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 […]
The sun flares over the bay, its haze a portal — to where I left a skin behind: under cliffs where a windbreak stood, catching barbecues, a waft of hot dog fat, skrikes of kids, open-mouths, white noise, broken kites, tugging pants for treats, tugging nan’s, dads tugging hands of ozone-scorched pink, where cirrus streaks cream on blue from gadabouts, tilted faces singed around sunblock and shades. A photo […]
On the chalkboard wall in my office you wrote your name along the corner near the door frame, drew a pink heart and some strange design closer to the floor, wrote the words “Hi, I love you guys.” I’ll keep the memories of you belting out a Drowning Pool song with your own lyrics – “Let the bodies hit the beach!”, riding go-karts in Ocean City. All you want to […]
Melancholy Hyperbole 