The poets
Every twenty-eight days, the poets posted pictures of the full moon in the group chat. ‘Wife looking horny tonight,’ they wrote. ‘So hot.’ ‘Harvest Wife, resplendent in fog.’ In life, it was true, the full moon magicked the sad city and its rumpled harbour. In life, it was huge and magnetic. In the photos, though, it was always barely visible, a round smudge above the prevailing red logo of the Westpac building.
Even though she was a decade older than most of the poets, they were sweet to her. They invited her to book launches, and to drinks afterward. ‘I read your book about the dog,’ they said. ‘I loved it.’ ‘What did you love about it?’ she asked. She had moved to the city for a university job that, after a year, turned out to be the high point of a career she had believed was only just beginning. Now, it was over and she was unemployed. ‘I loved the ending, when the dog came back to life.’
She wondered if, for the next book, she should make her prose less poetic. The dog had never come back to life.
At home, she peeled off the stinking mesh shirt she had worn out with the idea of appealing to the poets’ sensibilities, along with the jacket she had felt too embarrassed all night to remove. The poets favoured a throwback 90s goth-adjacent sexuality that was largely cerebral: corsets, visible bras, black patent spike-boots, all made to be seen and not touched. The year she’d had the university job, she’d told herself she was too busy to seek out sex. Now that she was unemployed, she told herself she was too inconsequential.
That night, she had tried telling the poets about a lake up north the locals called ‘Lake Fanta.’ Orange was the lurid colour it turned when dairy runoff killed all the fish and caused an outbreak of botulism, which then infected the birds. First it paralysed their paddling feet, and they had to use their wings to propel themselves forward in a kind of parodic butterfly stroke. Then, the paralysis moved up their necks and they couldn’t hold their heads above the water.
She trailed off. She wasn’t telling it right. A story like that, it needed more passion, or less. One of the poets—a public servant with a perfect silver-dyed fringe—stepped in to wax lyrical about their forthcoming move away, to a bigger city in a wealthier country where there were more jobs. ‘But I love it here!’ they said. ‘Everything is so ephemeral! And I’m just such a big fan of the ephemeral!’ The night ended with a series of group hugs, in which she was dutifully included.
In her cold bed, the phone pinged. One of the poets had shared a photo to the group chat. She was backed into a corner of the booth, her face round and pale and puffy, and so much smaller than in life.
Joan Fleming’s last book is Song of Less (Cordite Books, 2022), a verse novel about the limits of love, language, and individualism in the ruins of ecological collapse. She currently lives in Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington and works as a teaching fellow at Victoria University.