Lily Holloway
Dirt
In Tonkin+Taylor’s underground Newmarket car park, my girlfriend, Angela, shows me where they store the samples. In white corrugated boxes stacked up to the roof are cylinders of extracted earth. Some of the samples have retained their shape but most have collapsed.
‘See those,’ she says, pointing at the undecipherable black scribbles on their sides. ‘Those tell us the extraction sites.’
‘How long do you keep them?’
‘Until someone remembers to chuck them.’
Angela walks up to the wall of containers and pulls one down. She opens the box and sifts the sand between her fingers. ‘This one’s from Takapuna.’
My Street
Emlyn Place sits on the rolling Torbay hills near the cell phone tower, flanked by valleys of native bush. Mornings are for tūī, pīwakawaka and pihipihi, evenings for the woodwind hoo-hoo of the ruru.
I’m regaining the confidence to walk on my street. Sometimes, I even make it to the bus stop five minutes walk from my house. On these days, I say good morning to Paul tending to his bromeliads and he’ll reply, ‘Thought you were your mother for a second there.’
These are brilliant days. Scrawled into the concrete on the corner is ‘glenn u r a homo’.
Magic
The waitress at Uncle Man’s on Karangahape Road knows our orders by heart: dhal with flaky roti canai to be ripped apart by the hands and the tangle of flat noodles that is kuey teow goreng. Twenty-two dollars in total.
We sit in our favourite spot, the table by the window, and look onto the street. Sometimes, though, I’ll turn to face the other way and watch the chef. Her black hair is pulled back in a slick ponytail. She never takes her eyes away from her hands as they beat out the rhythmic spell in the airborn roti dough.
University
I can lead you to the places in the University of Auckland quiet enough for a breakdown. If you have a panic attack at the free books table in the New Science building, take your scavenged Fiona Kidman and slink into the bathroom behind the glass-encased lifts. If you break down in Munchee Mart, avoid the bathrooms behind the bus timetable stand. The busy rhythm of doors opening and closing will remind you that everyone else is moving on.
The counsellors might squeeze you into five minutes between sessions and, if you’re lucky, scribble down ‘Headspace’ on a post-it note.
Lily Holloway is a 21-year-old English Honours student and Teaching Assistant at the University of Auckland. You can find her most recent work in Scum, The Pantograph Punch, The Spinoff, Poetry Lab Shanghai and other miscellaneous literary places (including her website). This year she has been honoured to receive the Shimon Weinroth Prize in Poetry, the Kendrick Smithyman Scholarship for Poetry and second place in the Charles Brasch Young Writers’ Essay Competition.