Molly Crighton
March Hare
In the alley between the cathedral and the public library,
I implode.
I skitter up the walls like a March hare,
I zip through the air
like carbonated water.
I am a girl on fire running slowly through Countdown.
I am a girl on fire
whose watch speeds up like some prop
off The Twilight Zone
that I’ve mistakenly strapped to my wrist.
A man asks me for four dollars
and I cannot give him four dollars,
I cannot even give him a conversation.
I can set him on fire, if he likes.
I can give him a Guy Fawkes makeover.
At night my eyes glow green like a hare from Salisbury Plain
and my key glints between the clenched fingers of my fist,
as though I am the soft Persian cat of a Dutch princess
and I am declawed save for one.
The little princess lifts me onto her lap
and sharpens my remaining claw with a glass file.
I write my sincere thanks in God-red hieroglyphs on her forearms,
I lustre and swoon at her ankles.
I am mad, mad, mad. I want to go home.
The bus man says
Why don’t you just go, then.
Why don’t you just leave.
And maybe I will.
Maybe I will run
like a girl
like a hare on fire.
Iscariot
I remember nights—the thirteen of us laid down,
bruised with exhaustion.
I turned to look at you, your eyes onyx half-spheres,
like a camel’s viewed from the side.
You looked back, face taut. You’re thinking, you said.
It’s loud. If you could have heard my thoughts,
I would have known—known by the hitch in your face,
your glance to the sky.
I am worse than you ever could have believed.
My story’s centre is the moment my lips touched your cheek.
How far would you have let me go, for love?
My hand on your face like raised scar tissue,
my lips, my breath, your breath or just the wind.
My garden of paradise will be a marsh of blood,
or mycelium erupting from the mouths of corpses.
Every head will bear my face, every eye covered by a coin,
every tongue will slur traitor, traitor.
I remember that night I wanted to ask you
why you kept up the pretence that I could be salvaged.
Instead I asked if you remembered
your father’s house.
You searched my face in the same way you looked over crowds—
like you were seeking a cripple, a sinner, someone to save.
There are no doors, you said. No walls. No floors. It is not a house
like we would know a house.
Your hand slid across the dust that separated us
and I took it like a thief. Gripped it.
Your nail pressed into my palm and above your head
the stars looked like silver coins.
They would have found you anyway.
Molly Crighton was born in Wiltshire and grew up in Dunedin. She currently studies English and Classics at Otago University. Her poetry has appeared in The Cormorant and Redraft. She was longlisted in the 2020 Takahē Monica Taylor poetry competition, and won or placed in multiple years of the WriteNow poetry competition for Dunedin Secondary Schools. Molly also writes reviews for the NZ Poetry Society.