customer asks where you’re from. you reply, auckland, and somehow he hears, start guessing, instead. he talks over you, japanese? you look japanese. are you japanese? you move over to the grill and turn all the knobs up to high heat. the flames reach out to you, tiger orange and desperate. bacon rinds curl up into carbon crisps. your three fried eggs are smouldering, but you leave them there, yolks beaming. until soot falls from your eyelashes, blushing your cheeks. until the sun turns away, saying that she’s seen enough.

Emma Shi, from ‘THE CUSTOMER IS ALWAYS RIGHT’

Fabulous cover art by Nirvana Haldar, excellent interview with Shu-Ling Chua (a Melbourne-based essayist, critic and poet) and stellar writing from young New Zealanders.

Check out the contents page and go exploring. Starling has its finger on the pulse of new writing – as it says in their aims for the journal:

‘The young writers featured here will shape and drive what New Zealand writing is to become. Starling is a chance to get a glimpse of where they might take us.’

Covid blues

It’s 4 am and Ella is singing

summertime on National Radio

and I could tell you about a broken

heart and our dead cat and body life

breaking down in pain

or the rain pounding on the roof

in the humid dark

or the way I am counting years

or last night’s birthday paella steeped in saffron and paprika

or the way loneliness can rise in gut-kicking waves

or you feel you have dissolved

in the water tank or an extravagant bath

lemongrass and majoram salted

or the plot of Rajorshi Chakraborti’s novel

or the nostalgic music we picked for the boom

as we birthday ate and sang and danced

but I want to tell you how I went

garden crazy in the first and second lockdowns

and how the garden is a gushing glut

of tomatoes beans zuchinis pumpkins herbs

the vines and tendrils knotting together

like wildfire like verbs nouns semicolons

in a poem because I never went to poetry school

and learnt straight lines and golden rules and

how yesterday I was piling warm earth on tomato roots

snipping off dead leaves feeling for the potatoes

but here I am listening to Eva Radich make her picks

wanting to pile steaming earth

on the exposed roots of this poem

because it’s 4 am and I keep repeating

myself and tying up in garden knots

It’s 4 am and the Cuban trumpet is knotting up

the Cuban piano and the Cuban trumpet is aching

for a world where we are all fed and we

are all warm and much loved and the tyrant is impeached

because crossing the party line is human good

and where we can pack the car and head north

to the booked bach for our first family holiday

in summers, and peace and kindness and wonder

are the words we picked as we passed

the birthday cake and candle glowing in the dark

Paula Green

Political protest and Te Reo has featured strongly in this year’s Robert Burns Poetry Competition entries.

The adult and youth competitions attracted 53 entries last year with only one from overseas.

Judged by poet Kay McKenzie Cooke and Burns Fellow John Newton, the adult competition had a theme Freedom, inspired by Burns’ Here’s a health to them that’s awa.

‘‘The interpretations of the theme freedom ranged from referring to the struggle for political freedom while oppressed; whether that be by health problems or by unfair treatment from past and present injustices; to the image of freedom as expressed in nature.’’

You can access the rest of the ODT article with the complete list of winners and their poems – including the Youth and Unpublished Poets winners.

Published Poet winners: