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Poetry Shelf Monday poem: Rosina Baxter and Amy Marguerite’s ‘Pathetic Fallacy’

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Pathetic Fallacy

The rain is falling hard on the farm today
We’ve just messaged about loving older humans
How it’s true that age is just a number
How we want the whole world (two people) 
To eat our truth.   But how?
At noon certain numbers make a nation 
Sigh in unison
In the morning certain numbers make a city
Take out their thickest coat
At midlife certain numbers make a person 
Wistful for the bygone.
My grandmother is watching the kārearea soar 
Across the valley on warm spring waves
We give our lovers nicknames 
Like birds giving each patch of air a wing.
Punching my keyboard I ask is there is a way
to give without giving everything?  
I can’t help but think we are the kārearea
Our lovers the old ones watching 
Us soar, somewhere, like eyelashes
Licking golden cheeks 
Watching us watch the whole world
Watch each other 
For the wrong kind of answer.

Rosina Baxter and Amy Marguerite

Rosina Baxter is an emerging poet and songwriter who has used written word as personal catharsis from a young age. She is a regular performer at Poetry Live on Karangahape Road, she narrates poetry and prose for Passengers Journal, and has recently been published in Tarot Magazine.

Amy Marguerite is a poet and writer of non-fiction based in Te Whanganui-a-Tara, Wellington. Her poetry has featured in a number of journals and literary magazines, most recently the Food Court S08E01 zine. She is currently working alongside Rosina toward a collaborative collection of poetry. 

Poetry Shelf Monday Poem: Carolyn DeCarlo’s ‘The Opposite of Animal’

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The Opposite of Animal

It takes a fine level of awareness,
pulling one’s weight from the house
to the car, from the car to the supermarket
then back inside the car, down the street
to the hair salon, back into the car.
Down the motorway to the Kmart,
the car dealership, the brunch on the waterfront,
across town back to the movie theatre,
back home to dinner,
heating soup and toast on the stove,
climbing the stairs one by one,
being pushed aside by pets
passing one by one on the stairs,
dragging wet noses across
the chairs, the duvet cover,
inserting themselves into windows,
under carpets, inside closets,
and springing, always springing out
in varying levels of attack,
grins on their faces for the joy of it,
the sheer high of overturning the master,
if only to shift the balance for a second.

It takes awareness to centre one’s life
around the less fortunate,
those with fur and claws and wet mouths
whose daily glory revolves around the master.
Measuring food into small bowls like party snacks,
placing them at acceptable heights
around the kitchen and the bedroom,
vacuuming up crystals and muddy paw prints,
sweeping fur across the linoleum
and out the door, with the dog, ready for walkies.
In a moment of trauma, the pet will hide
behind the figure of the master.

A knock at the door or a dropped teacup
sends the whole house scurrying
back, folding in, listening in anticipation
of the master’s reaction. 
The reality of being called the master
implies an innate sense of false equality –
a lack of awareness of power bordering on
ignorance – an alternative so denigrating
one might forget one’s own competence
and begin to seek the pet for protection.

Carolyn DeCarlo

Carolyn DeCarlo is a queer writer living in Aro Valley, Te Whanganui-a-Tara, with seven other mammals. She runs Food Court Books and We Are Babies Press with her partner Jackson Nieuwland. Her chapbook-length collection ‘Winter Swimmers’ was featured in AUP New Poets 5. She also co-wrote the chapbook BOUND: an ode to falling in love (Compound Press 2014).

Poetry Shelf Monday Poem: Johanna Aitchison’s ‘WHO DOES ANNA THINK SHE IS?’

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WHO DOES ANNA THINK SHE IS?

Anna walks with wire
in her spine.

No one mentions the spine
wire, they just say,

“We call her Porcupine;”
or “You talking about Spiny?”

Overhead, cut-out birds
turn to ash

on powerlines. No one suspects
hidden spines are the cause of

Anna’s Olympic-
level ungratefulness. Perhaps

it’s because she’s a palindrome
that she gets away with fire.

A reversible jacket
has an unfair red side. Anna is unfair

in the forest. She requests a
thousand pines for her

red birds. She asks that her birds
sleep on needles.

Johanna Aitchison

Johanna Aitchison has just finished her PhD thesis “Asserting and Locating Value in Contemporary Elliptical-Style Poetry” at Massey University. She was the Mark Strand Scholar at the 2019 Sewanee Conference in Tennessee and a 2015 Fellow at the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. She has published three volumes of poetry in New Zealand.

Poetry Shelf Monday poem: Frankie McMillan’s ‘Girls Raised by Swans’

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Girls Raised by Swans

We swim like foster children, our necks held high, we swim with open arms knowing water will always want us back, we swim like brides with beautiful feet, we swim like Russian thoughts.

We swim in caravans of water, we swim amongst floating chairs, a toaster, we swim with a lampshade on our heads and when the current surges west, we swim out into the open with the eels.

We swim like we are missed, we swim like we are bridled, we swim under bridges and when the boats come calling, we swim low, through scum, through ropes, we swim like rich people, always laughing.

Frankie McMillan

Frankie McMillan is a poet and short story writer who spends her time between Ōtautahi/ Christchurch and Golden Bay. Her poetry collection, There are no horses in heaven, was published by Canterbury University Press.  Recent work appears in Best Microfictions 2021 (Pelekinesis) Best Small Fictions 2021 (Sonder Press), the New Zealand Year Book of Poetry ( Massey University), New World Writing and Atticus Review.

Poetry Shelf Monday Poem: Vana Manasiadis ‘Skylla draws the planet as three lippy women’

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from one spark:
Skylla draws the planet as three lippy women

 

 

the planet as Klytaemnestra

 don’t shove you everywhere the tail yours        don’t
sear you the fish to the lips my                like the fish out
 of water                               δεν τρέμω         the fish stinks
 from the head             like the fish     σαν     out of water                
won’t cut I the throat my            το ψάρι     won’t lower
I the tail my           won’t shake like the fish I    

 

the planet as Medea

              show I the teeth my               
 squeeze I the teeth my
armed until the teeth  fight I
       with nails and with teeth   
 talk I inside from the teeth
talk I outside from
                                    the teeth                                   
  if don’t you have teeth
                   can’t you to bite
you can’t dodge this
    δράκου δόντι να’χεις δεν γλιτώνεις
not even with a dragon’s tooth

 

the planet as Antigone

from one spark grows a bushfire
 put I the hand           to the fire
     from one spark
είμαι                grows a bushfire
am I lava                     and fire
 the eyes my         throw sparks
                      fall I        
                  φωτιά     to the fire
the eyes                   my
                                     throw sparks
grab I the fire              και
                              put I the hand
   λάβρα                   to the fire
grab I the fire                  am I lava             
 lava                           am I and fire
and fire                   

Vana Manasiadis

Vana Manasiadis is a Greek-New Zealand poet and translator born in Te Whanganui-a-Tara and based in Tāmaki Makaurau after many years living in Kirihi Greece.  She is 2021 Ursula Bethell Writer-in-Residence at Te Whare Wanaga o Waitaha Canterbury University. Her most recent book was The Grief Almanac: A Sequel (Seraph Press).

Poetry Shelf Monday poem: Elizabeth Welsh’s ‘all the intertidal meadows’

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all the intertidal meadows

 

my therapist casually suggested that I embody seagrass; this seemed dangerously close to social prescribing, but I had been reading Fontaine with its daymares repeatedly that autumn, together with articles on forest bathing, which seemed earthy, hungry, darkly prescient, so I experienced the briefest of pauses before I embraced it, placing a dark halo over a quivering body evolved from terrestrial plants, returning to the wide-open space of underwater hollows, to silence, to quaking, glittering light. they have flowers and seeds and roots and leaves and connective tissues; they have ribboning foliage, holding firm in built-up silt on tidal flats.

when we found the audio recorder we wanted to buy, the sales assistant outlined the different ways I could record conversations, as if this was the object’s sole purpose. I thought about the taking of another’s voice, the permission we were granting ourselves to grasp the sung shrieks of grass, and I turned to look at your mended lips, reading their unhurried movement. we took the handheld recorders into the soft carpet marsh of the wetlands, stopped our footfalls and created slight archives of our meagre silence, our scant pause. you were annoyed when I interrupted to ask how we define aural stimulus; but what is noise and what is sound? is there a moment – a blurred boundary? is a sound always so fitfully tender and sinking?

your lungs of clay heaved with the cold and unsympathetic air, my tendons stretched, elastic over our loud together loneliness. if you took a diecut mould and used it on me, you’d find: there’s your body and hers and safe and hard and compost and squeaking tedium and peaty soil; there’s microbes and knuckles and luminescence and practice and precarity and crushing blends of all this. we sign up for a noxious plant maintenance scheme when we leave via the ranger’s hut, and she informs us that it is mainly cordgrasses that we will be tackling. they strangle the groundcover, she murmurs earnestly, and we know to nod many times and make appropriate noises. all the intertidal meadows are swollen, she grows tiny as she talks, and I struggle to lip-read what she’s saying as she moves closer and closer to the compressed, rising earth

Elizabeth Welsh

Elizabeth Welsh is a poet, papermaker and academic editor. She is the author of Over There a Mountain, published by Mākaro Press in 2018. Her poetry has been published in New Zealand and the United Kingdom, and she is Auckland Council’s Artist in Residence for 2021, creating site-specific poetry and handmade paper on/from the wetlands at Āwhitu Regional Park. She lives in Titirangi with her husband and daughter.

Poetry Shelf Monday Poem; Lynn Davidson’s ‘Lineage’

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Lineage

I was nine months pregnant, and waiting, when the man in the

Taranaki airport shop snapped this isn’t a library you know,

and when I turned my great belly full of fingernails and teeth-in-bud

towards him he asked (hotly) if I was actually going to buy anything.

The baby made exclamation marks with its soft bones,

glared with its wide open eyes – two Os.  No I said I won’t buy

my news from you. Above the town, Mount Taranaki blazed red and then

in the quick cold dusk, the plane with my parents in, touched down.

That night the child swung from its treehouse to the tree

and climbed through me to my mother’s hands and with its

persimmon tongue brought us stories (both good and terrible)

from this world, and the other one.

Lynn Davidson

Lynn Davidson’s latest poetry collection Islander is published by Shearsman Books and Victoria University Press. She had a Hawthornden Fellowship in 2013 and a Bothy Project Residency at Inshriach Bothy in the Cairngorms in 2016.  In 2011 she was Visiting Artist at Massey University. She won the Poetry New Zealand Poetry Award, 2020 and is the 2021 Randell Cottage Writer in Residence. Lynn has a doctorate in creative writing and teaches creative writing. She recently returned to New Zealand after four years living and writing in Edinburgh. 

 

Poetry Shelf Monday Poem: Natalie Morrison’s ‘Be the Building’

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Be the Building

Make sure you are in a comfortable

position. Steer your attention down

to your foundation piles.

Sense your I-beams, your

cross-braces. Let your elevators

rise and fall in their natural rhythm.

You may feel your thoughts begin to wander

between floors and out into the street.

This is perfectly normal. I want you to accept

the drift of your thoughts, then gather them back

to their allocated desks. Just focus on the stillness.

Listen to the many keyboards inside yourself.

You might experience them as a ticking cavern

or a preschool armed with felted mallets.

Notice the shuffle of your thoughts in your internal

stairwells. There may be pigeons scribbling their nests

in your eaves, a fresh pucker in your wiring, burnt toast

on Level 7. Acknowledge these,

and try not to ask yourself

why your pipes

feel so water-logged

these days, or whether

it’s just a clump of thoughts

leaning on a wall.

Let your elevators rise

and let them softly fall.

Natalie Morrison

Natalie Morrison has an MA in Creative Writing from the International Institute of Modern Letters, where she received the Biggs Family Prize for Poetry in 2016. She lives and works in Wellington. Her debut collection Pins appeared in 2020 (Victoria University Press).

Poetry Shelf Monday Poem: Robert Sullivan’s ‘Dream’

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Dream

I woke with the birds.

We were on a bus somewhere in England,

a double-decker red one and the driver

turned up an arterial which had turned to grass.

He turned us around and took us commuters

in the reverse direction. We were working

our way through the contents of my soft

gym bag which was filled with beads,

shiny coins, and we’d piled them up on the bus floor

so a young boy with his parents sitting opposite us

dived into them before I could scoop them back.

I had asked the bus driver if he could let a passenger know

that they might miss their bus stop now that

we had changed direction, but he instead quoted

a lengthy passage of Shakespeare I think

in which he quoted owls do cry.

Robert Sullivan

Robert Sullivan lives in Oamaru. He belongs to Ngāpuhi (from Kāretu and Omanaia), and Kāi Tahu (Karitāne). His seven collections of poetry includeCaptain Cook in the Underworld, Shout Ha! to the Skyand the best-selling Star Waka. He co-edited three major anthologies of Pacific and Māori poetry. His PhD, Mana Moana, examines the work of five other indigenous Pacific poets. His eighth collection, Tūnui / Comet will be published by AUP later this year.

Poetry Shelf Monday poem: Ben Brown’s ‘Writing on the Moon’

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Writing on the Moon

Writing on the moon

with a feather dipped

in light

The sickle of

tomorrow’s sun

reflecting possibilities

The shadow of

the world defines

unlimited imagining

Ben Brown (2020)

Ben Brown (Ngāti Mahuta, Ngāti Koroki, Ngāti Paoa) was born 1962 in Motueka, which is further away from him now than he cares to think about. He has been writing all his life for his own enjoyment and published his first children’s book in 1991. He is an award winning author who writes for children and adults across all genres, including poetry, which he also enjoys performing. Generally, if pressed, he will have something to say about anything. In May 2021 he was made the inaugural NZ Reading Ambassador for Children – Te Awhi Rito. He is also a father of two, which he considers his best work to date. He lives in Lyttelton above a pie shop across the road from the sea.