They love lie detection tests and detention bracelets.They inflate a soft toy globe, they puff with notable lips.They discuss persecution complexes.They have devastation visited upon them.They always hark back to analogue times.They anguish about the good, the bad, the God-bothered.They make a welter of air kisses.They demand a simultaneous translation.They are drifting along a flight…
By the Sheep Gate Are these the lame, blind, infirm and withered who’ve flung off motel towelling robes, slid their complimentary slippers under the loungers? (Holy ground—they know it.) Does an angel stir the waters? And creation’s primal call: is that deep’s talk to deep I catch in every drop of utter blue babbling through the pool? Each molecule…
If my heart were lassoed by some beautiful woman whose pockets were lined with immense wealth, and she tried to drag it back to the wealthy suburb of Illinois where she was born and raised, I would grimace, resist, plead that my heart only beats in the city, defibrillated each morning in the vibrations of…
There in your kitchen, we crack brown eggs over your sink.Hushed, we redefine our childhood legends. Yoruba tales whisper about the cunning tortoise who would listen to the meeting of the birds and make a feathered shell with his own two hands. Rubbed raw and pink in Jerusalem bathwater.Or—no. Maybe not Jerusalem. Maybe Ilé-Ifẹ̀. Maybe it’s…
My Education from 1964 to I Forget Souls You can tell the rolls of dust under the bed are ghostsbecause their bodies are see-throughbut they have their own mind, their own fierce, unpredictable, grey mind.Your mind crouches inside your hard white head. Ghosts are actually souls. Ghosts, souls, dust—all the same. Your soul is a white…
There was a long haul in the middlewhere the tracks faded into dust.I was out there for some time.When I got back nothing seemed to fit.The worst part was becoming angry.I lost myself in there.At least the illusion of myself.I grew envious of thosewho possessed what seemedeasy comfort, from a distance.Like a child I grieved.I…
Kawekawe kōrero Ko tā te ngutu he whakahua kauMā ngā tini kawekawe ia te toro atu,Rongo ai, whakaaro ai Toro mai rā e ngā kāwai Kawea mai te kupu Tāmoea nei au i āu kōrero Whātero mai i ōu arero tini, — Ko ēnā iaia mōnehu Kare tīwheta mai ki au, Kōwirihia raunatia ai Me…
i. We, our family—Joe, baby, kelpie, me—live on the rain-wrestling smudges to Sydney’s west,Gundungurra and Dharug country Our house, a sweaty pram push from Gargaree,that sacred gully stamped with a mile-long loop of racing bitumen Our kelpie likes to run the loop, mark greens creeping up to light dystopian cracks,chase squawky boys circling:sulphur-crested snow flurries that drift…
It was the year of the caved-in ceiling.Water ran through everything and brought down the attic with it.Everyone was sure that the rain would have to stop one of these days,and still it sluiced down, right through the roofand the duvetsand finally into the carpetleaving a dark smell that never left and a stainso symmetrical…
whanganui, ōtepoti, whakatū,i kite tātou i a Witi,me āna kōrero,āna waiata,āna paki. whanganui, ōtepoti, whakatū,i kite tātou i a Witi,tēnei tōtara haematame tana pōtae kōhure,tana koti parāone,tāna memene. tēnei tōtara haematame mārohirohii ngā wā katoa.i mua,i muri:te kaituhi mātāreremō āke tonu atu. [English language ‘translation’ a mōteatea for Witi (Ihimaera) whanganui, dunedin, nelson.we saw…