Search history
Ask your parents how
they unravelled the world
before search engines.
What did they do with
the burden of the un/known?
Water tells the story of time
& the weather makes
a space for fear to curve
between selfish joys.
There is never a question
too bright for the mouth
of the cave.
Ask your parents how
many times they returned
to ground zero as a way to
unearth belief in themselves.
Once upon a time there was
a sky for every hopeful glance.
Decades have passed; the world
is still too much for safekeeping.
Chris Tse
from Dance-Floor Romance (Auckland University Press, 2026)
Chris Tse is a poet and editor based in Te Whanganui-a-Tara | Wellington. He is the author of How to be Dead in a Year of Snakes (winner of the 2016 Jessie Mackay Award for Best First Book of Poetry); HE’S SO MASC; Super Model Minority (a finalist for the 2023 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry and longlisted at the 2023 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards); and Dance Floor Romance. He and Emma Barnes edited Out Here: An Anthology of Takatāpui and LGBTQIA+ Writers from Aotearoa. In 2022, Chris was named New Zealand’s 13th Poet Laureate; he completed his term in August 2025.
