broadsheet new new zealand poetry

Issue No. 22, November 2018

Editor: Mark Pirie

THE NIGHT PRESS WELLINGTON

/ 1 Contents copyright 2018, in the names of the individual contributors

Published by The Night Press

Cover image: Jeanne Bernhardt (photo) by Reindeer Girl

broadsheet is published twice a year in May and November

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ISSN 1178-7805 (Print) ISSN 1178-7813 (Online)

Please Note: At this stage no submissions will be read. The poems included are solicited by the editor. All submissions will be returned. Thank you.

2 / Contents

PREFACE / 5

SANDRA BELL / 6

JEANNE BERNHARDT / 9

JILL CHAN / 19

KAY MCKENZIE COOKE / 21

MICHAEL DUFFETT / 23

DAVID EGGLETON / 26

BERNADETTE HALL / 28

MICHAEL O’LEARY / 31

PETER OLDS / 32

MARK PIRIE / 34

JENNY POWELL / 36

RICHARD REEVE / 39

DAMIAN RUTH / 41

LAURA SOLOMON / 42

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS / 44

/ 3 Acknowledgements

Grateful acknowledgement is made to the editors and publishers of the following collections, where the following poems in this issue first appeared:

Jill Chan: Chan’s poems are from her collection, Becoming Someone Who Isn’t, published by Earl of Seacliff Art Workshop, 2007.

Michael O’Leary: ‘A Sonnet to Neve Te Aroha’ first appeared in the event programme/anthology The Kink Poetroversy: Winter Readings (ESAW, 2018) edited by Mark Pirie.

Damian Ruth: ‘An elusive scent’ appears in On Edge (HeadworX, Wellington, 2017).

4 / Preface

Jeanne Bernhardt (b.1961), a contemporary New Zealand writer, has published seven book of poetry and prose, and has travelled extensively, working both in New Zealand and overseas. In 1997 she was awarded the Louis Johnson New Writer’s Bursary from Creative NZ and in 2016 she received the Earl of Seacliff Poetry Prize. Since her emergence in the Dunedin pub scene of the early 1980s, she has forged a determined path staying true to her art. Early work of hers appears in Critic, Parallax and on a Dunedin poetry cassette directed by Luke Hurley. Hone Tuwhare was an early appreciator at the Cook pub readings. I first read her work in the mid-1990s in the Dunedin Radio One newspaper, which I read as a night shift DJ at Radio Active in Wellington. Jeanne’s poems like ‘Fast & Slow’ and ‘th sex taste’ stood out, and I was at the time founding/co-editing JAAM magazine and also putting together The NeXt Wave, a collection of (mostly) younger Aotearoa/New Zealand writers. She also appeared in Takahe and Poetry NZ during the ’90s and self-published the poem “Dereliction” and the book Vorare Lacuna (1996), an image/text collaborative work with a number of Dunedin artists. Jeanne continued to feature in JAAM and Takahe magazines over the next decade as well as publishing two books with my small press HeadworX: baby is this wonderland? (1999) and The Snow Poems/your self of lost ground (2002). She left New Zealand for the States, and then returned to publish a series of well-received books: The Deaf Man’s Chorus (poetry, ESAW), Wood (short prose), 26 Poems and Fast Down Turk (a novel), these latter three were with Dean Havard’s hand-printed Kilmog Press. Jeanne, a wholly individual artist, has long been admired by friends and writers in the Otago literary community. As a long-standing supporter, it gives me pleasure to feature her in broadsheet. Her writing is innovative, not afraid to take risks, and is energetic and highly charged. Jeanne’s work in this issue is gathered together like small, polished stones, heartfelt and sinewy. Minimalist in technique, emotionally tense and highly personal, they are finely wrought and beautifully constructed. As with previous broadsheet issues, some of Jeanne’s writing friends and editors appear here alongside her: Kay McKenzie Cooke, Michael O’Leary, Sandra Bell, Peter Olds, Jenny Powell, Richard Reeve, Bernadette Hall, David Eggleton, and myself. A couple of poets like Damian Ruth, Laura Solomon, the late Jill Chan, and Michael Duffett (USA) also appear in broadsheet outside of the main feature.

Mark Pirie Wellington, November 2018 / 5 Sandra Bell

H E R E D I T A R Y S E A T / P A T H

Seems I followed my mother down her path, the one from Rimu to Woodstock, with lupins, bracken and cicadas and yellow flowers, behind our family pub, to the schoolyard with Miss Alabaster,

to this hospital bed, on the 9th floor, Auckland Hospital. the pretty anaesthetist asks me what my favourite wine is, central otago pinot noir I say as she slips a needle into my pinot noir veins and I disappear...

I resurface in a spaceship of pain relief hurtling in slow motion through time. I listen to the Brian Eno CD Jay sent me through headphones, floating on the waves of music like Aphrodite on her shell.

I got a window seat, looking over what is left of Grafton then the old lady

6 / next bed’s visitors screech and argue, is this the way they tell her they love her? it brings me back to earth with a thud until robbed of my moment of drug inflicted joy, peace and tranquillity I have to ring my buzzer and complain.

Dianne drifts in carrying a red flower I look at a knitted toy of a little journeyman that Mrs D knitted, and imagine him on his own path – embarking on a long sea-journey in his small boat made of walnuts.

/ 7 K A I A N G A R O A S T A T E F O R E S T

The pines of my childhood, once beacons of infinity piercing the sky, have been churned into the earth, or carried to the other side of the world in deep boats. The houses are gone, relocated. the brown magpies hover. the forest has taken over again, the spirit trees hold the secrets of our old life evaporated in ether.

The coal range in winter, clothes drying on the rack, Mum cooking in her coloured piny. the kettle always boiling, my father coming home in his hobnail boots and brown corduroy trousers, smelling of pine, my sister and I in our pink room, with candlewick bedspreads and pink net curtains blowing in the afternoon breeze, behind the dresser with the magic mirrors you could manipulate to see the back of your head for infinity. my brother in his room reading The Little Red Schoolbook the sound of the pig dogs barking in the early morning, the hens pecking in the chook run, my beloved bush pigs in their sty. And the pine trees creek, march in lines into the mist .

8 / Jeanne Bernhardt

H E R E W H E R E I W A T C H T H I N G S

Sunlight early morning vibration what is a deeply lived life? there is wind in the trees and the moon Is it this? Is the question this morning even if I am changing is my heart moved by any kind he might say he doesn’t say so letting go of those things

Imagine a shot of spring on the table how the sun would light on it and it would be enough

/ 9 I T S G I V E N

Almost time now, soft winds and a flat sky, sword trees behind the sun, so many efforts to contend with, a day and its given This morning it was like that a call for truer feeling to fan into life returning marks a kind of presence being here I wake to myself and know it is not myself except to point the way I came and went, the unbounded thing in the loneliness, here on the porch grieves a little

10 / J U N E

It happens slow somebody else’s mother closing her wings on the sofa in the sun I feel my wings too with less light in them just enough to disappear and do not mind the leaving or the summing up of smallish things the sails of my goodbye carried silent and away

/ 11 A D E A D T H I N G

The activity of your difficult deal these branches clasp the mountain neither invite, nor prevent how do they do it – invest their hearts with light conversation? eyes separate, the not-told still there must stagger back this tin roof lifts the dark outside and I am breathless to speak to draw a world inside our room but there is no room here and on the street the same.

12 / T H E G O U R D H O U S E

Drunk, the dogs lost. pale fingernails and black hair. No mail but blue grapes, a garden of chilies. I nap on the concrete under a vine, the knots of green fruit, orange, yellow. Dream

Other people died in this house. The old woman made of iron The bright stars. We didn’t see them but they were here. Nothing is wasted. I think and think; it’s all true.

Her eyes like almonds, a thousand nights, I pat your shoulder Tell me again, tell me your way. The ungivable gift, or so I thought, watching you eat. There is no end.

/ 13 S M A L L B L U E S

Made of clay, an old mesa, am I making a mountain? I know you my dear this is the idiot self, the self trapped, perhaps it is not sad but these words are thin these words with two meanings in them mist shrouds the house drifts under the door to the broken armchair where you sleep But it was sweet tucking you in small blue shapes on our tongues Reid and Kava in the next room talking quietly

14 / A Y E A R

She has withdrawn behind her vault it is steel, cold to enter

She has sprung up again the air is soft. salt warm dust in the mail a pale pink ribbon

She is busy. It is the business of big events, prosperity far too much silliness to be around

She is pouring tea, outside a wind of wild leaves, inside hot tea and talk.

/ 15 S U N D A Y

I feel older a thousand miles distant will she wait for me? she is restless under order I spend my time banging on these walls

Sunday bells across the field the sun on snow her smile no need for pain

I stop for a moment quiet all through it is there

16 / O L D M A N S C A P

Tears drop on the old mans cap this final day of February the sky more open though spring still hides no matter what we hoped he always knew how much was ending snow buries the track the old stone walls buried with it

/ 17 S O M E P L A C E E L S E

Some place else you were gentle, said not so fast

I left what I was doing the small orange flowers and the mown grass

A window on the picture the sun closer

18 / Jill Chan

I N T H E F O R E S T

I stepped into the green wave of brushing hands.

The sun comes to those who stay to meet their silent self.

I fix a spot on the ground.

What I couldn’t mend, I fold into my hands.

Now the trees are playing shelter.

The sky is a window in an upturned land.

All reasons hang detached not attracted to why.

So much is about silence, how you slowly do mine.

Silence darting in the sun like needles of rain.

/ 19 Y O U W A N T T O P L A C E T H E S U N B A C K I N T H E S K Y

At least you know it is supposed to be in the sky.

You learn this by remembering the way you feel walking on the beach, your feet catch fire

and where is the sun?

Before long, you are too happy to notice.

And when you are at home, curtains drawn and you let a slant of yourself escape through the window, you know the sun is back in the sky.

20 / Kay McKenzie Cooke

I ’ L L T A K E I T

The sky wide, dumb, fly-blown with clouds that shift into the shape of rats. And this scrabbling nor’easter boxing on. The cough of traffic. The pot-lid scrape of a dog’s bark, the seagull’s swoon, the faraway chant of a lost plane. That crazed cobweb moving like a fretful face. The future grandchild still in the dark. I’ll take it all and the long unreplicated blue of a sky that when seen from the other side of the speed of light, does not exist.

/ 21 P U R P L E R O S E S O F G O R E

I lived in Gore back when Flemings Oat Mill made porridge, not pet food and you could smell the warm oats and the middle car parks hadn’t been replaced with hanging flower baskets and a concrete sheep and the library with its round, brick

walls was still the old library, not an art gallery and the old High School down by the Mataura was a theatre for plays. And still is. Gore has its points of interest; a fish, a styley clock with Westminster chimes, a hundred-something-year old ponderosa pine,

an aviary with a kea and a peacock. It has fashion and coffee shops and rugby-coach farmers with heavy fists clambering out of dusty utes to punch coins into the parking meter. It has purple roses.

22 / Michael Duffett

O N A N I D E A O F R O B E R T G R A V E S

When all, including admirals and bishops, Seem young, my dog is the only one worth Talking to, and he cannot reply, And if he could, his words would be devoid Of maritime or theological Technicalities, obscuring their meaning. So I talk to him and my neighbours May think me mad but he replies with his eyes And although he is only three years old (Twenty-one and mature in canine years) We have a dialogue that tells me more Of the mysteries of the sea or God Than any conversation with a prelate Or a longtime dweller on the ocean.

/ 23 W A I T I N G F O R T H E T R A I N

for Blake and Blaise

I have five hours to think about God When, according to Blake, I only need One, or to think about His primary Aspect, eternity. And, he tells us, Infinity is in a grain of sand. Now that our men of science have split Atoms more than mere protons and electrons, We have, we are told, neutrinos and There seems to be no end to it. Blake Seemed to know more than nuclear science And I sit here reading him with over An hour to enjoy, not just five times Eternity but the grain of sand And infinite spaces in my hand.

24 / P A R T I T I O N A N N I V E R S A R Y

Only the poets see the truth of things: Thousands of young Indians, their minds scarred By lines drawn on a map by a British Lawyer who left India for suburban Home counties two days after his pencil Had decreed bloodshed and havoc to a land To which he never returned. Auden Recorded it but the man who presided Over it and was shot decades later Never got a poetic moment, Until now, Lord Louis, as memorial. Radcliffe and Mountbatten, one in peaceful Suburbia and the other downed By an Irish mob, had colder blood Than those whom they parted.

/ 25 David Eggleton

H U R R I C A N E O D E

In a Honolulu diner before the hurricane, I am a big fan, all blades whirring, of Mexican ode poet Tabasco, so fiery, so spicy, so bitter, so sweet — senses compounded in one salt sob. I hiccup verbs, peppery with heat, confronted by fragrant tumble-down flowers yellow in blue sky glare, tropic bowers flashing like a mariachi band serenading, or a machete band harvesting sugar cane.

Swish, swish, swish goes the ceiling fan, steel brushes sounding on a snare drum. Coffee fountains from Americano valves. Nets dredge sea-beds and plonk contents gasping in the dark hold of Waikiki buses, watertight compartments in submarine dive. Pidgin vocabularies confound a slow moving traffic cha-cha with brazen horns. Sidewalks trickle a torrid sweatiness, through snail-smeared barometric dawn.

Cast-off cloth unbound, we clap hosannahs, hail the new thing, doff baseball caps to old. And surfers are summoned to snowy hills become liquid, where caps toss adrift in loss. Giraffe towers sway their hotel balconies. Hurricane Lane gathers ballooning clouds, butterflies, graveyards of plastic shards. The airborne Pacific Garbage Patch might fall skull-and-crossboned on sunken navy ships, and chase frail white herons to skulk inland.

26 / Wind wobbles a motor scooter’s hand-held ladder, the singing sirens of aimless ambulances. TV’s ‘Lane’ might be the revolving eye of a god, bringing rain heavy as fists, leaving bruises. I’m aghast at this forecast violent hurricano, this pressure drop, apocalyptic, slam-dunk; but what we get is only wild wind rush, a moody wind shear waterdrop slash-slash, and howls like orphans, widows, sisters sinister, the trees bucking like horses in a rodeo.

Resonances rumble that might be whale song. All bamboo stands are bent in a tight knot. Places are shuttered, their doors pulled taut. They look almost vacant. Busy spaces bolted. The wind yahoos and whistles; things clang. Pebbles uplifted fling against leprous walls. The building where we lodge wheezes and gasps; it lurches on foundations, each room booms. Waves from far away surge up like shock troops. Banshees on roofs rap out their mating calls.

Then, downtown’s freed by rainbow’s shine from you, desperado, monster of weather. The breaking up of the impossible dreamboat, who took each island by the gurgling throat. Yet your drops still bead me, trailing tendrils, and so I am prompted to pelagic memories. The mind has the eye of a hurricane at its centre, and the eye of the hurricane, has a drone at its centre, and the drone a mind at its centre, heading for open ocean.

/ 27 Bernadette Hall

K A I W H E K E A K A T I K I

‘I have begun making the creature, with her breastbone (how lovely) this did shed a little more light, even perhaps on the spookiness (of the place) and then there are the pages of the beach’ – Robyn Webster

THE GLIMPSE the curve of the bay, its lingering look towards the mountains THE GLIMPSE the pods swelling (like cocoons) THE GLIMPSE the chain (reaction) THE GLIMPSE the transformation of energy .. Pierre de Chardin THE GLIMPSE the straight loss of it THE GLIMPSE the strings (and who pulls them ) THE MAP just checking the co-ordinates

Te Moehau and the Raukumara Range the movements of the Kaikoura Orogeny the Two Thumb, Torlesse and Puketeraki ranges Thalia, the laughing muse, and Apollo, the guardian of colonists

WAIHEMO THE RIVER NGA MAUKA THEMOUNTAINS NGA MOREHU THE SURVIVORS

* we drive around the corner and the sea rushes into our eyes the blurry rush of flax and pine as taken in from the car window we take it in and we are taken in and then there’s the road sign gone all blurry all blurry due to our acceleration all blurry all blurry as we rush past it heading for heading for what heading for what what all blurry ———————————————EXIT ——————— (3rd person singular)——— he/she/it is leaving ————— EXEUNT OMNES ————(3rd person plural + adjective) —————they are all leaving ——— and we are left here —————————— WAVING waving waving

*

28 / and there you are, sister, an almost lizard, embedded beneath 20 tonnes of mudstone below a 10 metre cliff in a natural pose your bones dissolved the imprint preserved the shape your triangular head your short snout 80 teeth in each jaw forward facing eyes flippers that made flying movements in the water breathing the air through your lungs and giving birth to live offspring 70 million years ago so the air in the room is the water

* THE CONTOUR LINES like try pots (remember the whales)

Puketapu 343m Pukehiwitahi 227m Lot’s Wife 714m Swampy 733m The Sisters 661m + Sheepwash Creek + Moeraki + Middlemarch + Roxburgh

* the mantle of KATIKI the fortification the mantle of the field guide the mantle of the fuschia the mantle of the kanuka the mantle of the broadleaf and on the tops, the mantle of the silver tussock the mantle of the kerosene lantern

* ex-tinguo, ex-tinguere, ex-tinxi, ex-tinctum = to extinguish, to put out, like a fire or a flame extinctus est . it has been extinguished (of the Haast eagle) vox humanum .. the human voice (of the plesiosaur) silentium . the silence (of the huia)

* the TEstameNT of the LiZarDs and TheIR cerVical GirdleS

* to be emptied as the house is emptied as the street is emptied as the city is emptied as the forest is emptied as the country is emptied as the sea is emptied as the air is emptied as the planet is emptied as the atmosphere is emptied as we are emptied out

* / 29 OPEN THE DOOR IN THE SAND OPEN THE DOOR IN THE STONE OPEN THE DOOR IN THE OCEAN OPEN THE DOOR IN THE POEM OPEN THE DOOR IN THE SKY OPEN THE DOOR IN THE BONE

FIND ME

Footnote: Kaiwhekea Katiki : the name given to the almost complete fossilised remains of a plesiosaur discovered near Shag Point in North Otago. Bernadette Hall’s text derives from her collaboration with the multimedia artist Robyn Webster. Sculpture, visual imagery and words were incorporated in an exhibition Matakakea, Shag Point. (Ashburton Art Gallery Nov. 2015-Dec 2016)

30 / Michael O’Leary

A S O N N E T T O N E V E T E A R O H A for Jacinda & Clarke

Welcome to our world little child with the name of Neve A name evoking the fearless queen of Ireland, Meave And Te Aroha, the small town where your mother grew Into a fighter for love and justice for Aotearoa anew

The Irish and the Maori strands of history combine Following down a continuous and struggling line For justice and return of stolen language and land A fight against the odds, both ordinary and grand

Much of my own thinking and writing over many years Has sought to address these twin cultural arrears My novel: The Irish Annals of New Zealand and a song ‘Potatoes, fish and children’ also about writing wrong

So, little child lying peacefully in your mother’s cradling arms You carry a great tradition in your two names of cultural charms

Note: Jacinda Ardern, New Zealand’s Prime Minister, is only the second woman Prime Minister to give birth while in office.

/ 31 Peter Olds

S P O T T I N G B U K O W S K I

Now ... the Library Security walks slow like John Wayne has a face like Charles Bukowski is dressed in black like Johnny Cash but mostly looks like Charles Bukowski.

I come to the library every day hoping to find the perfect book the perfect DVD – and I am hoping Charles Bukowski will tap me on the shoulder and provide the answer to life’s hairy question and suggest he and I go watch some cricket on the big screen TV in the large print section – or get up to some mischief sharing a joint together in the disabled persons’ toilet – then hold a poetry reading in the elevator stuck between floors packed with shrieking teenage girls in school uniform biting their fingers ... 32 / It’s a scream coming to the library every day and spotting Bukowski on the stairs at the point where two shaky floors meet – where on the walls a Hotere and a McCahon appear to be the only thing holding the whole joint together.

/ 33 Mark Pirie

H U G H B E L L E R , T O J.

after I’d read it moved by it i had missed yr rhythms

yr touch of energy, yr language raw yet forceful

ebullient like the day blue and endless, a searing horizon

i felt you, disturbed as if in a dream the stars had risen over the night

cloudy, but symbolic then, i was ‘me’ again and ‘you’, yr story setting far away

Author’s Note: A version of ‘Hugh Beller’, short prose by Jeanne Bernhardt, written overseas in the States, appeared in JAAM 20 (2003), which I co-edited, and was later republished in her fiction collection, Wood (Kilmog Press, Dunedin).

34 / M I C H A E L J F O X

It’s what you learn after you know it all that counts

Michael J Fox mentions that and Parkinson’s being a gift. (Hard to accept what life reveals to you.) Fox now sees himself a better person and citizen supporting others.

My childhood was coloured by this Fox driving a DeLorean and riding a hoverboard or Alex in Family Ties on at night after school.

Pop culture too has a habit of showing its age.

A nervous twitch, a stammer. Yet, caring, we live and learn.

/ 35 Jenny Powell

C H A S I N G T H E S E L E N E L I O N

Selenelion, a mineral eye trick on nutrient highways where users cruise to health food nirvana, chanting their antioxidant mantra to the shake of pills in shaded plastic, selenium, selenium.

Selenelion, trip of the tongue on shrinking savannahs where sibilant poachers wade through revenue streams their shots supressed by silencers triggered between a heart beat, ‘se no lion ‘se no lion ‘se no lion.

Selenelion. Leak of sun ignites the moon in solar powered detonation. Skylights explode. Shards of stars perforate lunar flesh while close at hand, Mars the god of destruction, fails to render first aid. There’s no healing now. There’s no healing now.

Selenelion. Line up of celestial luminaries in cautious choreography. Spot-lit moon sinks on the western horizon, sun rises in the east and earth poses in a tense mise-en-scene; scene-elion, scene-elion.

Set in the Book of Fate, lunary devices share answers to hope, bound in history’s lunacy. Magical alchemists announce preparations for fiery transmutations of silver to gold. Such belief neglects the shadow. Selenelion. Selenelion.

36 / T H I S I S N O T O P H E L I A

Floating in the air of her dress singing in the language of flowers her hair branches toward the willow hands rise in cupped communion her eyes are empty.

Clothes folded on the floor spectacles on the basin water rises with her weight. This is not Ophelia. Do you hear me? She is not her.

Breasts protrude from surface skim on top of each a rough fruited nipple pinned like a broach body and water a shared skin. I am telling you. She is not who you think.

Cupped hands lather liquid soap for absolute cleansing branches of veins dilate in her legs feet sink like rocks in a river’s bed. Do you hear me? This is not Ophelia. She is not her. She floats in a white tomb her radio sings from the kitchen her eyes are empty.

/ 37 P O S T I T

Post modernism Post certainty Post freedom

Post bail Post caution Post conditions

Post dated Post deadline Post mortem

Post pone Post sweat Post jogging

Post touch Post tender Post online

Post paper Post letter Post post

Post it notes Post memory Post importance

Post actual Post sensory Post truth

38 / Richard Reeve

P O S T S

Ever incomplete, always another thing to do, the hole dug, piles set in the clay, pug flattened with a foot in a boot on a spade, jolt nails skew-driven from bearer to pile, joist to bearer, the building a river, its boulders posts, planks, beams, purlins, wood submerged in the flow, nothing is still, the saw cuts, the hammer hammers, angles are drawn across the timber with elemental precision, their corners parting the torrent that floods into space, only at night, when the last nail has been driven in, at rest after the swollen current of the day, one may be forgiven for supposing the river has made peace with itself.

*

Something very old. From my back door I look over a skeleton I have assembled, wood resting on wood, my construction older than Jericho, than writing, filaments of ten thousand seasons past taut in a purlin hung across the rafters,

I witness a first capitulation of nature repeated and repeated with each advance, in the brace’s bolt suppression of an instinct

/ 39 to part company with the unrelenting other, propositions, incubations, assessments, I follow acutely the travesties of the past

in a grain of wood, am mindful of residence where weight leans against the prejudice of itself, propping up assumptions to fix the flux.

U N D E R T A K I N G S

i.m. John Dickson (1944-2017)

We worked out costs for death in supermarkets, you with your new profession, and later me, exchanging figures by the pasta packets, propounding the inherent lottery.

First librarian, then an undertaker, alive to loss, you talked of death aglow, reported on the trials of Homo sacer in poems sympathetic yet heigh-ho.

This being your undertaking, to talk death with the unswerving voice of a lover, sing life unlived, poke gentle fun at breath, be at peace with the light of being over;

and now your fire is out, poems remain, the ashes of your life called to account. We undertake to marshal your disdain and pay your debt, whatever the amount.

40 / Damian Ruth

A N E L U S I V E S C E N T

There’s a scent on Table Mountain whose source I sought for years until it slowly dawned on me that I would never find it. It’s a bit of this and a bit of that scattered over rock and thorn and soft green grass.

There’s a narrative in the search I’m sure – I now attempt combinations, and hope that soon I’ll have a whole slope of Table Mountain in my bedroom and then present one special day the woman I love with a bouquet.

There’s a tinge of sadness in the story, a wan nostalgia that soothes and irritates, a compulsion to luxuriate in a pessimism about which one has no real conviction and in the face of which I am terrified. It’s so easy to be forlorn, and kind towards one’s own well-worn failures to realise that an elusive scent is just that.

/ 41 Laura Solomon

B U I L D I N G W H A R F

‘I don’t knock myself out’ he said. ‘Mostly I just tinker.’ He was at it for six months. The wharf was a monolith – a construction made of wood and plastic that jutted out into the water.

My father is an engineer – the wharf bore the hallmarks of his design. It floats upon the water – and will float there after his death, a momento.

It’s something for his grandchildren to play on or dive off if they are game enough into the murky waters down, down, into the tangled weeds.

It’s an entity for the ducks to perch on squawking to each other in their own special language duck-speak, unintelligible to the human ear.

My father takes pride in the wharf. It’s a retirement achievement a man needs hobbies

to keep himself busy. We all know what happens to idle hands. Heaven forbid.

42 / The devil should take his at this stage of life.

I made a special trip to the family farm to see the wharf to find inspiration for this poem.

I found what I was looking for. A poem in the form of a jetty. Jutting out into the water – solid for generations to come.

/ 43 Notes on Contributors

SANDRA BELL is an Indie musician living in Auckland with musical releases in USA, Belgium, France, Germany, Italy and NZ. Her 2nd album NET was rereleased in New York this year. Her poems have been published in Poetry New Zealand, Landfall, Percutio, Phantom Billstickers and Café Reader. JEANNE BERNHARDT is the featured poet in this issue. See preface on p.5. JILL CHAN, an Auckland poet b.1973 from Manila, died this year. Chan’s poems are reproduced in memory of her. She published poetry and prose, and Jeanne Bernhardt designed the cover for her first book The Smell of Oranges in 2003, published by Earl of Seacliff Art Workshop. KAY MCKENZIE COOKE lives and writes in Dunedin. She is a published poet and has recently completed a novel set in Southland, ‘Craggan Dhu’. MICHAEL DUFFETT was born in wartime London, educated at Cambridge and has been a professor and poet all over the world. He is currently Associate Professor of English at San Joaquin Delta College in Stockton, California. DAVID EGGLETON has had eight books of poems published. His new collection is Edgeland, published by Otago University Press this year. BERNADETTE HALL, author of 11 collections of poetry, received The Prime Minister’s Award for Poetry (2015). In 2016 she was awarded an MNZM for her services to literature. MICHAEL O’LEARY, a Paekakariki writer, publisher, performer and bookshop proprietor, recently had his autobiography Die Bibel and Collected Poems published by Steele Roberts and HeadworX respectively. Michael published Jeanne Bernhardt’s The Deaf Man’s Chorus (ESAW). PETER OLDS’s selected poems, you fit the description, was recently published by Cold Hub Press in 2014. He lives in Dunedin; former recipient of a Janet Frame literary award. MARK PIRIE is the editor of broadsheet. Mark published Jeanne Bernhardt’s baby is this wonderland? and The Snow Poems/your self of lost ground (both HeadworX) and the broadsheet, Two Poems. JENNY POWELL is celebrating 20 years since her first collection of poems was published by HeadworX. Website: www.jennypowell.co.nz. RICHARD REEVE is a Warrington Poet. Horse and Sheep is shortly to be published by Maungatua Press. DAMIAN RUTH had his first collection, On Edge, published by HeadworX in 2017. Originally from South Africa of immigrant parents. LAURA SOLOMON is an internationally published Nelson writer. 44 /