dis ability lately the kind you have to touch me to understand could you raise your arms please one day I’ll need a stick to walk with oneday they’ll stick enough needles in me fine tuning the…
Mondays at the slaughter is hardgraft, blunt rhythmic steel on bone.Sheep hang their heads; muted nowas final sounds washed from stone by bucket-slosh and scrubbing brushsend offal into the stream. Flaxline the banks, keeping the ritoclean and safe. The butcher, tongue-trussed like poultry, ties wordstogether, saliva pools on sounds unknown, skips and drowns with the splutter, the…
the bravest thing i’ve done is change your name in my phone.the pixels fold together, press us between slick graphics like flower petals.i fold for you every time. if i laid our texts end to endthey would wrap around the moon like blood vessels.our image unspooling as i archive, missing teeth in my highlights,both black…
I craved the time when I was aloneso much so it started to crave backweathered flowers and pale pollensettling in soft hollows and broken skin I felt myself sickenI felt myself starve I felt myself rot the mind is poor companybut I was a poorer friendI stood by and watchedthe spiders make it theirs Nina Tulloch is an artist and…
Cherubs Standing on a stool, looking for herbal teabags, teabags being a prop, a means to normality, newly home, our jackets not yet removed, my intimate’s arm has appeared around my hips, I glance down, back up and search for these teabags we aren’t interested in, a box of peppermint, a bottle of blackcurrant cordial,…
he asked if he could borrow twenty bucks i said no it’s taken me twenty years to forgive myself a week after my dad died a man told me he had seen a black spectre hovering over my dad’s body it’s taken me twenty years to forgive him a month after my dad died my stepmother skipped…
#26: Margaret Kev and I are leaping from the roof of the Scout Hall on Totterdown Road using Thatcher as a target. She scoots about to avoid us but on the eighth attempt I catch her in the temple with my heel. Kev’s body goes limp. He’s confused. We’re animals, he says. I suspect he’s…
For Ahuwhenua The sun rises on youand still the earth is dry each clove split by your handsand still no rain with my father’s handcrafted toolyou plunge tines into cut grass and roll and roll until your haystackstarts to tremble days and days go bythe weight of it rotting into goodness your homemade dibble spacing holesyou,…
It was always just us. And we knew it too.Behold, behind the curtain was a child.Behold, behind the statue was an old man speaking through a device. Under the bed, it was always just us.No one seriously considered it would be anyone else hiding in the shadows. Remember when you got happy,totally out of it, clean gone?That was…