The grief of being sick for so long that I forgot how to be gentle sits in my guts like a stone (tomorrow we will buy groceries together and everything will be alright)

The clatter of skateboarders down at the memorial.

We are in the long grass
watching each other watch the city
silvering into dusk. Overhead, birds
are making their way home. A siren
rolls away around the basin and there is
a bee on your hand and it loves you
like a flower, soft
on the junction between jacket and flesh. It is

summer again and I am finally
well enough to love you,
you in your underwear half nude
in the kitchen,
you
in pale dawn light.

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Niamh Hollis-Locke lives in Pōneke. In 2023 she was shortlisted for the Ginkgo Prize Best Poem of UK Landscape Award, and she was the 2023–24 guest editor of Minarets (Compound Press). Niamh holds a master’s in creative writing specialising in ecofiction.