Clearing                                                                               

To get away from the all too much of myself,
I push out on a walk through winter-scoured streets,
wish I’d timed it better—say, for when school was out:

local footpath turned small carnival,
the glossy new brush tips of children’s voices
stretched high to glaze the clouds in lickable colours

like that afternoon I saw twins slow toe-to-heeling
as if a pint glass quaked on a tray on their heads,
as they carried matchstick galleons stapled to paper seas;

or the time the street stopped around the concentration
of another boy, skipping: his avid focus
like a pianist entering flow;

or even the day I saw the small girl at her front gate,
her cries green and broken as she held a savaged nest
that let float feathers like petals of black blood.

But now the air tightens on the edge of snow.
It is close to dusk.
There is nobody much about.

A younger self roams under my ribs.
Hungry, scavenging along a basalt sea cliff,
it shuffles to the edge of desolate.

An ice-knuckled wind rakes the tops of skeletal trees
so I glance across — see, through a rental’s window,
a large room filled with balloons.

Pearly, silver,
or ballet-slipper pink,
they press up against the ceiling.

Newly discovered star cluster,
they glow like silk in firelight

or like dozens of bubbles risen
to a cava glass’s rim,

where they quiver, words that flew the coop of the heart
yet still long to leap from the tip of the tongue.

In an instant, I’m warmed, laughing quietly to no-one
at the ludicrous lengths, the sweet excess

that love can go to
and I’m swept up, sailing clear

along the night’s opened channel, mind reset
by a stranger’s rosy zodiac.

Emma Neale

Emma Neale is a writer and editor who lives in Ōtepoti/Dunedin. Her collection Liar, Liar, Lick, Spit won the Mary and Peter Biggs Prize for Poetry at the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards for 2025; the year she was also awarded the Janet Frame Prize. Her new novel, Maybe Baby, is due out from Bateman Books in May 2026.