Skeletal

Leaves loosen on their bed; they can fall
no further. I pick one up before
the earth comes crumbling
from its darkened door
to claim it.

I press this blueprint against the light
and parched canals and gardens appear:
a city inked with a single hair.

On my palm, it lies
diaphanous in the lift of body heat.
See the breath rush back
into the chambers of its birth.
It’s like my flesh as a threadbare sheet,
my touch reduced to finger-whorls,
the lines of my life writ small,
all grip and strive relinquished.

It rides at rest on its stem, tremblingly,
this skiff of lace.
There is the trace
of kinship in the veins.

Megan Kitching

Megan Kitching is an Ōtepoti Dunedin poet. Her debut collection At the Point of Seeing (Otago University Press, 2023) was shortlisted for the Mary and Peter Biggs Prize for Poetry at the 2024 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. Her poetry has been published in Aotearoa New Zealand and international journals including The Frogmore Papers (UK), takahē, Poetry Aotearoa Yearbook and Landfall. In 2021, she was the inaugural Caselberg Trust Elizabeth Brooke-Carr Emerging Writer Resident.