The sun is setting behind the mountains and pours its golden light everywhere. Whole Indonesia unfolds before my eyes. Rice fields, forests and rivers, banana trees, houses, mud ponds. Wide rivers and narrow ones, waterfalls, huge plains, roads carved into mountains, children riding bicycles, bamboo trees, late farmers coming back from work, two men sitting next to their bikes watching the sunset, group of youngsters cheering when the train is […]
– Lea Deschenes Whatever’s developing is likely to remain sealed below the skin’s great projection screen until it’s finally done marinating in chemicals that will either decipher it as the amazing answer to a litany of unasked questions or expose it as yet another reminder of that time I jackknifed the tractor while backing-up a load of hay and sliced the tubeless tire […]
They came upon some bones in the forest. She saw them first in the shadows and thought they were ferns forcing up fiddleheads from a bed of leaves. But he saw them first for what they were, bones of a small creature. It looked like some carnivores had shared a meal. Hollows clawed from decaying leaves told a story of a tragic scene unseen. He was a police officer […]
My day begins as usual, woken by click-clacking tracks as the 6.56 from Paraparaumu passes. I can hear birds in the garden bed below my bedroom window. They’re scratching at the mulch, uprooting the seedlings I planted yesterday. I’d thought of protecting them, placing sticks and weaving cotton thread strung with milk bottle tops, as my mother used to do. But milk doesn’t come in bottles any more; there are […]
Lichen patches and rust almost erase my family name from the kerosene can letterbox. Rata twines around the gate, kikuyu fingers stretch and join across the track. The milking shed, roof broken by a weight of stars, crouches sway-backed against the sky. Moonlight fills its windows, spills through gap-toothed walls, lies in lozenges along the grass. Creamy fog pours down the creek, circles the swamp, backs […]
He once used a ring to prolong his erection, and panicked, rock hard and throbbing, when it couldn’t be removed. I thought of the columns at Karnak, their sad priapism, blunt thrusting unable to detumesce once frenzy had passed and all the gods were gone. Mercedes Webb-Pullman: Victoria University Wellington MA in Creative Writing, 2011. Her poems and short stories have appeared online and in print, including […]
Once, it was glorious — lithe, flowing, carnal, capricious. So effortless, moving with abandon and finding fault with hips and lips and hair and thighs now mourned. Watching through eyelid slits as charts become tomes of words and terms and treatments that are hard to bear, but for the alternative. Contemporaries arm themselves with creams and steams and fillers to smooth grin crinkles, instead of saline streambeds and […]
I am sick. Not the dying sick, but the perpetually sick, the we-can-help-you-manage-your-pain-but-we-can’t-cure-you sick. I need a lot of bloodwork and my phlebotomist calls me Momma. But I never felt that primal need some other women have, the urge to grow children inside and deliver them to the world. I am a Teacher, and a good one. I help dry tears and give advice and attend youth sporting […]
I AM SO SORRY! Your fleece—did my feelings wash out? They did though, right? For ten hours on a one-hour flight. That’s cat-year math…I never told you anything about me (like that I’m crazy for the superior pet) or asked your name. Nobody wants that though, yea? Just to not get projectile- feelingsd all over the whole flight—or at all. I know. Sorry, Sir… Sir feels apologetic, subservient even, […]
Boxed here, her room, fruit punch served as breakfast, no TV, bad reception, books on architecture, more on trees, runes, in dust. The mattress, as ever, unshaped to my skin, bones; and so the pain goes, comes in waves. Now the radio, its waves, long and lonely, and she and I in every note. Each point, the scan finds some instrument, some aria, far flung, from the far reaches […]
Melancholy Hyperbole 