Issue 2: metamorphosis

The circle expands. Issue 2 bears a host of adaptations, mutations, and transformations. We’re privileged to release these voices, both new and familiar, of writers from Aotearoa.

~~~

Featuring short stories from Shannon Campbell and Hypatia Orchard; personal essays from Laura Imogen Tucker and Johny Wills; and poetry from Lauren Gibson, Ethan Christensen, Cadence Chung, Amy Blyth Noble, Harley Bell, Devon Webb, Jedidiah Vinzon, Nur Aina Nazlee, Tate Agnew, and Stephanie Cullen.

Cover art by Keith Nunes.

Page art by Hannah B.

• welcome to metamorphosis ~ Brooke, Maddy & Steph

  metamorphosis is our first issue containing works sourced from public submissions. After a month of reviewing and much excitement (and some agonising too) we arrived upon our final line-up. We are honoured and enthralled to include works from fourteen writers – for several of whom this is their first time being published – and two visual artists.

  As one poet writes, metamorphosis is “a change of the form or nature of a thing or person into a completely different one / the process of transformation”.

  We hope that you enjoy the transformative, exploratory, joyful and dark moments that tell the story of metamorphosis.

  Thank you again to all of our submitters! We received over 70 pieces of work. This was immensely humbling, and it was our honour to have so much creativity entrusted to us, especially while we are just finding our feet as a collective.

  Ngā mihi and thank you for continuing to support the eclectic creative adventure that is circular.

  We hope to see you snakes again soon.

• The Composition of Something Else ~ Lauren Gibson

  My palms are made of cold ash and overripe plums

  Red lipstick stains and ribbon and baby worms find a home in my gyri

  My insides are made of ink and dry leaves and cicada shells

  I am a lethal cocktail of

  Dirty rain

  Crumbling pages

  Bouquets of baby’s breath

  Stale bread rolls

  My mother is in the melting snow

  My father is ensnared in a tunnelweb’s grasp

  They wish to call me their daughter

  Press your ear to my chest and wait

  Try to count my heartbeats and you will hear nothing

  Forget about it and I will be thunder in your ears

  Child of fury and calm

  Child of the moon and the volcano on the horizon

  Child of the deer’s carcass and the praying mantis and the morning fog

  Look at me and tell me what you think I am

  You will be wrong,

  But I fear that if I correct you, you will run for the hills

  I have given up

  I will be what you want me to be –

  Just don’t be afraid when the chrysalis bursts

  —

  Lauren Gibson (they/them) is a poet from Tāmaki Makaurau who is currently going into their second year studying English and Criminology at Te Herenga Waka. Their work has been published in Signals, Tarot, and Bad Apple, and they recently won the Michael King Signals Poetry Award. They spend their free time falling down internet rabbit holes and watching documentaries about cults.

• Root Rot ~ Ethan Christensen

  I remember you behind my fingerprints:

  index and middle – dominant right hand.

  Just past the cuticle, before the skin thins

  and wrinkles on the first knuckle.

  The warts on my fingers are dying.

  I can’t remember who I caught them from.

  Maybe it was you – a malignant thread of your

  DNA that wormed its way between the tectonic

  plates of my skin, like a dirty fingernail digging

  digging into an orange peel. If I’m honest though,

  you were never that close. Maybe I didn’t catch

  them: some mutation in my own DNA that sprang

  an ugly head. To try kill this piece of me is to kill

  part of my Self. I follow theories and anecdotes

  suggesting ways to remove them, like models of grief.

  Chemical burns are caused by contact

  with a corrosive substance. Salicylic, 16.7%.

  Lactic, the same. Repeated films of caustic

  acid turns the skin necrotic. With each coat

  a crater burrows into the weepy meat below,

  like a blister with its dead white-head dome

  burst. Organic acids dissolve each cell’s lipid

  membrane, which is like sandpaper on a living

  branch. Stripping the bark to reveal particles

  of the heartwood, mutilating the ecosphere of

  atoms buzzing in their symbiotic worlds.

  Burn, as the verb, associated not with heat

  but the body’s shock inflammatory response.

  The sensitive nerves webbing the hand and

  fingers throb hot not with fire but the nuclear

  fusion within the core of the sun.

  The warts on my fingers are dying

  because I found a way to burn you off.

  Cremated your root that’d taken hold and

  expunged you like a tumour, ‘til the memory

  of you is forever held in scar tissue.

  And I think, in time, as the thin skin forms

  once more and the pores and follicles of

  gentle hair scatter across my fingers, I will

  touch another without the fear of contaminating

  them with this, the last vestige of you.

  —

  Ethan first learnt the importance of finding one’s voice within the University of Waikato’s Creative Writing programme. His work appears (or is forthcoming) in Mayhem Literary Journal, The Spinoff, Overcommunicate Magazine, the Poetry Aotearoa Yearbook, and others. His creative non-fiction often examines intersectionality, and he feels most proud when others share their connection to the experiences he puts to page. He also loves photography, fussing over audio codecs, playing favourite songs on the piano, and unnecessarily complicated coffee orders.

• A Possession ~ Shannon Campbell

  In April Meredith dyes her hair red. I come home one day and find the bathroom door wide open and her on the toilet seat, flattened sheets of tinfoil circling her head, rinsed-out dye staining her fingertips. I find a flannel and dab a spot of dye from her jaw while I ask her what she’s doing. She says she needs a change.

  A change of hairstyle?

  Just a change. You know.

  I tell her most adults sky-dive or climb a mountain or something when they need to shake things up. Dying your hair red is more like a teenage outburst.

  I don’t think I ever got to be a teenager, she says wistfully.

  Later, when she gets out of the shower, she stands in front of me with her towel wrapped around her and blowdries her hair in front of the mirror until it fans out around her shoulders, each errant hair like a thread of crimson silk. The change from her mousy natural brown is intense and disorientating. She turns to me. Does it work?

  That morning as we had shuffled around the kitchen together she looked like she normally did – plain, a little frumpy, colour washed out of her by the overhead kitchen lights. Now, almost naked and blushing, her glowing face ensconced in a halo of red hair, it was as if the dye brought out some kind of new light in her pale skin. Seeing her like that filled me with a curious anxiety. Looking back it might have been dread.

  ~

  In May we go to the nearest cinema. It’s a $10 night where they play old films in the smaller theatres, the crowd mostly uni students looking for something to do on the cheap. I smell vodka on the people in front of us and plumes of vape smoke shoot up near the first rows, diffusing the light from the projector. Usually, Meredith is sensitive to strong smells and loud noises, but tonight she floats down the carpeted stairs like the lady of the house. She even buys us both glasses of wine though she rarely drinks. Before the lights go down she taps the rim of her glass against mine so zealously that some of her merlot sloshes into my prosecco, turning the clear bubbly liquid a hazy pink.

  The film was about nuns living on a mountain in the Himalayas, and I’d never heard of it but she had. It was kind of slow, and the most memorable part comes toward the end when a jealous nun in a red dress tries to push her fellow nun off a cliff. During the scene, I feel her eyes flickering back and forth, from the screen to my face and back again.

  ~

  In June she downloads dating apps, which she’s never done before. She once told me, back when I was desperate for male attention and cruelly optimistic about love, that any guy you meet online will automatically have the wrong idea about you.

  When I point this out she tells me it's cuffing season, in such a hollow and rehearsed way that I ask her if she actually knows what that means or if she just saw it online. She rolls her eyes, and later when I ask if she’s found any matches she shrugs.

  The days really are colder now. Still, I find myself waking up in the early hours of the morning when it's still dark, my skin clammy with sweat, the cotton top sheet sticking to my thighs.

  ~

  In July I realised she was barely eating. We go out to celebrate my work bonus and I offer to pay for dinner but it’s not much of a gesture, since she only orders one small plate – a steaming side dish of spiced beef. I say she should eat more, but she shakes her head, her lips pressed into a thin line of resolve.

  I just want to look different. Is that so terrible?

  I guess I went through a similar phase once. I ask her if it feels worth it and she scoffs at me. She asks me if it looks worth it, then picks up a square of dark meat with her chopsticks and devours it.

  After dinner we stand under the restaurant marquee, avoiding drizzling rain and fumbling with our phones to see who can get an Uber first. There’s the hollow ring of a bell as the restaurant door opens behind us. We shuffle to make room but the tall man coming through stops and holds his hand out to Meredith, a silver tube in his palm. She left it at our table.

  She doesn’t seem surprised. It’s her favourite lipstick, apparently.

  Good thing you get to hold on to it a little longer, he says, with the confidence of a guy who is too used to talking to strange women. I notice he’s not only tall, but arguably pretty handsome, and roughly our age.

  They banter back and forth a little, about the lipstick, weather, and restaurant food. I stand to the side and stare out into the spluttering street. After a few minutes, he finally asks for her number, and she acquiesces in an aloof, dismissive way that is so unlike her I can’t help but stare. The guy doesn’t seem to notice, and after calling the number to make sure it's hers he nods politely at me and goes back inside, letting a gust of warmth blow out into the street. I yearn to be back in my room. Thankfully the Uber pulls in.

  You don’t wear lipstick, I say as the Ford Taurus glides down Boston Road.

  I thought I’d start.

  You weren’t wearing any tonight.

  So?

  So how could you leave behind lipstick that you weren’t using? I try to hold back the accusatory tone but it’s there, curdling my words into bitterness.

  Instead of being annoyed, she laughs. Light from the street lamps outside floods periodically into the backseat, shining on her face. For a moment her eyes look black as if her pupils have dilated to three times their normal size. But the light cuts off and when we pass the next lamp they’re the same watery blue as always.

  She’d caught him staring at her all through dinner from the table beside us. She says she left the lipstick behind as a test, to see how closely he was watching her.

  He failed, she says. I don’t even know what that means.

  I turn back to the window so I don’t have to look at her. She sighs and there’s something so soft and feminine and false about it that it only irks me deeper. There’s a gentle pinch on my thigh, and when I turn back her phone is in front of me. ‘Do you want to block this caller?’ flashes on the screen under an unnamed contact.

  She presses ‘Block’ and says she was never going to text him anyway.

  ~

  In August she starts going out late at night. I know because my sleeping issues start at the same time, and I always hear her leaving.

  One night the insomnia gets so bad I feel entombed in my bed, so I lie on the living room sofa instead. I drift off easier than expected and don’t come to until I hear the doorway creaking shut. Between my half-closed lashes, someone is standing in the darkened dining room. Enough moonlight filters through the windows so that I can make out Meredith’s red hair. She’s speaking, low enough that I can’t hear the words.

  Her voice sounds so different that it wakes me fully like a splash of cold water. It’s deep and haggard like she’s miming to audio of another person's voice. She keeps saying things I can’t decipher, and seems to be talking to the air. For one hideous moment, I wonder if someone broke into our house wearing a wig to masquerade as her.

  I lie frozen on the couch until she disappears, and the house is doused in silence again.

  A few days later as we’re making breakfast I ask her where she goes at night. Why, she asks, not looking up from her apple slices. Do you stay up to listen to me leaving?

  ~

  In September she meets a guy. Antonio, the kind of romantic Euro name that makes me want to puke. His looks don’t match – he’s soft, blond, and chubby, with round cheeks that are almost hairless and turn a rich girlish pink, like blooming flowers, when he’s embarrassed.

  On the few occasions we’re all in the lounge together I notice how she stares at him. There’s an intensity I’ve never seen on her face. Like an apex predator tracking helpless prey, the vine pattern of the living room wallpaper morphing into the backdrop of a primal hunt. I realise how little I understand human attraction.

  I figure the late-night excursions will stop now but they don’t. She still leaves on the nights Antonio stays over. She only goes when he’s asleep, which I know because his snoring whistles through the walls.

  Some nights I hear them having sex too. The noises are thick and guttural, the kind of low sound that emanates from below the ground, down in the warm earth, not from a shoebox apartment on Baker Street. I wonder if it's him making them, or her?

  He usually leaves in the early mornings when I’m already up, muttering short goodbyes and avoiding my stares. Sometimes he leaves her bedroom door open, and when I walk to my room I can see Meredith still asleep, tangled in the sheets, her hair like a river running down her bare back.

  ~

  In October we go to a party thrown by mutual friends we haven’t seen in almost a year. They’re ecstatic to see us, especially her. They grab her face, arms, wrists and run their fingers through her hair. You look amazing! What happened to your hair? What kind of diet are you on? Who are you?

  They pull her to the kitchen where more girls lean against benchtops necking cherry vodka seltzers, waiting to be introduced. She looks sideways back at me as they take her. Six months ago the look would have been anxious, maybe pleading. Come with me. Don’t leave me alone.

  The look she gives me now is cold, almost gloating, a look that tells me you deserve this. I stay in the living room and feel a little piece of myself floating away.

  ~

  In November Antonio stops coming around, and her footsteps no longer pad through the hallways past midnight. I don’t ask what happened and for a few weeks, things kind of go back to normal.

  One day I get sent home early with a high fever. When I sit down on the couch I notice something on the living room floor. Thick flecks of liquid, deep red, stain a patch of the grey carpet.

  Hey, did you spill something?

  When she emerges from her room her perfect skin and inscrutable expression betray nothing. She claims she was touching up her hair, which has grown even longer and frames her face like a velvet curtain. It’s bone dry.

  Sure, I say, no worries. I excuse myself to the bathroom to splash water on my face and find Panadol. At the same time, I make a note of the lack of dye spatters, empty packaging, or crushed tinfoil. The shower walls and floor are streaked with water, but it's as colourless as water should be.

  Back in the living room, Meredith is squatting on the carpet, balancing on the back of her spindly calves as she dabs at the gorey spots with wet wipes. I watch her hunching over, as she takes one of the smeared wipes and presses it to her nose and mouth. For a moment I hear her inhale, holding it there.

  I turn back down the hallway and lock my bedroom door behind me.

  ~

  In December I take 3 weeks’ leave and go to my parents, eager to sink into the intoxicating normalcy of suburban life.

  A few nights before Christmas I check Meredith’s Instagram but there’s nothing new, so I go to her tags and find pictures from the party.

  She is in most of them, two alone and two with our friends. She stands out in each one as if our friends and their friends are just extras in a movie about her. Her pale skin is luminescent, her hair the most vivid thing in the frame, and she’s so thin now that it makes all of her features seem more prominent – cheekbones, breasts, the ratio between her hips and waist. Looking at her makes me uneasy. But her eyes are the most troubling. They’re the same colour and shape, but the look in them belongs to someone else.

  I spend a few minutes looking at them, failing to notice my Mum wander past and stop to look over my shoulder. I only know when I hear her sharp intake of breath.

  Good God is that Meredith? She’s barely recognisable.

  I delete Instagram after that.

  ~

  In January I go home. Once I’m in the door it takes a while to really register the differences. The living room and kitchen look half-naked – fewer wall furnishings and less clutter on the benches. Most of the cushions and crochet blankets are gone. A vase of dried-up flowers on the dining table. All hers.

  In the bathroom, her shower shelf is empty too. Her neat little corner of cleansers and toners has been cleared from the sink, her new toothbrush missing from the jar. On her stripped twin bed there’s a blotch of reddish-pink. I guess it's from her hair dye.

  Nothing comes up when I search Facebook or even Twitter. She vanishes from my life, leaving nothing behind but a pellucid stain on a white sheet.

  I don’t try to text her or ask around. I just email our landlord and let him know I’ll need to find a new flatmate.

  In the evening I go back to her room and stare at myself in the hanging mirror that was here when we first moved in. Frizzy brown hair and mottled traces of acne scars. My belly has the soft beginnings of a pooch. It’s funny how similar I looked to her, before the hair and the starvation and everything. Back then we could have plausibly been sisters.

  Maybe I need a change too. I don’t know. It’s something I ponder as I turn off the light, stretch out on her bed, and drift to sleep.

  —

  Shannon Campbell (Ngāpuhi, Ngāti Kahungunu) is a freelance copywriter from Northland, now based in Wellington. When she’s not writing for work she’s exploring the southern coast and writing contemporary short stories about dysfunctional relationships, domestic drama, and small-town intrigue, sometimes steeped in magical realism. This is her first time submitting a story for publication.

• Hector ~ Cadence Chung

  Everything I want is small and calcified —

  and I hunger at the antique store, at the drooping

  flower-kiss of lamp, of lampshade, of gilt cover,

  of fake Rothko, of Venetian glass. Of bullet-kiss.

  Of porcelain breakability.

  When I see the old perfumes, still rattling in

  ambered bottles — oh, how I thirst.

  I never used to call myself an artist — not

  important enough to earn the title. That is,

  until Hector Berlioz told me how he chased

  the girl he loved down the street,

  night after night after night.

  I asked him how he composed all those

  melodies, and all he did was lead me to

  her house and show me the yellow glow through

  her window. That’s when I knew it —

  oh how I knew it already, but couldn’t yet say

  I know —

  — that every artist was just another lunatic,

  I, another psycho to add to the canon.

  In return I showed Hector my first love,

  bright like beetle-wing, misty-eyed.

  How she told me I was a poet first and

  a lover second but she’d still buy my book.

  Hector was unfazed, telling me something

  about the poeticisation of experience — but I couldn’t

  hear him over the enormous string section

  that was suddenly searing my ears.

  I felt naked in the lace dress I’d worn

  just for him, stupid in the gold earrings,

  the high heels, the vintage rouge,

  stupid in body, in skin, in veiny tongue.

  I tried to write this down, but already life

  was turning into poem and I couldn’t see

  anything without thinking of words.

  Hector vanished. I sat alone. I got out

  my compact powdered my face.

  Already I knew that I hadn't listened.

  —

  Cadence Chung is a poet, student, composer, and musician from Te Whanganui-a-Tara, currently studying at the New Zealand School of Music. Her debut poetry book anomalia was published in April 2022 with Tender Press. She can be found weeping in antique stores.

• Spidal Chord ~ Amy Blyth Noble

  It hits again

  now 3AM

  meds must be wearing off—

  there are stones

  in my back

  grown from peas I must have dropped in some ignorant past

  I’ll pay for forever.

  If this were a story, it would be romantic.

  But catharsis is too late.

  My own body cannot find me

  if I breath just right

  phasing off, phasing out, till morning.

  Pebbles of blood pulse

  under my skin, I’m not embarrassed, just pestered

  by this festering co-habitation

  a spider in my spine

  curls inwards, it crawls

  on needle legs

  spits a spot of hot water

  from a boiling pot of pasta

  obligingly fleeting

  thousand simultaneous paper cuts

  intrusive imaginings keep

  extremities crawling off without me

  wind and dust cauterise

  clean cut meat

  mouths water

  drowned rabbit hole, a storm’s eye blue water

  —

  Amy Blyth Noble studied English and Creative Writing at Te Herenga Waka (Vic) and now writes about living with a disability and being a nerd. She lives in Wellington, and can be found hiding in local choirs. Her work has been published in Turbine/Kapohau 2022 and the National Library of New Zealand.

• “Metamorphosis” ~ Laura Imogen Tucker

  a change of the form or nature of a thing or person into a completely different one

  the process of transformation

  I have been changing a lot of myself lately.

  I’ve been wriggling and squirming inside my cocoon of a body, transforming the way I see myself.

  I am in a constant state of transfiguration.

  Constantly twisting around the ideas of my gender.

  Shifting into my expression of myself.

  Each day I break open my shell to reveal a new embodiment of my soul.

  I alter my inner form, no day in this insect-like body is the same.

  I show off my changes to the world.

  Through the decoration of my body.

  The colours on my skin.

  And the look on my face.

  I evolve into a million things every day, this little bug in my skin lives to mutate its form.

  From day to day. Moment to moment.

  Earth’s greatest phenomenon

  is to change.

  To metamorphose.

  —

  My name is Laura Imogen Tucker, but I often go by just Tucker.

  I am a queer transmasculine artist with AUdhd, (autism and ADHD) who uses poetry and artistic journaling to understand my world.

• Birds of the braided river ~ Harley Bell

  I look for you,

  out here in the snow,

  beneath the weight of many thoughts.

  It took months and a great deal of effort

  to carry my body this far up.

  Brave bird, how did it feel to break out

  of the shell that surrounded you?

  As an embryo, I was still attached to the mother.

  I know, you had to grow feathers

  before leaving the nest.

  Sweet bird, some say you are the messenger

  between blue canvas and green earth.

  If it was me, I would fall from terrible heights

  before trusting any words on the wind.

  You know, I’ve been tempted to cross canyons

  before the bridges were built.

  Out here, this close to the weaving waterways,

  the streams braid, over and over

  until there is no choice

  but to become a river.

  Some say it was a glacier that carved

  cliffsides and valleys. Now sediment

  inherits the work. What creature

  can commit that much time

  to being here?

  I look for you, tern, dotterel, wrybill.

  But my thoughts narrow among the stones

  before encircling the black-backed gulls of the open sky.

  Tomorrow, I shall arise earlier

  than the eager light

  and wait for you.

  Tomorrow, I will look

  just beyond myself.

  I can imagine it now,

  a shimmer in the moving water.

  It could be your reflection or mine.

  —

  Harley Bell is a poet from Aotearoa New Zealand. He is currently working on a book of poems, called Temple Fire. He has been published in various journals, including Tarot, A Fine Line, Globally Rooted and Overcom. He spends his time in cafes, libraries, forests and parks. He draws inspiration from the conversation between the natural world and cityscapes. He drinks vast amounts of coffee and he isn’t sure why he wrote this in the third person.

• My Morning Routine ~ Johny Wills

  My morning routine is longer now

  I still eat Weet-Bix, when I have the time

  Some things never change

  I’m one of the other things

  Thirty years into my natural life (or 55% based on optimistic climatological projections and depending heavily on the genoprotective qualities of Sanitarium’s Weet-Bix), I decided to get a haircut. But not just any haircut – a haircut by queers for queers. I knew I was some sort of queer (bi or pan) thanks to Mae Martin, and I thought that the reason I felt so wrong in the queer clubs was because my hair was too long and misshapen and my clothes were what a queer might wear if they were cosplaying as a halfway dead, straight, human Weet-Bic.

  I got ever so itchy in my skin and my hair and in my Weet-Bix clothes from Rodd and Gunn and I asked my partner for help. We booked a queer haircut. Then, she said, “Why don’t we start with the clothes you like.”

  “None of them,” I said – my lifelong determined indifference to fashion transforming to palpable disgust at the unpalatable beigery of my 97% wholegrain wardrobe.

  “Do you want to try on some of my clothes?”

  I feel new fabrics on my skin,

  No longer unbecoming denim, but flowing

  Expressions of someone at the beginning

  Of an everlasting process of becoming

  At the barber, I didn’t yet know what I was, but I didn’t have to. No assumptions were made, no pronouns imposed. They thought I was called Marion, because she booked the appointment in her name. After, I bought a dress and some lipstick. I wore this dress and lippy while dancing my chores to Queen like a good queer and when I looked in the mirror I saw someone who felt like me and went by Johny and used they/them pronouns. I didn’t know I was that sort of queer. It is a strange thing to know in a single instant. But I knew it.

  I make myself with makeup and make believe

  To make myself believe what I know

  In the very dust and clay of me

  That to make and unmake is to grow

  A femby. A Dangerfield-goth femby. A wannabee goth femby slut. It’s expensive when you finally have something to say. There are other costs too, apart from the Dangerfield sales and the makeup specials and the late nights out on early morning drugs. There are the costs already paid. Paid in lost time, in anxious days, sleepless nights, sleepy days, lost nights, lost fights, lost friends, half-recollections, painful reflections in mirrors like cold brick walls, empty hours, dulled thoughts, closed doors, not yets, no mores. My life had been one long viewing of Spykids 3D but in black and white and without the cardboard and cellophane goggles. But it couldn’t have been any other way. I have something to say now.

  Mum worried that I wouldn’t want to play golf anymore. I will play golf, but I don’t know where I’ll tee off from.

  It’s ok, mum,

  I’m the same child you knew

  Eating 5 Weet-Bix in an All Blacks bowl

  I’m the same child you knew

  Who played rugby and did ballet,

  Loved insects and fishing and played golf.

  I’m the same child you knew

  Dressed up by their cousins

  In their cousins’ clothes and makeup

  I’m the same child, but now I know myself

  A little more each day as I’m making myself up,

  Eating weetbix, but not wearing them,

  Dressing myself in your mother’s kilt,

  Dressing myself in all the colours of the rainbow

  With an exception for black, but not beige.

  I’ll still play golf, but I might be late,

  My morning routine is longer now

  —

  I'm Johny. A femby born in Timaru. I have Scottish, Irish and English ancestry. I work as a mental health peer worker in Naarm, Melbourne. I write strange songs in my spare time.

• WHAT AM I PAYING FOR? ~ Devon Webb

  I used to be Karangahape’s princess

  so charismatic, delicately manic

  actually I was just on a lot of acid

  but they didn’t know this (they did)

  now they ask me who are you

  & I introduce myself all over again

  which is a good thing because

  I’ve changed

  it’s just strange being a stranger

  collecting names of the bar staff at Verona

  piecing together the interrelationships I missed

  & standing in the way all the time

  last time I was here

  I didn’t even know I was autistic

  & I have not lost my habit

  my magnetic pull to beauty

  people they’re so interesting

  & I follow them around like a stray

  the powerful lesbians the cute DJs the art school students

  sipping their beers & floating around in the smoking area

  & when they slip down the stairs I drop

  forty dollars fresh cash just to be part of something

  just to look

  but I get there & my body doesn’t know how to move

  my voice doesn’t know how to say shit over the impersonal jazz

  when you don’t even know who’s playing

  you’re just waiting for something to happen

  but everything’s too narrow

  for space for something to happen

  What am I paying for?

  What mystery in the city that forgot me?

  What is there to see underground?

  How do I make people know me?

  Am I paying for the beauty of a stranger?

  Am I paying to be remembered?

  Am I paying for a possibility

  I’m too tired to pursue?

  I go home stoned & forty dollars poorer

  with several hours of sleep lost to these intersections

  wondering what the fuck I’m still doing here

  with the night lost & bleeding out

  but maybe somewhere

  around one of these hidden corners

  a beautiful person forgets to forget me

  & the city writes me back into its history

  oh, what an old, classic honour that would be

  my memory returned to the streets.

  —

  Devon Webb is a 25-year-old writer based in Aotearoa New Zealand. She writes full-time, exploring themes of femininity, vulnerability, anti-capitalism & neurodivergence. She shares her poetry online, through live performance, & has had her work included in over forty publications worldwide. She is an in-house writer for Erato Magazine, an editor for Prismatica Press & Naked Cat Publishing, & is currently working on the final edits of her debut novel, The Acid Mile. She can be found on Instagram, Twitter, TikTok & Bluesky at @devonwebbnz.

• the avatar of hera. ~ Jedidiah Vinzon

  my sister inherited my tears

  like a failed science experiment she fell

  into the vat in the walls ear-first

  and instead of a superhero, i had made

  a non-villain, faux-hero: anti-hero, they call it

  but what do you call the last woman standing

  after the fall of a house; when the four walls

  you fashioned into a home shreds itself into strings

  of a forgotten story with no body; what do you call her

  when she tapes the edges of the ashes

  like the ocean returning to the shore to collect

  the sands washed away from inside her but even

  in her liquid touch they run away like the spiders

  from a fire in their nests; if she is like the grandmother

  facing the hole in her dress with a needle, is she wrong

  for recreating the story from memory? when she strays

  away from the narrative: is she wrong? or is she

  a lonely goddess resurrecting from the heart of stars?

  when she collects herself, where are the magis

  to welcome this new constellation? do not weep

  for the lost nebula: she is heralding her own return:

  she is coming again.

  —

  Jedidiah Vinzon is currently studying towards his Bachelor of Science (Physics) in the University of Auckland. He enjoys writing poetry and music, reading, and watching films in his free time. Jazz and classical music combined with high fantasy and science fiction summarises his taste in a nutshell. You can find some of his work at Tarot Poetry Magazine.

• Mutilation ~ Nur Aina Nazlee

  Aching skin, split open. Hollow pit and bitter tongue. Your hands sowed seeds of love, I like thinking — but what am I, past a bearing fruit? Entire worlds held on lips, everything bitten, sharpened to skill. You were my nation, grinding teeth and assured silence.

  How do I go on?

  Unbelonging, with no birthright? My own name, foreign.

  I brush past mirrors, piercing shards stabbing.

  They’re wailing: Alien, alien, alien.

  Cacophony of voices blending to your own.

  Mama,

  I fear sleep only visits in your absence.

  I’ve eaten so much of myself for so long, I fear what I’ll find at its core. You created fruit, but I was bruising before I was ever ripe. Nobody bites into rotten and hopes for lasting joy.

  Papa,

  I’ve grown weary.

  I no longer wish to grow with the seasons. Every change I live through feels like death; I never come out nurtured. Solely, exclusively, undeniably drained. Winter has resided too long in our halls — its chill rendering me sick. My lungs are fighting, and their pain is scalding; we didn’t plan on breathing this long.

  Your voice occupies seas, and getting too close eats at me.

  There is terror in corrosion, and you’ve inflicted tides on my being for entire lifetimes. Chipping away like teeth and blunt metal; never an island, always rock. In every chunk taken, am I made renewed?

  I’m not sure I want remaking.

  Fitting to say salvation, when all we’ve ever known was to starve.

  Consistently empty.

  Bottomless. Cruel.

  No sacrifice will satiate your hunger.

  I’d wished you’d been honest//Telling me from the start.

  Losing sight — and memories — on your behalf.

  My bones weary from standing; ribs pried open, and gaping; spleen stolen; back bent. My nose — a carbon copy of your own. I look in the mirror and convince myself: I’m saving grace. His eyes are right by your lips — carved in my image.

  I’ll save us from ourselves, I’ll make that a promise. I promise I’ll mold perfect:

  Debilitate myself to prevent your deterioration.

  \It’s a puzzle, missing.\ And I can change that.

  —

  Nur Aina Nazlee is Malaysian born, and in 2023 she placed in the Poetry Aotearoa Yearbook Student Poetry Competition. Having lived around several different languages and cultures as a growing teen, nothing speaks more to her than having to mold with the environment; a metamorphosis for survival. This poem is for immigrant youth in broken homes with fractured identities – we’re scattered across oceans, and it is as beautiful as it is terrifying.

• Where the Tarāpunga Nest ~ Tate Agnew

  The wind has finally chosen its course

  Amidst the cloud grey sky

  Waltzing violently and vehemently

  Turning the tussock grass my ancestors used to make paraerae from into an ocean of green

  Grassy waves that crash against the shore of my legs, leaving faint bloody scratches in their wake

  The Tarāpunga take flight around me

  Dots of white and red against the blackening sky, every feather, every wing

  Altering their mast formation,

  One entity, one consciousness of flocking gulls

  Ruby beaks singing sharply to the wind

  Crying out in freedom

  For they know no pistol of mind nor matter will shoot them down

  In another life the bird and breeze were my brothers

  Now we are estranged

  Speaking only in strange tongues to one another

  Their forms vanish, swiftly, over the cliff’s jutting edge

  Beckoning me in a language I will never understand

  So I run, screaming their names as I have learned them in the tales my grandmother told me

  Begging for them to take me away

  To where the Tarāpunga nest

  But they cannot hear me

  And I hate them

  Hate them for leaving me

  Taken by the wind over the fierce sea

  Over the bowing cattails and tussock grass, over the harakeke and toetoe and to the turbulent sea

  Below the cliff, white-capped waves and tendrils of seaweed

  Wear away at the rocky volcanic shore of fossilised kauri

  A storm is coming, the waves tell me, swollen and massive

  I can feel her hunger deep within me, it hurts,

  She is muttering, always muttering

  I follow and trust that my feet will take me where I am meant to be

  I am not afraid, not anymore

  Eyes open, tears streaming, I fall as the cold pushes against me

  I can sense the water beneath,

  Pulsating with a deep primordial heartbeat, desperate to catch me in her fatal grasp

  The pumice cliffs, white as chalk and bone

  Rise steep and jagged above

  As though they were thrust from the crust of the earth only yesterday

  And not a thousand lonely years before

  My hallowed space, my coastal crest, I’m home

  And as the wind sweeps through the trees

  And whistles on the salt laced breeze

  I feel my soul turn into a winged bird

  With feathers white as snow

  And a beak red as blood

  The sea was once my refuge, now it is my graveyard

  But I am with the ghosts of the sky, locked out of a settler’s heaven

  I will be born again in the tide, baptised in the green-blue seafoam

  I will be a Tarāpunga, an albatross, a red-billed gull of flight

  As my footprints fade with the rising tide, a new body shall be born and she shall be free

  —

  Tate Agnew (Ngāpuhi) is an American-born artist and writer studying at Otago University. Tate’s work can be found in Speck Comics, Pūhia, and the recently published children’s book “A Fairy Farm Family”. When not reading, writing, or painting, Tate can be found pacing the floors of the nearest museum.

• Persimmon Paused ~ Hypatia Orchard

  I’m being pressed down, my paper corners folding in around me; it must be home time. Her small fingers run along my back as she bumbles to flatten me in towards myself. She leaves a pocket of air where my paper doesn’t meet its counterpart so I can breathe.

  Olive, the girl folding me up, drew me when she was three and a half. Mum said I would keep Olive safe when she went to kindy by herself because I would always be with her. Now we’re at school in Mrs Rawson’s class – she’s the New Entrants teacher who speaks very loud when she wants people to listen to her. She does a funny thing with her hands too; she slaps them together like she’s playing the drums but the drums are her own hands. That gets everyone to stop, look, and listen.

  “Shhhh Percy. You’re safe here.” Olive’s stubby fingers press against her wet lips. I don’t like being wet. Shiny I don’t mind, but not wet. Once Olive accidentally dropped me very close to a puddle, which could have gone very bad because “Percy is not allowed to get wet or she’ll be washed away for good” Mum explained. I’ve noticed that everyone in class is always wet or shiny and always bursting with an energy impossible to contain like the cork in a bottle of sparkling wine. We’re not allowed this but whenever Mum and Dad’s friends come over for a celebration Mum always gets out a bottle and Dad always tells Mum: “Give it your best, Jen!” when she pops it open.

  Olive is holding me up to her chest in my paper home, an A6 sheet of pink paper folded in half, cooing to me like I’m a fledgling in a nest. My paper is my egg; it encases me and makes me feel safe. I’m not very big because I need to fit inside Olive’s pocket so I can keep her safe. That’s my job.

  I snatch a quick glance out of my paper, the gap between my edges only a tiny oval of light. It’s hard to see much and it’s a bit bumpy but I spy one of the Barbies left on the floor by herself and I feel sorry for her. She’s laying flat on her face with hair that reminds me of dry grass splattered around her. I feel like one of the Barbies today but not that one. I’m like one of the dismembered Barbies who’s been twisted in sharp angles. The gap gets smaller as Olive places me inside her pocket as soft as she can manage but her fingers get stuck and she squishes my back even further towards my legs, which I didn’t know was possible.

  She’s hushing me again. “You have to shush or Roar-Roar will hear.” She takes good care of me because I’m her favourite.

  I wonder if Mrs Rawson ever gets confused and thinks she’s one of us because she’s around us all the time. Or maybe she gets sick and tired of us. I know I get sick and tired of Olive sometimes like when she wants me to try her broccoli but I don’t want to because I don’t like the colour green. When I do this she threatens to tell Mum and tells me she’s only doing it because she loves me and wants me to eat healthy.

  She tells me interesting facts too, which may seem like a good thing, but often it’s not. The thing is, I don’t need to know much because I don’t have to do much. I don’t have to grow up and worry about learning my sight words (like ‘the’ – when I don’t listen Olive puts on her best Roar-Roar voice and it scares me) and what primary colours are. I know how to spell c-a-t and that we have one called Mouse, which I haven’t learned to spell yet. Dad thinks it’s hilarious that he’s called Mouse but I don’t get it because he’s a c-a-t not a mouse. His fur is a grey colour, which I don’t mind, and he likes b-i-r-d-s like sparrows and sometimes tūī but he’s not supposed to like tūī because they’re special b-i-r-d-s. They have a beautiful call – Olive loves to make me stop, look, and listen whenever she hears one.

  She would be a great teacher one day. Maybe when she grows up she’ll let me live with her and take me to school with her. I could help her set up her classroom because I’m creative. She told me I come from the best crayons so I must have good wax, which makes me good at anything arty.

  When I was first drawn, Olive was only little and she was trying to think of a name for me but didn’t know many words then. I remember her and Dad trying to come up with a suitable name for me but Dad’s ‘Crayfish’ suggestion didn’t land with Olive. “She’s made from a crayon and she’s orange! Crayfish Crayola is a great name if you ask me,” he said, tickling Olive and making her shriek.

  Thankfully, Mum steered him away from that, “What about Persimmon? You love persimmon. And it goes with the food theme we already have going.”

  “Purse-ssim-in,” Olive pushed the word out of her mouth like she was blowing out candles on a cake. But she hardly ever calls me Persimmon these days, only when I’m in trouble.

  It’s Mum’s turn to pick us up from school today and I can hear her sing-song voice as we walk towards the car. I know we’re walking towards the carpark because I can hear all the other cars starting and teachers chiding “Watch where you’re going”. Mum doesn’t need to remind us to look for cars though – we’re street-smart.

  “Can we have a party for Percy, Mum?” Olive is patting me in her pocket to let me know she’s thinking of me.

  “I could invite my new friends from school. Matty, MaTILda, is her name actually but everyone calls her Matty, and Iris could come. We like to play on the slide and we made up this game called The Fashion Show where you have to look around all in the bark and stuff and find special things like a bottle cap or piece of Gladwrap–” taking a breath she carries on “–and, and, oh yeah, and then you have to make a necklace or a ring and then go down the runway wearing it.”

  Mum is humming along to a song on the radio and I can feel Olive tapping her leg to the tune as well. She adds, “The slide is the runway.”

  “Sounds like you’ve had a fun day at school.” I didn’t think it sounded that fun but I wouldn’t know because I was locked in Olive’s desk during playtime.

  “So can we?”

  “What?”

  “Pardon.”

  “Pardon?”

  “You said ‘what?’. That’s rude. You’re supposed to say ‘pardon?’ or ‘pardon me?’.”

  “Oh, I beg your pardon.” Mum has her fancy-pants voice on.

  “Or that. But can we have a party for Percy? It’s her birthday.”

  “Today?” Mum asks, an alarm ringing through the word like she’s only now remembered that she’s left a cake in the oven.

  Olive considers this and the car stops. The engine dies and doors open. It’s a sunny afternoon and I’m burning up. I watch the gap where my paper is poking out of Olive’s shorts and see a flurry of green and brown above. Yuck. I crave to see the baby blue house with the red door.

  “No, on Saturday. Remember?” Olive’s racing ahead of Mum to the front door. The red one – we’re home. Olive gets me out as soon as Mum lets us in. I think Olive’s still scarred from the time we were playing outside at Nan’s house and a massive gust of wind nearly carried me all the way to South America. That’s what Nan said anyway.

  Now when I want to go outside Olive either has to put me in her pocket or tie me to a piece of ribbon that goes around her wrist. She gave me a piercing where the ribbon goes through. It didn’t hurt too much and Olive drew lots of hearts on me when it was over. Now, when we go out, I know how a d-o-g feels. We don’t have one of those but I see them when we get the paper in the morning with Dad. Our letterbox is mustard-yellow, and did you know our house uses all the primary colours? Mouse likes to follow us when we get the paper and looks like someone’s pressed his pause button when he spots a d-o-g. He doesn’t unpause until the d-o-g is out of sight.

  “What kind of party should we have for her? A tea-party? Disney?” Mum’s sorting through the things in Olive’s lunchbox that she didn’t eat like the banana skin and the packet of almonds. She puts the packet of almonds back in the pantry and throws the banana in the compost.

  “She likes art. So a colouring-in party.” Because I am art, I must like art. Olive grins down at me because I’m her favourite and takes me into her room so she can stick me to my favourite spot above her bed. Mum calls this my Mona Lisa pose but I don’t know who that is. Dad says I’m about the same size as her.

  “I need to talk to Mum about something, you stay here.” Before she goes she checks that all my creases have been flattened out so I can stand up again. For birthdays you get wishes. My heart flutters like I have a hundred fairies in my chest getting ready to sprinkle me with magic that I don’t want.

  I know Olive would wish for me to be real but I don’t want a real bed, a real schoolbag, and a real body that’s not made of paper so Olive doesn’t have to worry about me when we go outside.

  If it’s my birthday then I get to make a wish and I wish to stay like this forever; with my waxy feet and purple hair in my perfect paper home. Besides, if I had a real body with real feet and real hair I wouldn’t be able to fit inside Olive’s pocket so I can keep her safe. That’s my job.

  —

  Hypatia is an emerging writer currently residing in the Kāpiti Coast. She works as an editor and in her spare time you can find her browsing through second-hand bookshops, exploring the many walks along the Coast, and experimenting with new recipes in the kitchen.

• Tidepool ~ Stephanie Cullen

  She holds off the scissors for a year, for an age

  Resisting the turning of angel to page

  Clutching little hands tight, like a vice, like a cage:

  Those first curls never quite grow back the same.

  In the shade of the rock lazes starfish and rays

  Her boy clings like a monkey in primal amaze

  Mending barely-formed thoughts on his salt-stinging graze

  But the water will drag him below, just the same.

  Bone fingers brush over wood as blood pounds beneath rain

  That rogue cowboy heart’s gone a-wand’rin again

  Trembling with longing and tender-grown pains

  Her little boy’s turning a man, just the same.

  Dreaded, matted, frayed, decayed

  Time breaks the cutesy masquerade

  Sallow and sharp; skin carefully flayed

  The salt will still sting her boy’s blood, all the same.

  —

  Stephanie is a long-time writer and a lamb-legged poet living in Christchurch with her devil of a cat.