mel ansell
cook, little pot, cook!
Sometimes, I don’t know what to do with my love for you.
The bank won’t take such a risky investment – sticky-handed
molasses of joy – you know that porridge pot that overran
the whole town? The rose-red clasp of your devotion closes
around the fat black fly of my pupil, so eager to dissolve.
The moon is irrelevant to my life. Can I run sappiness down
to the shops for semolina? When you get home love
will be floured, festooning the kitchen with lasagne streamers.
We must gleefully celebrate the uselessness of this love
for money laundering, climate change policy, a get-away
car, etcetera. Of course, there’s fringe benefits – like identification
of the tree with yellow flowers that smells flagrantly like a
fish market – diminishing returns be damned. I miss the
long-suffering stalwart mugshots, I miss fashioning
meaning from a moth-eaten hat and a coat hanger,
I miss you here in the place you lived as a child, where
housing costs are getting ludicrously dear for expanding
love, who wants a view of the big blue hills. Dear, we’ve naught
to begin the revolution but a stolen golf cart. I’ve a plan to
mill the changing clouds, eat my way home to you.
Mel Ansell is a poet and hot chocolate enthusiast living in Wellington. She has previously been published in Takahē and Critic.