Sea Skins Sophia Wilson, Flying Island Books, 2023
In 2022 Sophia Wilson was the joint winner of the Flying Islands Manuscript Prize for Emerging Poets. That manuscript, or a version, now appears as Sea Skins. The poetry is a rich, layered offering for both ear and eye.
The title poem navigates multiple skins, along with tongues and teeth, ruins and ruination, illness and family, a spinning wheel, and a new poem that sets sail. It is the last poem in the collection but it is a perfect window onto poetry that builds bridges between the domestic and the wider world, the remembered and the uncertain, the catastrophic and the sad.
Notions of spinning feature in ‘Amygdaloid Knots’ where ‘we’ become yarn, raw fibre, neuroses, the smell of fleece. And it feels like the pronoun spins and shapeshifts through the collection as a whole, with the poet reflecting and refracting to embody weI or you or I. And always, there is the underlay of uncertainty and devastation:
We are bundles of raw fibre spinning uncontrollably
from ‘Amygdaloid Knots’
The word that resonates more than any other for me is ‘tongue’: as a motif, a theme, a vibrant idea. Sophia is a translator and a poet so language is significant. We are what we speak, I am musing. We are teeth and we are talk and we are tongue. Multiple languages make an appearance, especially te reo Māori and Italian. The children’s father’s tongue atrophies as he loses touch with his native dialect, the linguistic bridge between parent and offspring impaired. Sadly. Achingly. And then, yes, the writer is dreaming in multiple languages, like foreign mouth pieces on the page that we may or may not hear.
I dream in diverse languages and when I wake my tongue is like a map.
from ‘My tongue is like a map’
Take the word teeth: another connecting motif as it links nourishment to wound to weapon to food to chewing to body. Like tongue. Like poetry. Like I am musing the poem is teeth and tongue, like I am musing the poetry is also map.
In a section entitled ‘Medical Records’, disease becomes unease becomes procedure and diagnosis, in whiffs and hints, and then spins and speaks and recollects to draw in family, at the level of intimacy and divergence. I am so moved by ‘A Family History in Porridge’ where the narrator places the bowl of porridge on the figurative table in the form of a list poem, and we move from porridge that is detested to porridge that is prescription to China, fortune, aunt, eco and more. We move from this family member to that family member, from this wisdom to that ritual:
Celebration porridge: raise yer parritch-bicker lift yer kilt chopsticks!
Sun-rain-sky porridge: Peace in the oat and in the Earthly Bowl
from ‘A Family History in Porridge’
The terrific mother poem, ‘Taking my mother to the beach,’ is intimate, moving, sad. It is luminous with physical detail and has the incantatory drive that builds poetry. It is illness, it is connection, it is loss – both at a personal level and a wider global level. ‘Heritage’ can be maternal and it can be the beloved valley. Again there is the yarn (life? poetry? the world?) unravelling: the poem in which ‘the yarn unravels / along with we / will / when‘. And how crucial it feels when I read the poem embraces and presents ‘the heart of the family’. So poignant, so resonant, so touching.
This is the poem that chose to end in a coma; the poem resisting sterile light and the unbearable silence of asystole
This is the poem that conjures the long beach we loved to walk; the poem in which I take my mother’s arm and we face the ocean together
The land. How can we not speak of and for the land. How can we not write of and for the land? In this damaged and on-the-brink world? How can we write and speak of green fields and daffodils when our contemporary choices are unsustainable? Sophia weaves the thread, the weft and weave, of environmental challenge.
Sea Skins is a poetry collection that reveals and conceals, sings and mourns, challenges and lingers … long after you have put it down.
Sophia Wilson is an Australian-born writer and translator based in Aotearoa New Zealand where she runs a rural property and animal refuge with her partner and three daughters. Her poetry has appeared in journals and anthologies in Australasia and internationally, and won awards including the Robert Burns Poetry Competition, the Hippocrates Prize, and the Caselberg Trust International Poetry Prize. In 2022 she was joint-winner of the inaugural Flying Islands Manuscript Prize. More at here
Claire Orchard reads from Liveability, Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2023
‘Where duty lies’
‘December’
‘Our son of eighteen summers’
‘When I bring up advance care planning’
Claire Orchard (she/her) lives in Te Whanganui-a-Tara. Her second poetry collection, Liveability is now available from your local independent bookstore or direct from the publisher Te Herenga Waka University Press.
It’s getting colder as the flames rise from the bonfires, real and virtual. See how they flicker in the darkling air.
What’s sending up such enormous sparks? Lines that once lasted a lifetime. Look, they show up clear, then disappear.
Here’s one: I have measured out my life with coffee spoons. And another: A squirt of slippery Delight. Now they’re coming thicker, faster.
Which watch not one another out of fear. The art of losing isn’t hard to master. You don’t want madhouse and the whole thing there.
A charred scrap settles on my hand (Belinda smiled and all the world was gay) flares for a second, is whirled away.
Eventually the ice will calve and dissolve; the bonfires fade and crash.
Harry Ricketts
Harry Ricketts has published around 30 books, including literary biographies, personal essays and twelve collections of poems (most recently, Selected Poems, Te Herenga Waka Press, 2021).
The novelist is about to step out onto the unknown ground that is every new book. She will make up characters and a setting and a plot and walk about in the imaginary land that always lies just offshore, alongside reality. She has no idea if her story will work. It’s always a bit of a gamble. Maybe making things up will feel ridiculous, irrelevant before the online deluge of fact. Maybe she’ll lose her nerve. Maybe her imagination will fail her, her characters will dwindle to dots. Maybe she will be be unable to settle to the daily grind at the computer, distracted by the news reports and their insistence on failure, collapse, shambles.
from ‘The Frame’
Fiona Farrell’s writing has enthralled and inspired me from the moment I fell into the freshness and delight of TheSkinny Louise Book in 1992. Since then I have devoured her poetry, her novels and her nonfiction. Her writing prompted by the Christchurch earthquakes was humane, lyrical, layered and so utterly necessary. When I think of Fiona’s writing, I am reminded of the power of books, regardless of style or genre, to move us, nourish us, to challenge without ever losing touch with both heart and mind.
I recently read an essay in The New Yorker by a disgruntled critic who poured a wet blanket over our contemporary enchantment with and cravings for stories and storytelling. We are besotted with story. And yes, a story might not have the power to dismantle global warming or feed the hungry or put an end to violence, yet stories have mattered and continue to matter. It matters that the awkward child picks up the picture book and sees an awkward child dressing in a sparkling dress or singing out of key or kicking a football through a hoop. Or reading a book in a nest for an elephlion. It matters that I read stories that entertain me, lift me out of despair and maybe signal choices for the good of the planet. It matters that I can step into other points of view, close to mine, or at arm’s length. As the film-directors, the Tavianni brothers exclaimed when they first saw themselves and their stories reflected on the Italian cinema screen: ‘Cinema or death!’ We tell stories from the moment we get out of bed; to ourselves, to each other, to our friends, family, doctors, politicians, to strangers. Some of us crave to write. We might be plagued with doubt over sending our books in to the world and what difference that book will make. But stories represent how, where, who and why we are – and how, where, who and why we will or might be.
Fiona Farrell’s new novel, The Deck has made a difference to me.
The Deck steps off from Covid, borrowing the structure and motifs of Boccaccio’s The Decameron from the 14th century to re-present a novel that speaks from and to our contemporary plague. Boccaccio sets his novel, his sequence of stories and homage to the reach of storytelling, in the time of the plague in Florence. He opens with ‘La cornice’ (The frame), an autobiographical and nonfiction introduction to the scene and the situation. Fiona follows suit. I am catapulted body and heart to our time of Covid, to the new language that introduced bubbles and isolation, RAT testing and quarantine hotels, border controls and conspiracy theories, masks and hand sanitisers, the 1pm news gatherings and the daily statistics, teddy bears on fences and deserted city streets, online ordering and the stockpiling of flour and toilet paper.
For me, Fiona nails the uncertainty, the unreality and complexity of the situation, the daily reassessments and difficult choices, the willingness to work together for the good of the whole, the unwillingness by some to relinquish individual freedoms. The reevaluation of what mattered.
The Deck. When it looks like the country is about to collapse under another plague, Philippa makes a beeline for her beach house with her husband Tom and some friends. The retreat feels like a mini intermission, a temporary retreat from living in the thick of the plague, its consequences and the tough decisions. As in The Decameron, the group of friends pass the time drinking, eating, telling stories. So what stories get shared on the brink of catastrophe? In the frame story, Fiona speaks as the novelist, and asks what the point of writing fiction or a novel is, when the world is under multiple threats. She asks: ‘Is fiction no more than a brief solace, a distraction on our the way to our own extinction?’
On the third night, the friends debate China v America, war and famine issues, and then meander through best books, best movies (yes The Bicycle Thief!), places to visit, sports, philosophy. Each person takes a turn at spinning a yarn, drawing upon their own life, hinting at dark undercurrents, turning points, mis-turning points, yearnings. At times the story is a gut a punch to the listener, a secret revealed in public. Each story is headed by the epigraph: ‘A tale of one who, after divers misadventures, at last attains a goal of unexpected felicity.’
Ah. This is a book to read for yourself, to track and trace the impact on your own heart and mind as you are transported back to 2020 and the arrival of Covid, and into your own cache of stories, secrets and intimacies, your misadventures and felicities. I am struck by how we perceive things, how the protests at parliament were a sword in our side, when decades ago, the anti-Apartheid and Vietnam protests attracted so many more protestors. Ah. And how the image of the desecrated children’s slide at Parliament was so unfathomable. What on earth does this rebellious act stand for?
I am at the novel’s ending. I love the novel’s ending. I am transported back to the endings of post-war Italian neorealist films. I am there watching (think The Bicycle Thief and Rome, Open City) as the characters and a group of children walk down the road, down the road to the final frame, to the word HOPE, and even though I am wrung out and smashed to smithereens by planetary greed, I am strengthened by a collective impulse to write – as resistance, as solace, as illumination. There are multiple versions of who we are and there are multiple versions of who we might be. We need novels. We need stories. We need imagination and we need the mirror held up.
Fiona Farrell’s remarkable new novel, The Deck has made a difference to me.
Fiona Farrell, born in Oamaru, was educated at the universities of Otago and Toronto, and has published volumes of poetry, collections of short stories, non-fiction works, and many novels. Her first novel, The Skinny Louie Book, won the 1993 New Zealand Book Award for fiction. Other novels, poetry and non-fiction books have been shortlisted for the Montana and New Zealand Post Book Awards with four novels also nominated for the International Dublin IMPAC Award. In 2007 she received the Prime Minister’s Award for Fiction, and in 2012 was appointed an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to literature. The Broken Book, a book of essays relating to the Christchurch earthquakes, was shortlisted for the non-fiction award in the 2012 Book Awards and critically greeted as the ‘first major artwork’ to emerge from the event. Her work has been published around the world, including in the US, France and the UK.
a – wake – ( e ) nd, Audrey Brown-Pereira, Sau’foi Press, 2023
Audrey Brown-Pereira’s third poetry collection, a – wake – (e) nd, is a moving evocation of being, remembering and retrieving, of acknowledging and connecting. You move between fire and fever, ocean and silence, wind and light. There is breath and there is breathe and there is breathing.
Audrey is writing the girl, the woman, she is writing a constellation of selves, she is writing she and I and me and you and we. She is rendering the voice of the woman audible, the woman visible. She is recognising self within self, writing to remember, writing to ‘forget me (k)not’ as one poem is entitled. It is for daughters. It is for her. It is speaking in poetic form to and with and by and for whanua and family, for poetry lovers.
It is political and it personal. It is raising the red flag on climate change and the effect our choices have had and are having on the Pacific Ocean and its inhabitants.
Audrey resists a seamless word flow for both eye and ear. Open the collection and you will fall upon the spaces along the lines, the gaps, the clearings, the intake of breath. These might be registered as silent beats or as rich gatherings. The space becomes bridge between this word and that word, this feeling and that feeling, this recollection and that idea. It is musical – think syncopation, harmony, melody. It is daydream and it is sidetrack. I am (a)float on these islands of words.
And there we go – carried to the i (s) land. The fractured word re-forms to sing of self and belonging and again, yes, of being. The reverberations are there too in the title poem, ‘a- wake – (e) nd’. Both revitalised and reclaimed words are windows, doorways, exquisite pathways into the collection – this writing and this reading is an awakening. A reforming of self. There is pain and there is a slow vital spacing out of self. Think heart and think body. Think loved and loving and loved ones. The writing is awake to or with or for or by: she and I and me and you.
Find a copy of the book – nestle into the clearings – tune in your ear and your eye. Listen to Audrey read from the collection here. Follow the wind and the light, the ocean and the land, as you are embraced by the rhythm and melody and remembering. This is a glorious book of her, of making woman girl she present. It is voyage and epiphany and talisman. It is to hold close and breathe in. I love it. So very much.
Audrey Teuki Tetupuariki Tuioti Brown-Pereira (1975) is an innovative poet who plays with text on the page and words in the air/ear. Poetry collections include Threads of Tivaevae: Kaleidoskope of Kolours (2002) with Veronica Vaevae, published by Steele Roberts and Passages in Between I(s)lands (2014) with Ala Press. Born in the Cook Islands and raised in New Zealand, Audrey lives in Samoa with her family. She is a graduate of Auckland University and the National University of Samoa.
It nudges its long snout through the dappled curtains of time.
In a green light its teeth shine; they are sharpened emeralds
wanting, waiting and momentarily there is no longer snatch gob and grab –
there is only the soft rise and fall, the even breath of a sleeping ocean.
2
There was a perfect arch from hill to shining hill, the dark water between.
There was the smell of morning coffee, a warm cup and toast to ward off the autumn chill.
There is not one centimetre of human history in the kilometres of its eyes.
It would have sensed your uneven breath as you waited, warm and naked,
and as your rainbow body arched with love, it would have burst through the surface
of the ocean, its jaws stretched beyond lex talionis, beyond reason, streaming with saltwater, with lust.
James Norcliffe from Shadow Play, Proverse Press, 2011
Note
Over a dozen years ago, Vaughan Rapatahana prodded me to enter a manuscript for the Proverse Prize. Vaughan had entered the competition the previous year and had been a finalist and subsequently published by Proverse Press. His title was Home, Away, Elsewhere and Vaughan, an old friend and colleague from Brunei days, asked me to provide an introduction, which I was very happy to do. Proverse is a Hong Kong publisher run by expatriate New Zealander Gillian Bickley and her husband Verner Bickley. Apart from Vaughan they published the late Laura Solomon, another prize winner.
Accordingly, I submitted my ms Shadow Play which was a finalist and subsequently published by the press in 2011. I am very fond of this book, which, I feel, contains some of my best work. Perhaps, in retrospect, publishing a collection in Hong Kong wasn’t the best strategic move as the book had only minimal distribution in New Zealand and very few if any reviews here.
I’ve chosen the poem ‘Ichthyosaurus’, originally published in Landfall. According to Richard Peabody of Gargoyle Magazine, who was one of a number who provided an encomium for the book, “(this) great poem exposes the slinky sinister undertow at work”. I imagine that is so. Many of the poems are layered and built on anxiety. We live near the sea, the sea where aeons ago the ichthyosaurus ruled. The imagined creature is pretty scary and not a bad – if over the top – simulacrum of our modern anxieties.
James Norcliffe is an award-winning writer of poetry and fiction and an editor. His eleventh collection of poetry Letter to ‘Oumuamua was published this year by Otago University Press. he has written many novels for young people and his novel for adults The Frog Prince was published last year by Penguin Random House. In 2022 he was awarded the Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement for Poetry and this year was awarded the Margaret Mahy Medal.
Favourite poems is a series where poets pick a favourite poem from their own backlist and write a note to go with it.
Megan Kitching reads from At the Point of Seeing, Otago University Press, 2023.
‘Headland’
‘Crematorium’
‘Houseplants’
Megan Kitching holds a PhD in English Literature from Queen Mary University of London, looking at the influence of the natural sciences on eighteenth-century poetry. She has taught English and creative writing in the UK and at the University of Otago. Her poetry has been widely published in Aotearoa New Zealand and international journals. In 2021, she was the inaugural Caselberg Trust Elizabeth Brooke-Carr Emerging Writer Resident. Her debut poetry collection is At the Point of Seeing (Otago University Press, 2023).
We walk into the light inside the poem we have become, inside the house of poetry. Your words flying to each other with astonishing ease, a constellation in the world-sky, the moon a perfect accomplice.
Michael Harlow
Michael Harlow has written 14 books of poetry, and was awarded the prestigious PrimeMinister’s Award for Literary Achievement for Poetryin 2018. In 2014 he was awarded the Lauris Edmond Memorial Prize for distinguished Contribution to New Zealand Poetry. He was awarded the Katherine Mansfield Menton Fellowship to France in 1987. He lives and works in Central Otago as a writer, editor, and Jungian Therapist.
oh Frances bright wings at the corner of the barrel vault against a blue Tuscan sky
or that big purple octopus curving along the underside of the pontoon where you wait for the ferry that will bring you to Devonport a big purple octopus for the start of rehearsals wind and weather never looked better
and then there were the summer lunches breezes on the deck cuisine straight from the garden crisp white wine cat monitoring dog then into the car or the swim at Onetangi
island life its purple octopuses and banked tomato plants in cans clear white wine and zucchini fritters surrounded by golden flowers
here
bells pealing from a dark throat in the tītoki
here
sticky white flowers pelting the deck
here
a fantail hopping about in the yellow ginger
I come down the steps counting to fifteen and we make a progress around the garden arm in arm feet cool in the damp grass of the oncoming evening here is Senhor Palm his thick trunk one of two shooting four metres into the sky chinks below him the heliconia almost in flower bright red bract about to unfold two more palms though one is ragged and may have to go pink banana flowers so beloved of birds a leaf the length of my arm torn into soft strips then the four beds of provender wilding coriander basil coming on in ordered rows beans out of control on their towers bull’s horn peppers curling from stalks that can barely hold them three tomatoes from Taranaki seed sweet green shishito peppers for pan-frying feathery thyme clinging to fingertips then the feijoas and the disreputable bird of paradise whose days are numbered but not the cannas waving their red flags in a bundle of green spears the tall ginger plant with ivory flowers yellow and orange on the inside the boxed fig tree branching out tiny fruits on its extremities and the soft new foliage of the tītoki where berries of red and black are forming and the tūī comes to dive for insects in the evening air we circle back across the grass to the steps and ascend listening to water pattering below
Michele Leggott
Michele Leggott’s eleventh poetry collection, Face to the Sky, was published recently (Auckland University Press). Her selected poems, Mezzaluna, was co-published in 2020 by Wesleyan and Auckland University Presses. Earlier titles include Vanishing Points (2017) and Heartland (2014), both from Auckland University Press. She is working on a study of archival poetics, provisionally titled ‘Groundwork: The Art and Writing of Emily Cumming Harris’. Michele Leggott co-founded the New Zealand Electronic Poetry Centre (nzepc) with fellow poet and librarian Brian Flaherty in 2001. She was the New Zealand Poet Laureate 2007–2009 and received the Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement in Poetry in 2013. In 2017 she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand.
We, the poetry communities in Aotearoa, are heart-smacked, gut-punched, unbearably sad, at the news that Paula Harris is no longer with us. Poets and friends are sharing personal heartbreak and pain on social media. It is a time to remember a woman whose poetry touched us, whose ongoing struggles with depression touched us, who wrote and spoke publicly of her illness, whose wit and sense of humour touched us.
Paula won the 2018 Janet B. McCabe Poetry Prize and the 2017 Lilian Ida Smith Award. Her writing was published in various journals, including Hobart, Berfrois, New Ohio Review, SWWIM, Diode, Poetry NZ Yearbook, The Spinoff and Aotearotica. Her essays have been published in The Sun, Passages North, The Spinoff and Headlands: New Stories of Anxiety (Victoria University Press).
Poetry Shelf is offering some of Paula’s poetry as a tribute. I hold out her words as a way to remember. I am mindful of a need to support each other, to open a space for connection, and it feels like poems have the power to do this. In 2019 I hosted an event at Palmerston North Library, where a bunch of local poets came together to celebrate Wild Honey, and more importantly, the writing of women across decades, across communities. It reminded me that poetry is always a cause for celebration. Even when it is laying down challenges, speaking of tough things, getting complex and difficult, opening up self. It is sound and it is heart and it is interlaced. Paula Harris was part of this poetry embrace. I am remembering this. Today I am holding her poetry close. In grief and in aroha.
everything changing
I never meant to want you. But somewhere between the laughter and the toast the talking and the muffins somewhere in our Tuesday mornings together I started falling for you. Now I can’t go back and I’m not sure if I want to.
from woman, phenomenally
If you love me you’ll buy Bluff oysters and cook asparagus. Even though I don’t like either.
for Kirsten Holst, for feeding me many good things and for Alison and Peter, for their Bluff oysters and asparagus
When I am no longer who I was I can only hope that I will be loved by someone so much that every day during Bluff oyster season they will buy me a dozen Bluff oysters.
Even though they don’t like Bluff oysters they will buy them for me and every day I will exclaim “I can’t even remember the last time I had Bluff oysters!”; they will nod at the extreme length of time it has been.
When I am no longer who I was and when Bluff oyster season is over I can only hope that I will be loved by someone so much they will cook me freshly picked asparagus every day.
Even though they don’t like asparagus they will grow it for me and pick it for me and lightly steam it so that I can relish it served with hollandaise sauce (although some days more lazily served with butter and lemon).
I will eat it with my fingers and let the sauce (or butter) dribble down my chin; no one will mind or tell me to be less messy it will just be moments of edible joy.
In reality I don’t like Bluff oysters (or any oysters) and I can’t stand asparagus (the taste and texture are disturbing); I can only hope that maybe someone will love me enough to buy and cook me the things that I love even though they hate them, even though I won’t remember.
First published on Poetry Shelf
Our House
The roof drips rain beside my bed The shower curtain hangs torn from a ring The gate creaks unprotected from the wind
No drawers in the kitchen A gap in the toilet window A half-painted rainbow on my wardrobe
Our house is beautiful
First published in Spin 31 (1998)
Herakles phones the depression helpline at 1am, exhausted from crying and the inside of his head
it is easier to fold a fitted sheet than to get help from the depression helpline easier to fold a fitted sheet with a partner who doesn’t listen to instructions easier to fold a fitted sheet with one hand easier to fold a fitted sheet made of damp tissue easier to fold a fitted sheet while balancing one-legged on the end of a crocodile’s snout easier to arrange finance and buy a fitted sheet factory and deal with the folding en masse of fitted sheets than to get help from the depression helpline
they tell him to take up a hobby to have a cup of tea to get some sleep
he folds into himself, holding the corner of a sheet in one hand folds into himself and balances one-legged on the end of a crocodile’s snout
The wise woman sits in the shade With stuffing peeping out from her chair, Looking like a watercolour of the writer In her wide-brimmed straw hat Dark glasses And flower-laden dress, While a black kitten plays In her tossed aside straw bag. Watching her through an open window, With bees playing in the lavender bush And spiders weaving their homes, This is where she belongs At the bottom of the garden In full bloom.
today an editor told me that what I write isn’t poetry and so maybe I don’t know how to write a poem but I was thinking about you and wanted to write something; so here is your something
you are the bath filled with green marbles I slip into at night to wash myself
you are the letterbox overflowing with sleeping ladybirds I check compulsively for mail
you are the curtains of pink candyfloss I pull closed after the moon comes up
you are the couch made of turnips I lie on as I wait
you are the carpet made of ripe figs I dance over on summer mornings
none of this makes sense so it’s possibly a poem none of this makes sense so
you are the wheelbarrow full of silver bullets I feed to the garden to make it grow
First published in Leon Literary Review 2020
2019 Palmerston North Library and the writers: Johanna Aitchison, Paula Harris, Thom Conroy, Paula King, Helen Llehndorf, Marty Smith, Hannah A Pratt, Jo Thorpe, Janet Newman, Paula Green and Tina Makereti.
2019 Palmerston North Library: Paula Harris, Paula Green and Paula King
sharing the good stuff
my mother always told me i had to save my good stuff keep it for another day
so my prettiest colouring books went uncoloured my toys sat on their shelf
her best dresses stayed in plastic her engagement ring hidden in its box
what my mother never learned was that if you save your good stuff for too long one day there’ll be no one to share it with you
First published in Spin 32 (1998)
chamomile and lemon balm
in need of some healing i drive and drive until i reach a brick pathway lined with lavender gently waving and bobbing as i pass by. i sit on a bench resting my feet on the chamomile floor and i breathe. a honey coloured angel lays her head on my knee while i scratch behind her ears and i breathe. and when i have breathed enough i walk back the sea of lavender parting before me my angel loping behind me and i smile.
First published in Spin 33 (1999) Also published in Poems in The Waiting Room (2012)
The Twelve Lightbulbs of Janet Frame
I saw her in the supermarket driving a runaway trolley that dodged and charged imaginary opponents
I wonder if she was writing, paused in the frozen foods between the chicken legs and the harassed mothers
people want to know – what was she buying microwave lasagna, toilet paper, mouldy French cheese, canned spaghetti and sausages, sugary cereal, green tomatoes?
a dozen lightbulbs was all she had; maybe they were on sale super coupon special, maybe she only buys them once a year, maybe they all just blew at once like mine do
in 1945 Dr Lorand Julius Bela Gluzek of Cleveland, Ohio developed a dolorimeter which could measure pain in grams so maybe the weight I gained on antidepressants wasn’t from sadness and an increased appetite but my organs and glands – thyroid, pancreas, lungs, adrenal glands, ovaries, stomach, hypothalamus – each getting heavier from the consumption of black bile
the weight of the water inside the mouth of a blue whale can weigh more than the whale itself so if I dive into the ocean and convince a blue whale to swallow me I will leave my sadness on its tongue and be weightless
First published in Anomaly 2021
home
even though the sign says there’s still 27 kilometres to go on the horizon i can see a halo at the bottom of storm clouds
through the driver’s window the halo spreads into a line of orange light
closer now until the line becomes disjointed into orange street lights and white house lights and one of those is home
You can find a number of essays by Paula at The Spinoff
Paula’s friend Anna Sophia remembers her extraordinary talent, wit, bravery and heart at The Spinoff.
Read this poem: “when I was fucking a lot of men when I was 19 and 20 (and 18, and 21) I was fully aware that it was partly because I love sex and partly because–having grown up being told I am unlovable–I crave that feeling of being wanted, even for a few hours” at Passage North 2023
NZ Poetry Shelf 