sophie van waardenberg
thirteen
I’m a delightfully interesting woman
in the empty clean blue air, uphill,
newly fatherless, baby eulogist,
brain a brain of grass, chlorine, beetles,
breath. the world began one saturday
in this corner dairy on arthur and forbes
when the first ever born girl opened
her little fist, tipped out ten five-cent pieces,
bought a bag of bright green feijoa sweets.
she sucked the gummy tang right out.
wish I were her. touch my cheek,
shopkeeper, over the counter, or lend me
an ice cream for my woes.
I have the money, the exact change,
and I don’t ever want to be a child again.
dear little asphalt, don’t you know
someone’s just died, and you’re still hot
like hands, and happy? I ran all this way,
most of the way. I’m only here
to be loved. I’m only here because
I’m not at home. grow up, everybody,
and begin to understand me!
my knees are sweating.
I’ve lost everything.
this is the closest faraway place
I know how to get to
all by myself.
starship down
like when worf the klingon shouts evasive manoeuvers! and the ship in the darkness dodges tidily the asteroid field, or the torpedoes, or the stomping feet of the galaxy, you, papa, come gangling through the crowd like a man who exists carrying things that exist — a mug of snowed-in coffee and a book of stamps — wrongly alive with familiar elbows — and I move to evade you with a force so rockety I could swing into the t-shirt shop on marshall street and thoroughly combust, and stretching flopping bits of shirt would get all over the place, and the street and everything would turn orange and candyish and I’d be that smouldering fistful of metal beneath the melted clothes racks and look at you, look at you, papa, look what you’d have made me do.
love practice weekend four
you continue to be a nice place to visit
and I a nice visitor
you continue to outfit an endless stripe of bright
and I a nightmare of corduroy
you continue to ride the escalator furiously
and I to follow unlaced
you continue to correct your posture
and I to hold your shoulders straight
you continue to point at your friends on the subway
and I to exclaim how popular
you continue to tromp and muscle and zoom
and I to comb and mumble
you continue to love the most tremendously
and I the second most tremendously
in this stonking blue afternoon
and 66th street bins overflowing
with the sugar of ketchup packets
as if I am not the only bad one
Sophie van Waardenberg is a poet from Tāmaki Makaurau and an MFA candidate at Syracuse University, New York State, where she serves as co-Editor-in-Chief of Salt Hill Journal. Her first chapbook-length collection was published in AUP New Poets 5 (2019), and her work can also be found in Sweet Mammalian, Best New Zealand Poems and Mimicry.