Work
This is it, Ruahine Range
“These winding roads always recall
Thriller, which was playing
as we drove them
the winter we were twenty-two.
Michael Jackson was just three weeks dead then.
Still, no more alive than he is today.”
Park Road, Hamilton
“Blackadder would resume where we left off
the night we came home early from a party, as was our habit,
your brother just waking, as was his – Hugh Laurie young again
or still and strawberries in season, the elms in full foliage
on the street that joined our flats.”
Boats Against the Current
“I do my best to hate this town but then there’s morning, when I have to be up by six to pay the parking meter by the harbour. In my sleep hazed stumble from the backpackers I notice a cigarette smouldering in the street. It marks the brief interim between night and morning, in itself a kind of forgetting.”
Social network
“I wonder if the last person ever to write
their phone number on the back of a beer-soaked bar coaster
knew they were seeing out the epoch
where the speech Bogart delivered to Bergman
beside the plane at the end of Casablanca was possible.”
I kind of thought the alpacas were a metaphor until we got there
“She tells me one of the weirdest things
I ever asked her to do was drive across
country to an alpaca show. I kind of thought the alpacas were
a metaphor until we got there, she says.”