Maia Armistead
Riverstone, Watercress
Riverstone, watercress.
I was not made for such
nice words. I bored of
the riverside. I sickened
of greens. In my new
urban landscape I eat
bottles for breakfast.
My teeth hurt all day.
When I sleep I hear
grass growing. When I
cry I make bird noises.
My lover has eyes like
car headlights. She weeps
fluorescent. I tap at
my screen like an iced-
over lake. I am skating
down The Terrace and
my heart is lost in
the gutter. My heart
which is wicked red.
I was born somewhere
so blue and green.
I bled into the river.
I can never drink
from there again.
Shared
I have started having dark thoughts about / your green cursor on our shared Google doc. I go to sleep wondering / what your next move will be. If maybe / you will accept my suggestion, change your font to Times New Roman / or add a profile picture so you are no longer / an anonymous animal, but something I can recognise. Even when you are idle I think / about your closed computer somewhere, and my small face lying in wait, squirrelling amongst the lines like an electric insect. And when you explode back into movement / and colour again I blush like a child, and make myself look / very busy by resolving a comment in which / I profess my love for you but in the form of a kind but constructive remark. I could never be mean to you. Even when / your sentences run on even when the white of the screen is like / the gaping empty of the space between us which is immeasurable, and underlined in red. Oh I could never be mean to you / even in a professional sense / Even with the document history hanging between us / like a dark cloud of all the other girls who lay here, and the ways they changed you / corrected your apostrophes / and cloaked their critique in honey, like I do. I watch / your finger flicker on my screen in the dark as you sleep, a soft shadow of yourself, halfway through a word / and touch it with my own.
Past Lives
Mandarin peel:
Peeling off in a heart every time.
Seemed strange until I learned
the shape of it. I’d done it before.
Held and thought of you and found
you in my hand, in orange, and
vague curves, and under my nails.
It started when I decided to want
you, and stopped when I lost
my taste for citrus, and threw
those orange hearts off the deck.
All but one to keep, and trace
the shape of sometimes, when
I wanted something sweet.
String of pearls:
Not polished for a pearl, more rough
at the edges like pumice, and ready
to glance your edge off anyone. But
pretty with rose cheeks and deep
like a black gem, light taking ages
to pass. And when it does, the best
light you’d ever see. Only thing
I talk to all summer, to help me
lift hard things into hard places.
Laughing all the time, and telling me
not to be too stupid, or you’ll
leave me all alone, really.
Shard of pāua:
Too much to be in this place alone,
the scratching of silence, the alarm,
the hunger, the expanse. But I had
forgotten a day without your knock
on my door, your flower drying in
its plastic vase, a purple so small,
a gentle I couldn’t take. Better to
throw, better to throw and leave it
to the wind. Better to keep on a
string and hang on my door, blue
green dream, and silver veins, like
you in the late light, and close
the windows so you can’t knock.
Maia Armistead is a poet and student originally from Hamilton. She has been published in such places as Starling, Mayhem, and The Spinoff, and is one of the editors of Symposia Magazine.