THE BALLOON

Before it arrived, I dug up my garden. 
I poured seeds over the new landscape; 
packets that said ‘Wild Flowers of the World’, 
‘Carpet of Blue’. My neighbour’s flax bushes 
rustled and laughed. It seemed like I was 
planning to build, dirt lines in a row.  

Sedge remains blew across the ground
from the pile where I raked them. I thought of 
my hair, single strands, pulled from brush pins and 
moved over the floor by a vacuum with no suck. 
Lurking in every corner of my bathroom. 

I had ripped each native tree from the earth
to plant my flowering weeds. 
The sun reflected on the tawa leaves  
as if they knew that in time they would burn,
browned and curled in like wet receipts. 
Their light a final scream at what I had done.

I wiped my hands on my jeans, but a coat
of smog had stained my fingers. Under the tap
it streamed down my arms. 
Drops grew on my elbows, my garden’s blood.
A bird in the cabbage tree next door 
chimed and I jumped: cold, caught. 

I made out my neighbour, over twisted wire,
walking towards me, across his yard. It had to be,
cricket hat protruding from his head, dark smudge
above his lips. ‘Bury the evidence’ was my instinct.
“I’m going to cry,” he muffled from afar.  

There was to be no song and dance, 
was my second thought. I would tell him
I was building a new veranda. I listened back
in on the world as my neighbour said “sky”. 
Repeated, “Look at the sky.” He pointed
behind me, arm veins like raised rivers on a globe.

It floated between our two yards; purple and 
rubber I could smell; big as my neighbour’s yacht;
shadow a grounded kite, a hole to sink all my mess. 
Like a bruise on a sick man, skin greyed, 
coming up after falling from a height. 

Unlike my garden, now a pit that would 
only grow weeds, the balloon was marvellous 
and my neighbour laughed. I imagined setting 
it on fire: smiling, clutching gold. 
An enemy’s head.

Tessa Keenan

Tessa Keenan (Te Ātiawa) is from Taranaki and now based in Te Whanganui-a-Tara. You can find her writing in various Aotearoa publications including AUP New Poets 10, The Spinoff and Starling.