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 […]
It was worth it; in spite of broken ribs and teeth (they always smash my face), in spite of boots when they’d knocked me down, in spite of hospital and pain, stubble bristles through scabs and bruises on my face, long enough for the grey stripe in my hair to grow out again – I felt like a tiger, the night I roared from the Stonewall door. You carry […]
Melancholy Hyperbole 