nina powles
mid-autumn moon festival, 2016
The city is turning, the trees are turning,
we are walking or perhaps swimming
through a sea of yellow leaves when Louise
stops to bite a perfect persimmon. Her front teeth
pierce the skin and she is laughing saying
I remember my mum cutting persimmons
in the sun one afternoon while soft orange bits
stick to her palm. We look up the Chinese name
for persimmon on my phone, 柿子, we taste the word,
we cut it open, wondering at how it sounds
so like the word for lion, 狮子, lion fruit
like a tiny roaring sun, shiny lion fruit.
At dusk we sit outside cutting mooncakes
into quarters with a plastic knife, peering
at their insides: candied peanut or purple yam,
matcha or red bean? The moon looks like
a single scoop of red bean ice cream
but really it’s a girl who ate her beloved
then swallowed the sun he gave her as a gift.
Oh there’s always so much to be lovesick for
when seasons change, like green birdcages
and plastic moon goddesses and pink undies
hanging up to dry above the street and boys
who only text at night. We lick the sugar
off our wrists and it’s been so long,
so long since we dreamt of the sea.
last summer we were underwater
last summer we were underwater
and we asked what are you doing there, moon
our bodies neck-deep in salt and rain
each crater is a sea you said & dived under
the sun before I could speak water
rushing over your skin the place where
chocolate had melted and dried there like a
newly formed mark on the surface of
us and the islands crumbling apart softly
over sea caves somewhere opening
my mouth into the waves to say you are
you are you are
a small window of pink light
after Warsan Shire
This is so new and I am so much myself.
Here is the feeling of never having to tell anyone.
Only my tiny desk and my pink lamp
flooding everything, flooding me with raspberry light
beneath a sky that is never dark.
I walk home alone from the subway at night,
skin damp in the deepening air
while giant white moths dance under streetlights.
Their shadows on the pavement move through me.
I could carry them home.
I could carry them home.
Their shadows on the pavement move through me
while giant white moths dance under streetlights,
skin damp in the deepening air.
I walk home alone from the subway at night
beneath a sky that is never dark,
flooding everything, flooding me with raspberry light.
Only my tiny desk and my pink lamp.
Here is the feeling of never having to tell anyone.
This is so new and I am so much myself.
Nina Powles is from Wellington and lives in London. Her debut poetry collection Luminescent was published by Seraph Press in 2017. Her work has recently appeared in The Pantograph Punch, Asian American Writers’ Workshop, Hotel, Poetry Magazine and Best New Zealand Poems 2017. In 2018 she won the Jane Martin Poetry Prize.