O-O-O

O is a figure amongst crop circles. O scythes cornstalks that flank the maze. O tells me she lived through red barns and dust and lard and mashed sweet potatoes. O says the tobacco yellowed her fringe, that she hasn’t danced in forty years, that the doily gathers a fine lint.

—

The patient says O like the world is poetry.

She says O to the mashed sweet potatoes and O to the commode. Maybe that’s how it ends. A series of vowel sounds softening to murder. An O that sits in a vacant lot, a rust-chassis O, an O that has cold hands but would pass a Turing test in a heartbeat.

—

O – she sits in a lawn chair rocking her hippocampi to sleep. Babies,

the sky is her centrifuge. Her one use.

Grass-wick in her foreteeth, haze of summer long as a scythe, trembling with cloud.

—

O eats the Old Testament. O finds a full set of teeth in her centre console. O says they don’t make eggs like they used to. Where the light falls on the curtains, O licks it off. Where the sun goes, O might follow it, around and around the campus lavender.

—

O, to love with one synapse holding the wound of the world shut. O, to be a ghost that spooks the cortex but jumps ship at the final moment.

—

The janitor wipes up whatever spilled out of O. A comma on the lino, like there was more to say.

Elizabeth Morton
from Incident Report, Otago University Press, 2026

Elizabeth Morton is a yarn teller, poem maker, and neuroscience enthusiast from Tāmaki Makaurau. Her writing has been published in the likes of Landfall, Takahē, Poetry Aotearoa, and also in overseas journals such as the Moth Magazine, Rattle, Narrative Magazine and Smokelong Quarterly. She is always the bridesmaid, never the bride, as is evidenced by twice placing second in the Sunday Star Times Short Story Competition and also second in the Sargeson Prize. She has four poetry collections, the latest being Incident Report (Otago University Press, 2026).