sophie van waardenberg
attempt
there are two types of people in this world. they lived together once, and then again. their hair was straight and blond, curly and dark. then grey. they shared two children. they shared them well, so that the children never knew which type of person they were most like.
one of the two could bake bread. the other could burn toast. one sang, one played. one went away and went away, and the other stayed as long as he could. one taught for a living. the other, she did not want to. they loved: it was mostly all about the children.
now, they live—well—now they are very far from each other.
small
in those days I could make myself into a shoelace. I understood the confusion, somehow the loop, the tree, the hole, the rabbit, and the journey at once. I could go and go, tickling the footpath and the glass on the footpath. when I fluttered into the drain I saw the dead goldfish flushed into the sewers. they glittered but deep down and darkly. I was held. bent gentle. pulled tight. when I left myself alone I lay quite still and thought of all the ways I was loved. I smelled of the day when I curled up at night, and of nothing in the morning.
gerald
I say a life. but nobody knows what it meant. very few of us know it happened. how loudly my father spent his days in his olive green cap just to die slowly. if he’d had a choice he would’ve gone out singing. wouldn’t all of us? so we’d all make the good song together? one summer my father parented us alone, played two-person cricket with my brother on the school field, adopted a ginger kitten for the family. we named the kitten samson. my father fell in love with a second woman and called her every morning, auckland to london. as long as you love the things you collect. as long as they love you, all can be repaired. no. more than singing—my father probably wanted to crowdsurf out of here.
Sophie van Waardenberg is a poet from Auckland and first-year MFA candidate at Syracuse University, New York State. She is a poetry editor for Salt Hill and associate editor of Geometry. Her first chapbook-length collection was published in AUP New Poets 5 (2019).