Lily Holloway
Pegasus gateway motel
(Before Ali’s Funeral I Make My Mum Cry)
Through the motel’s
Net curtains of whimsy
One may position themselves
In relation to Mum’s silver
Odyssey people-mover
I cannot see it for I am under the duvet
Digging nails under my cheekbones
Into those overripe peaches
Until I feel the moment of deserved
Puncture
My face drips and the bees
Who lilt around the room
On their quavers, bumping gently
Against the microwave door
Are drunk on just sipping
From the crescents
My thirteen-year-old body
Imagines dying of sheer will
My thirteen-year-old body
Imagines exploding like a dandelion
And disappearing on the wind
I hold my breath
When the motel is asleep
I walk over the dunes
Sit in soft sandy divots
Among the toroheke
Body folded like a tea towel
I pick up a beached starfish
Blue skin callus under thumb
Its cilia no longer grasping out
Throw it back to the tide, just in case
I pick myself up again
In the morning over continental cornflakes
All is forgiven
Mum examines my face closer
The sand not yet warm
From the chill
methods of burial
fantastic or grotesque pottery with elaborate handles
never depict the movement of cattle
up the hill in summer and down the hill in winter
only inhumation [being final disposition] and cremation
fosse [being trench]
and pozzo
like shafts in the turf
bodies vertical
we are drinking and drinking and screaming on the palatine hill
the air awash with typefaces
i am garamond and you are something else serif
and our feet crush through the urns
using a can opener we detomb my grandmother
but she’s just a breastplate and dappled sky
experts try to identify what type of breastplate she is
and, in doing so, when people first settled on the plateau by the river
we consider resomation [bullet dissolution]
and ossuation [being transported] but i already have thighs like a memorial reef
concrete and remains in tango, fish swimming in and out of my archways
sea anemones resting in my dimples
we decide on being woven into a mushroom suit
being eaten by the pervasive network
mycelium fingering like bone sponge
laying down toes and spreading them
Lily Holloway is a queer postgraduate English student who likes collecting Teletubbies paraphernalia. She was recently highly commended for the Caselberg International Poetry Prize and was this year's recipient of the Shimon Weinroth Prize in Poetry, the Kendrick Smithyman Scholarship for Poetry, and placed second in the Charles Brasch Young Writers’ Essay Competition. You can find a full list of her published and forthcoming work at lilyholloway.co.nz/cv.