I borrowed an extra duvet from your bed last midnight Creeping through the darkened house to execute the crime that it felt like Even though you didn’t need it You weren’t in the bed
I can’t stand the sight of your naked mattress Rearranged the pillows in memory of your dear head The print on your coverlet is brighter than mine, still hopeful So, I left it where it lay this morning And wondered what you would say if it was still there and you came back.
Bee Trudgeon
Bee Trudgeon (She/Her) is a writer, rocker, stroller, strummer, mama, storyteller, dancer, perpetual student, and Porirua Children’s Librarian Kaitiaki Pukapuka Tamariki. Her journalism has been published in RipItUp, The Sapling, Gecko Press Curiously Good Book Club,NZ Poetry Shelf, and in the Free Range Press Radical Futures series volume Death and Dying in New Zealand. Her poetry has been published in Kiss Me Hardy 2, and the Amanda Palmer fan anthology Poems for the Ride. You can read more of her work on the Patreon page of her alter ego, Grace Beaster – where she posts a poem a week year-round, and a poem a day each April.
Let yourself submerge in a puddle of your own remaking. Permission sees the unseeable shift from nothingness to nothingness with a ripple of renaissance. Resistance strangles even those attempts spurred by pure conviction. Don’t let yourself half-arse it. Don’t be fooled by anyone who says this is an end, either. A pool of water is the only womb we choose to enter.
I once wrote in a poem a cliff is only dangerous after you jump off of it. That was before I realised I am terrified of heights. A puddle is only dangerous before you submerge in it and by submerge I mean suspend and by suspend I mean surrender and by surrender I mean stop looking up for an answer.
Amy Marguerite
Amy Marguerite (she/her) is a poet based in Aro Valley, Pōneke. She has recently completed an MA in Creative Writing at the IIML. Her poetry can be found in Food Court, Salty, Milly Mag, Poetry Shelf, Bad Apple, Sweet Mammalian and on her blog.
Needing ingredients for the meal, I rode the solitary darkness down to the ground floor. I was delivered to a courtyard, which was new to me. This lift of darkness was subtly different from the one I’d traveled up in earlier. The lift across the way was different again, which meant three boxes of night were operating. I set about looking for an exit on this plane, all the while wondering, was the woman who lived opposite me still dancing in front of the television with her son? What would be ideal, I concluded, would be to find the entrance I came in by. Eventually, a door led me to a blind alley where an old man sat cradling the memory of an animal. Back in the courtyard, two women were unenthusiastically painting their apartment. They directed me to a possible avenue to the outside in a language I was almost certain was Hungarian. A woman about my age passed, carrying oranges in a net bag. With an air of justified condescension she assured me in English the exit was just over there. Turn that corner and turn again, she said, and we shall never meet again. That night the sun was poisoned on the hill and darkness rode the lift to my apartment. In my sleep, I devoted myself to leaving the apartment, traveling the night of elevators.
Rachel O’Neill
Rachel O’Neill lives and works in the Wellington region and is currently developing books, films and collaborative projects. They have published two collections of poetry, One Human in Height (2013) and Requiem for a Fruit (2021). As a queer non-binary storyteller Rachel strives to represent the longing for connection and the humour and strangeness that characterise human experience. Being Pākehā, Rachel aims to look unflinchingly at their culture and to work collaboratively with others to reflect meaningfully on intersecting relationships in Aotearoa, past and present. To find out more about their work, visit their website.
A Question Bigger than a Hawk, Jan FitzGerald, The Cuba Press, 2022
Jan FitzGerald’s fourth poetry collection, A Question Bigger than a Hawk, is a terrific read. It’s an excursion into past and present, a sojourn among myriad stepping stones: you move from a photo a memory, a storm a blackbird, a bee a death. Poetry becomes bridge crossings to the past. A moment may be hooked, and then is rendered visible with piquant detail. This is poetry of the heart and of the eye. It is poetry to be felt and it is rich in physical detail.
Things change as I read. I keep stepping back into the poet’s childhood, into how a child makes sense of the world, into how things change and stay the same for a reflecting adult. I fill with questions, I am drawn to the gap, I am moved by accumulating admissions. A single poem is an alcove in which to linger. Take ‘Mushrooms’. Begin with gathering mushrooms, move to Japan’s nuclear bomb tragedy, shift to mispronouncing shitake so ‘mushroom’ becomes’ underwear’, step from laughter to weeping.
I am gathering clues to the missing story, the missed story, the admitted story. In ‘Family Photos’, grandparents are retrieved from the past, yet there is mystery, the building questions: ‘The first tiny flag raised.’ I am wrestling with what to tell you without spoiling the way Jan brings things into view, the way events have shaped who she is, what she feels, how she is. Certain poems pierce your reading equilibrium: ‘Personal effects’, ‘Natural mother’, ‘Too far gone’.
You move amidst storm, rain, chill, sun, wind. The rhythm is the connective device, so sweetly crafted, so fluid for the ear. It carries us through the ranging subject matter. A tree that watches over the speaker when she is near death at Queen Mary Hospital. Umbrellas that slam into the walking poet. The moon shining like the torch of a child reading under blankets. The poet baking bread while a high-vis jacket flaps on a billboard, a prompt for people disappearing everywhere.
Reading A Question Bigger than a Hawk, is a sublime retreat into intricacy, wonder and observation. There is light and there is dark. There is the spoken and the withheld. Death and life. Presence and absence. It is a book to take into a quiet nook and let it slowly unfold as you read it in one sweet sitting. Glorious.
Jan FitzGerald is a full-time artist and poet who lives in Napier. She is the author of three previous poetry collections, the most recent being Wayfinder (Steele Roberts, 2017), and she has been shortlisted twice in the Bridport Prize poetry competition.
The Spin Off recently posted a terrific series of tributes to Geoff Cochrane. His passing has saddened so many readers and writers; social media is evidence of the depth of feeling for Geoff, for his writing, his presence on our literary landscapes. I invited his publisher Fergus Barrowman, his publicist Kirsten McDougall, along with writers Anne Kennedy, Chris Tse and Pip Adams to select a poem by Geoff that they loved. We have all been reaching for his books on our shelves, to settle into a poem, to grieve and to celebrate.
Damien Wilkins once wrote: ‘Geoff Cochrane’s is a whole world, rendered in lines at once compressed and open, mysterious and approachable.’
In my NZ Herald review of Pocket Edition (2009) I wrote: ‘Cochrane’s mix of dark, witty, concentrated lines are well worth storing in a jacket pocket for the spare little moments that beg for a poem.’
Geoff was the author of 18 collections of poetry, mostly recently Chosen (2020), two novels, and Astonished Dice: Collected Short Stories (2014). In 2009 he was awarded the Janet Frame Prize for Poetry, in 2010 the inaugural Nigel Cox Unity Books Award, and in 2014 an Arts Foundation of New Zealand Laureate Award.
An Ambulance
Between hospital and zoo asterisks of rain fall audibly on the many old tin awnings. Through cool blue air arrives a siren’s pure ambulance. Someone is dying of too much afternoon, of fennel and cats and clothes props.
Geoff Cochrane from Aztec Moon (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 1992).
Selected by Fergus Barrowman: This poem has everything I love in Geoff’s work. It was the second poem in the manuscript of Aztec Noon, and the moment of encounter and recognition remains vivid 30 years later.
3 : 00 A. M.
The wind at night is new The wind at night is black and unadorned The wind at night is better than other winds
Step outside and taste it Step outside and feel it on your face
The wind at night is clean The wind at night is lucky The wind at night is young, innovative
Step outside and taste it Step outside and feel it on your face
Geoff Cochrane from The Bengal Engine’s Mango Afterglow (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2012)
Selected by Chris Tse: Geoff was the master of capturing the fleeting moment. Many of his poems were short bursts of clarity behind those daily interactions and pauses that often pass us by without a second thought. I chose this poem because I know that early morning wind well – it’s been both confidante and unruly friend. I only ever met Geoff once, very briefly, but I’ve met him hundreds of times over on the page.
The Rooming-House
1
An ambulance might splash its scarlet light about.
The concrete steps and paths were mounded and Pompeian, like fluid porridge frozen; Do Not Leave Chotes To Soke read the card in the cold, spacious, primitive laundry.
2
When I got a room at last, it was tiny. Tiny and quiet, with a wee built-in bookcase in which I installed a radio and a dictionary.
And I sat side-on to my little olive desk and drank and drank my plonk a little at a time, like a student of something large and long, large and long and complacently abstruse.
And many nights fell and many days dawned, and I studied and studied.
3
An ambulance might splash its scarlet stain about.
My bedding was arranged neatly on the floor, but my sherry glass got very cloudy, grubby, gooey, its utility contingent on its never being washed.
Yes. And what I was after, what I sought to renew day after day and night after night (tried to understand by reinforcing), was the gorgeous condition of being addicted to addiction.
Geoff Cochrane, from The Worm in the Tequila ((Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2010)
Selected by Anne Kennedy: In this poem, Geoff shows everything to do with the room: outside the room, inside the room, the poet in the room, the reader in the room. The intense emotion in the room is so recognisable yet completely original. How does he do this? I don’t know!
Super Wine
The news is early or his clock is slow, so he grabs his mug of tea and pops a biscuit in his pocket, the top pocket of a faded old coat. It’s a wreck of a thing, this coat of his. a shamefully limp and grubby article, but he wears it through the news and Campbell Live and on into the night, and he wears it when he leaves his little flat and slips up the lane and out into the park and lights a cigarette (his skinny nine-o’clocker and the last of the day). And he smells the smells of mown grass and woodsmoke, and he walks across the park towards the lights, the lights of the houses on the hill, secular stars of silver and orange, and he walks beneath the frosty stars themselves, this unmarried, unmended man, this unmarried, not-unhappy Earthling, A Super Wine forgotten in his pocket.
Geoff Cochrane
from Pocket Edition (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2009)
Selected by Paula Green: I love how Geoff’s poem draws me into the throat, heart and resonance of the present tense, the evocative detail sharp, the biscuit embodying so very much. The last line always gets me.
Impersonating Bono
for my sister Mary
On a bright, crisp day in winter, we leave our mother’s house to walk to town. You seem proud of me. Or unashamed. Which is better. You hook your arm through mine and we are sweethearts.
Petite and fresh, you’re over from Australia. Left to my own devices, I’d walk as far as the old railway station, passing the junk shops and the new green tractors, the saddlery with the plastic horse on its awning. But not today, for today I have you on my arm.
Our jaunty tour takes in the carpeted mall, the TAB Dad ran, the library in which you once worked. In Paper Plus, we score a couple of Little Golden Books to give to Luke at his christening brunch (the reason for our unseasonal reunion).
I’ve left my shades in Wellington. You talk me into buying a replacement pair at the $2 Shop– slittishly repulsive retro jobs through which the cheapened world looks sick and blue.
Geoff Cochrane from Vanilla Wine (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2003)
Selected by Kirsten McDougall
Little Bits of Harry
chapter i
The Marmitey smell of a roast. Harry watched his Grandad crank the table. June could do with a spot and Here’s to your very good health.
chapter ii
He was raised not far from a salt-and-vinegar beach. The wound in his shoulder looked like a slitty eye.
chapter iii
Harry had a friend called Brian. Brian’s smile was framed by inverted commas (“v”). Together the boys made poisons, decanting their grassy sauces into Aspro bottles shaped like canteens.
Under the house was where they’d built their Zombie Chair. And under the house was where they stored their poisons, smoked cigarettes and cultivated stiffies, tent-poled their school shorts with stiffies (“v”).
chapter iv
Trust Harry to do a lovely Jesus. To get himself nailed up with many a fine contortion and grimace.
(The theme from Exodus played. Brian’s Roman helmet had been painted with gold paint from the hardware.)
chapter v
Harry’s father loathed Mario Lanza. The cold yellow sky dimmed to mustard. Rain swept up the valley, crowding it like troops.
chapter vi
Winter seemed to mirror the sweet rainy gloom in Harry himself.
Nanna sat in front of the fire, toasting her shins and listening to the footy. Harry sprawled beneath her, in the odours of crumbling heels, mottled calves and droopy puce stockings.
And the wound in his shoulder began to squeak, squeak and whistle like the fire itself. Like the fire in which the damned were said to live, their hot bodies molten orange jellies.
chapter vii
“That’s it,” said Harry, vexed. “I’m setting my face against it all.”
“What about your passion-plays and poisons?” his mother asked.
“I’m setting my face against it all. All except swimming and going to the pictures.”
“Well that sounds mighty fine, but what about the dental clinic? You won’t get very far setting your face against the dental clinic, however implacably.”
And when he got to the brilliant, methylated clinic, he was sent straight home again for having furry teeth.
“I’ve disgraced us both,” Harry told his mother.
“And how,” said she. “Get in there and polish good, you fiend!”
chapter viii
The wound was like an eye. Or a slitty, sticky mouth. Whether eye or mouth or merely perennial gash . . .
chapter ix
Harry’s father managed a radio shack in Furnace Lane. And Harry liked the murk, the smelly alchemy of his old man’s profession.
There were fresh boxed valves in pigeon-holes and chassis labelled like toes in a mortuary. And Harry was thrilled by the tinny stink, the runny splash and flash, the quicksilver dartings of the solder. By the bevelled tongue of the iron, so hotly blued and silvered.
“The secret of good soldering is to work cleanly with clean surfaces,” Harry’s father explained. And handed his son a slimmish book: Radio for Boys.
chapter x
College. Saint Cuthbert’s was a place of “standards”. Of lines to be toed and traces not to be kicked over. Larking near the milk float merited a flogging. There was also a mysterious urinal juniors were discouraged from using.
When Harry ventured into it, he got what almost amounted to a fright. The gorgeous prefect Harry encountered within had long-lashed, Ray Liotta eyes and a dingy, ancient, ox-felling cock. A veritable Trojan of a tool, but modelled in accordance with the slickest principles of modern rocketry.
chapter xi
Each year began with the soapy odour of newly purchased exercise books. The chaste white leaves of which seemed to offer scope, to promise better academic results. It was never long, however, before Harry had begun to fill his books with circuit diagrams and sketches of inventions. With red stanzas shaped like expensive bits of advertising copy.
chapter xii
Brass band. Choir. Drama club.
Harry tried them all, only to find himself underemployed and bored.
And then would come the warm messy business of withdrawal, disengagement. The qualified disgrace of having to return the flugelhorn whose valves had kept sticking.
chapter xiii
Firemen pumped Saint Cuthbert’s flooded basement. In library and classroom, flubby gas burned pinkly.
And the body of a pupil killed in a car crash was laid out in the chapel. And the guy looked most peculiar, bounced sideways into death, like some rouged harlot lividly contused. Like some rash pierrot mauled by the colours rose and mauve.
chapter xiv
A morning, yes, in spring.
But Saint Cuthbert’s lay in ruins, Saint Cuthbert’s had been crunched.
A haze of smoke and dust hung above a hill of shattered grey masonry. Puny yellow fires devoid of any briskness licked up through the rubble here and there.
I loved it but it didn’t love me back, thought Harry. It failed to apprehend the qualities in me, the excellence of me and my lambent wound.
chapter xv
Or were the failures and derelictions mine? But were they?
chapter xvi
Parks and public gardens became his haunts, a limp oilskin parka his cloak.
In a stately filmed ascension screening backwards, he was sinking to the bottom.
chapter xvii
He’d noticed a dank garage up near the old tram tunnel.
Seepage and stink and frog-green slimes: no one had used the place in years.
And Harry took his fish and chips in there, his library books and cartons of flavoured milk.
And the hip, punchy novels of P. Zanoski got into his blood like a craze, a suave new malaria sexy as ejaculate.
chapter xviii
The odour of a sump or an oily grave. But Harry rehabilitated a manky chair he’d found (so that then he had a seat). And he stole a couple of P. Zanoski’s books and fashioned a shelf for them (so that then he had a bookcase). And Harry liked to imagine P. Zanoski flying in from Chicago. Sending one of his minders ahead of him. “P. Zanoski will be here in two minutes. He’ll accept a cigarette, but please don’t offer him gum.” The white gleaming limo just outside, soon to be joined by a second and a third.
chapter xix
The telly he salvaged from the skip? The telly he salvaged from the skip was a small girly number with a plastic cabinet of cream and lipstick-red. It needed a few modifications, sure, but Harry worked for hours to convert it into a sun- lamp, and soon he had his contraption up and running. And he’d spin the bicycle wheel that juiced the system, strip to the waist and sit in front of the screen. Certain dormant circuits would thaw and kindle, and the charcoal screen would glow invisibly, pumping forth a torrent of black light, black influence, black medicine. And the wound in Harry’s shoulder could begin to heal at last. Could begin to shrink and close—or seem to.
chapter xx
Unworried sleeplessness. Engagement with the texture of the moment. For the treatments had their novel side-effects.
A good dose of the sun-lamp imbued him with an energetic bliss, a wakeful equilibrium, a rapturous serenity abiding.
Yes. A single hit of darkest radiance and Harry was pumped for days. Wired and feeling like a crystal ping sustained.
chapter xxi
Night’s brassy shadows. The flimsy Chinese carpentry of night.
And Harry out walking all the time, working off his treatments at all hours.
chapter xxii
They stopped him outside the electricity park, that buzzing necropolis of cottage-sized transformers and giant porcelain peppermints.
The car drifted in toward the kerb like a flying saucer on its best behaviour. “What. You couldn’t sleep?”
“Something like that,” said Harry.
A golden-haired forearm. The dashboard’s toxic purple array. “Hop in,” said the cop, “it’s fun in here.”
“Like Der. Like Let me think.”
“You’re a healthy looking kid. And a smart one too I’m told.”
“So?”
“So give your folks a ring. They’re worried sick. I speak to you again I better hear you called.”
chapter xxiii
Weeks passed. Months. While slowly the sun-lamp’s dark effulgence seemed to dwindle in potency, so that Harry needed more and more of it.
And then, while he was out, the garage was trashed. The bicycle wheel wrenched from its cradle. The telly’s ham-shaped tube bashed in and its fragrant pastel gasses dissipated.
chapter xxiv
Slipping his P. Zanoski books into his khaki bag, he traipsed across the city.
Cowled and caped in blankets, he hunkered down beneath the motorway.
A spitty wind blew up. The sky was a fuzzy orange murk. And it rained on our dispirited Harry, on Harry and his army-surplus knapsack.
chapter xxv
He took to drinking cough mixture. Sometimes he was asked to sign for it. “Blaise Cendrars”, he’d put. “Blaise Cendrars” or “Alexander Trocchi”. And he’d get through several bottles in a day. Three or four bottles, yes.
chapter xxvi
He’d often breakfast at the soup kitchen (a statue of the Holy Family presided. The soup came in stainless-steel jugs) and there he met a chick who took him aboard a ship.
In a grotty cabin charged with a greeny stench (some sturdy distillate of marine putrescence?), he gave her the business well and truly. “Great,” she said, “and you so long and thick! Do you always keep your shirt on?”
“It’s gelid as, down here.”
“Give us a swig of your syrup, there’s a pet.”
chapter xxvii
3 a.m. A brilliantly fluorescent service station. Harry had scored a cappuccino (he craved the milk, the sugar) and was stirring it with a small wooden stick.
“So how the fuck’s it looking?” asked the stranger.
Harry shrugged. “Like where do I go to sell my blood?”
“You don’t do that. You make another plan.”
“Yeah?”
“Sure.” The stranger winked and popped his can of Pepsi. “Stick with me and I’ll get you hung.”
“The word you want is hanged. Stick with me and I’ll get you hanged.”
“Hanged. Hunged. Whatever.”
chapter xxviii
His name was Rubin.
A little tee-shaped chalice of a tuft adorned his lower lip, and he wore a long black leather coat in which he looked agreeably satanic.
chapter xxix
He was staying at the swanky Xanadu. “Temporary riches,” he explained, “—a winning streak at blackjack.”
Carpet. Tepid musks. An elevator prescient and swift, below the perspex capsule of which the twinkling city was spread. And Harry saw the city and the world (a doomed winter festival of lights) fall away from under the rocket.
chapter xxx
Rubin’s suite was warm, its colours peach and beige. Rubin himself had hired the ecclesiastical jukebox with its rainbow of glows.
Harry took off his parka. Unbuttoned the cuffs of his shirt and sat down on the sofa. “I could get used to this,” he said.
“You reckon?”
chapter xxxi
When Harry produced his bottle of cough mixture, Rubin scoffed. “Say goodbye to that crap. Let me give you a taste of something decent.”
He tied off Harry’s arm with a rubber tourniquet. And slid the needle into Harry’s vein adroitly, painlessly.
“You’re being very . . . doctorly.”
“I keep it dark, but I almost qualified.”
“And I won’t need the linctus anymore?”
“You won’t need the linctus. Nor any fucking sun-lamp.”
“How come you know about the sun-lamp?”
“I had a hunch. I’ve read my P. Zanoski.”
chapter xxxii
The drug in Harry’s system was a liquid clarity. Was prompting him to level, spill the beans.
“I have a wound.”
“We all have wounds.”
“But mine’s peculiar. Peculiarly mine. It weeps and shines and sometimes even murmurs.”
“Don’t they all.”
chapter xxxiii
A liquid, improving clarity.
And Rubin was transformed, in Harry’s sight. Transformed and transfigured. Laundered and sharpened.
The Ray Liotta eyes became apparent; the smile framed by inverted commas emerged (“v”).
And Rubin unbuttoned Harry’s shirt, gently baring Harry’s dubious shoulder. And his lips sought Harry’s wound, in order to kiss it better, in order to seal and heal it with a kiss.
Geoff Cochrane, ‘Little Bits of Harry’ appeared in Sport 32, November 2004 and Best New Zealand Poems 2004.
Selected by Pip Adam: What I love about this work is that it shows Geoff Cochrane at his genre tight-rope-walking best. I met Geoff’s work first in the shape of fiction but I grew to love him in the compression and gap-jumping glory of his poetry. I think Geoff would hate me saying this because his work shows such regard for form – but I feel like genre description pales when we talk about his work. It is like his work creates a new genre – the genre of Cochrane. He is the master craftsman, the Olympic formsman – and he does it all under this cape of laid-back. It takes a lot of work to make something seem so immediate, so off-the-cuff and conversational while weighting it with traditions as old as speech itself.
It is weird going public after keeping my personal hurdles private for so long! Talking so much about me rather than about you.
I am now at Day 153 and making great progress on my long slow bumpy uncertain recovery road. My specialist is pleased with where I am at, and reassures me that bumps are part of it. He says it probably takes a year to get to a smoother zone after a bone marrow transplant. Normal is a distant horizon and I try not to dwell on what I can’t do. What I can do is a far more helpful position to be in.
My recipe for a calm, happy, strong headspace includes reading, writing, blogging, baking, walking, doing jigsaws and watching things. Children’s books are essential, but I am also loving novels and poetry.
For the first time since I went to hospital, I recently hit a dark hole and found it really hard to focus on my mantra to Live and Love the Day. I think it was because my body has delivered all kinds of challenging bumps that I have weathered – I thought I had done so well getting though them all. Then it threw another one at me: dizziness, wooziness, light-headedness. Who knows when it will ease up! My head has been the key to keeping strong and calm and happy, and miraculously I have been able to write. So it threw me off course to be spinning-out, forgetful, foggy, near fainting.
Ah, the doubt. We all have doubt – I found myself double doubting in my dark hole that I could write or blog. Telling myself I was the crappiest writer and blogger in the world! But I kept/keep/will keep doing as way of being. Picking up a new poetry or children’s book is a vital diversion but I am making mistakes in my reviews. I don’t want to get names wrong or book details wrong. I want to honour and celebrate the fabulous books we are producing in Aotearoa. For the past week or so, I have wondered if I should put my blogs back on holiday – but no, I am selfish. They are too important to my well-being. They are my anchor and kite, my lifeline and source of joy.
I want to keep doing them but I want you to kindly tell me when I make mistakes. I will be grateful not offended.
If I don’t answer your email straightaway that is to be expected – but if too long goes by nudge me as I may have missed it.
Ah, the joy. My idea to get children to illustrate poems by authors is one of the most rewarding things I have done on Poetry Box. They are so keen to do it, it gives them truckloads of pleasure and satisfaction. It draws them closer to a poem and they create something where imagination knows no bounds. Rules and regulations are not paramount.
Your support is astonishing. Your understanding. I used the word ‘occasional’ to protect myself, knowing there will be days I can’t even turn my lap top on. Books I don’t review. Yet I always seem to have a gathering of posts ready to go, and am able to post poems and reviews most days. I am sticking with the word ‘occasional’!
Yes, it is a long slow bumpy recovery road, but having a happy zone, a support crew and a big stack of books to read and jigsaws to do, is gold. Having two new books in the world, so lovingly steered by Penguin, is also gold. I got sad I couldn’t be out in the world promoting them, but Poetry Box has helped. AND being part of our sublime writing communities matters so very much. You matter. Thank you.
Green Jewel (Griselinia littoralis) – here is a leaflet for you and you and you
Wild Irish(wo)man – forget the white flowers stay prickly, take no prisoners
Viola (mountain) – conditions are rugged you will not be thanked by those drunken men falling in the River Avon but you are on the money
Gail Ingram
Gail Ingram writes from the Port Hills of Ōtautahi and is author of Contents Under Pressure (Pūkeko Publications 2019). She won the Caselberg International Poetry Award 2019 and the NZPS International Poetry Competition in 2016. Her work has appeared widely across Aotearoa, and in Australia, UK, Africa and USA. She is editor for a fine line and Flash Frontier: An Adventure in Short Fiction. Website
NZ Poetry Shelf 