Geena Slow
at last weekend’s vegetable market
you laughed so nicely
when a 20-cent coin fell out of a lettuce & landed between us.
into a puddle our queen sunk r.i.p. elizabeth r.i.p. our unprotected faces
in the burning cloud sun r.i.p. plum season r .i.p. the sleep crust in my eyes.
we weaved ourselves around the vegetables & thought
to each other ‘oh what special little rituals we have here
in this city’ to complain about how nothing is getting any cheaper
& how there is nothing to do but buy individual onions & talk
about all the mad little absurd things that we really shouldn’t know
like how human bodies emit a very small quantity of light too faint to be seen
like how spider goats exist in captivity just standing there producing
large quantities of spider silk milk among the strongest substance known to man
like how wild pigs are killing goats & bullying dogs.
behind the wellington wind turbine naomi raised baby goats
until a wild pig came along & skinned them inside out until
in the yard there was just baby goat legs & nothing else
poor naomi. shit yeah
sometimes this big ol’ world is too much to handle
so we decided to just make cabbage soup
& call it a day.
Rupture
We must be re-learning the same things
from generation to generation, like how to
write the same stories, conquer and cower
tradition, then rehouse ourselves in it.
Finding ways to re-write a series of endings
bound up in an anthology of same old, same old.
I think of this when I dust the line
of golden metal ducks on the mantel.
So much depends on misplaced trinkets
sitting in their quiet importance around the faded photographs.
My father stands on the pinnacle of a mountain before I was born,
my mother smiles alone in the water, together, they hover apart.
Extraction and consumption, the making of
us, driven to the edge of the precipice.
Two hundred years ago maybe I would have had to go
to a nunnery to discover this on my own,
to lean over the nights, and reach the
end of my tether, then read back again,
on how much of our life depends
on the rupture of our surroundings
or the marriage of one thing
with another.
Gracie,
Imagined in the context of a room
after an exhibition of Joanna Margaret Paul
Gracie what can I say but you are a terracotta tiled thing.
You look so lovely against that subliminal space,
criss-crossing the wall in watery brown paint.
I don’t know you but I want to.
I want to know what you think
about the videos of women ironing,
about the creases in our clothing,
about the artist behind the washing line. I want to know
about the way your mother once held you,
the games you play in your head,
the spaces between the doorframe and the kitchen,
what you feel when you look
at the unfinished scribbled armchairs
trapped behind this glass.
I take a picture of you without you knowing.
You look confused. You look still. You look at me.
I look away
and quickly put my phone away
without saying anything.
Geena Slow is a writer from Arrowtown who has almost completed her degree in English Literature and History at Victoria University. She is currently learning Spanish, writing for theatre and how to dehydrate vegetables for hiking. Her work has appeared in Overcom and Starling.