Eager

It’s four o’clock in the afternoon
and your face is red as sunset.
You are eager like a young dog,
chasing words for salivating feelings

and day by day building a rockpool
full of creatures and colours, and
rushes of tunneling sand. I want
to ask why you loved me so.

Nothing I did, even in fantasy,
was ever deserving of it. You tell me
that in your sky the crescent cycles
back and forth, threading the waist

of the moon, never quite full or empty.
I didn’t understand it. Is it possible
to be wrong about a world you don’t
believe in? What is that shape in your eye,

or is it a smile, opening you? And
what is that, moving, underneath
the sand? This place you have made,
I cannot begin to understand it.

When you dream, you dream of me.

Maia Armistead

Maia Armistead is a poet and student originally from Hamilton. She has been published in such places as Starling, Mayhem, Sweet Mammalian and The Spinoff, and is one of the editors of Symposia Magazine.