Katherine Mansfield Park

After we moved away, I often thought about the park. I thought of how I
used to practice rolling sideways down the hill. I thought of grass stains
on my elbows and dirt beneath my fingernails. I thought of sitting on the
seesaw licking the pink icing off hundreds-and thousands biscuits.

This must be the place where I first saw her name. It was printed in yellow
letters on a signpost next to the slide.

If I could, I would tell her I like the park best at dusk in summer,
looking up at the green hills looming above. I would ask her if she
remembers this—the moon rising and shapes collapsing inside their own
shadows, birds flinging themselves out of the bush, calling out to each
other in the dark.

Nina Mingya Powles
from the chapbook, ‘Sunflowers’ in Luminescent, Seraph Press, 2017

Nina Mingya Powles is a writer from Aotearoa based in the UK. She is the author of several poetry collections and pamphlets, most recently In the Hollow of the Wave (2025), Magnolia 木蘭 (2020) and two books of creative nonfiction, Tiny Moons: A Year of Eating in Shanghai (2020) and Small Bodies of Water (2021). She is part of fieldnotes collective, an experimental nature writing project in collaboration with Alycia Pirmohamed, Jessica J. Lee and Pratyusha. She writes a monthly substack on food and memory called Crispy Noodles.

The Poetry Shelf Breathing Room: A place to enter and pause and take a long slow breath and then another, as you absorb the beauty movement joy stillness wonder movement of a poem.