2023 & Other Poems

Try to remember how the year began. Were you under
a sky of your own choosing or one stripped from
photographs you’ve only ever seen on social media?
At what point did you realise you had lost the language
to describe even the most simple of joys?

/

The party had been raging for months by the time I
arrived in my silver. Cans and bottles blanketed the lawn
while neighbours peeked through their curtains to sneer
silently and mouth curses. I entered with a resolution
and left with a mouth full of blood and extra teeth.

\

The history-makers abuse their well-worn templates,
framing each year as business as usual. The media play
along until business becomes personal. The storytellers
sift through ash to find something to celebrate but
all they find is another word fashioned into a weapon.

/

I have known this year and its versions, all measured in
past lives and misdirections. Joy becomes a distraction.
Sometimes the only escape I long for is a dancefloor—
where I can keep my body moving under flashing lights
and not worry about being ushered out into the cold.

\

The machines are programmed to show us how it ends.
Blossoms bloom into fists. Sugar on the tongue sours.
The radios talk back, the televisions stream and another
old song goes viral as bodies become a spectacle on our
screens. Erasure makes a deathly noise, floods our blood.

/

I want to believe the heart is more than a muscle—
more than a faded metaphor for a contract that binds us,
flaws and all. I press my ear against the year and hear
a song with a lyric repeated until the music fades, leaving
a ghostly chant in my head imploring: do not look away.

\

This year proves that borders are imaginary and they do
more harm than good. Nothing can contain what little
remains after devastation has swept through a city.
The impulse to read the earth’s lines in the past tense
even though those on the ground attest: is, now, forever.

/

A niece’s embrace. A pool in swampy heat. The gift of
Knowledge. German brass band techno. Ponies prancing
under mirrorballs. Cruel summers bring the sweetest
stings. The Poet Laureate’s port. Northern storms and
southern rainbows. My love’s love. Padam? Padam.

\

My hopeful poems wait in the wings—my highlights and
golden hours are no match for our collective whiplash.
Make a wish before we knot this year and let it slip out
of our hands as another lesson we will never learn. Is it
enough to summon the star that once called us home?

/

Somewhere there is a sky that rages in psychedelia—
the shapeshifting breath of a benevolent god looking
down at the legacy we have scorched into the earth.
If the hand no longer feeds, bite. If kings and queens
try to take our tongues from us, bite—and don’t let go.

Chris Tse

Chris Tse is New Zealand’s Poet Laureate for 2022-24. He is the author of three poetry collections published by Auckland University Press: How to be Dead in a Year of Snakes, HE’S SO MASC, and Super Model Minority. He and Emma Barnes edited Out Here: An Anthology of Takatāpui and LGBTQIA+ Writers from Aotearoa. He is the editor of The Spinoff’s Friday Poem and Ōrongohau | Best New Zealand Poems 2023.