But for the yearning
I’m in love with next week. Like next week is climbing a set of stairs slowly, meeting my eyes. I can’t talk to next week. I cannot touch next week. Next week never comes. I am trying on this endless love. You can imagine how it fits. All the next weeks are the same.
& it’s bruising, bruising to wait, thumpilly bruising in the neck & the air, all my air, arriving with a limp in lung & lung & the head, an emptied bag of chips & I do not care, actually, to imagine how it fits you can walk in circles round your heart for seven days walk in circles, or find a body of water & take off all your clothes
Sun hots sticky green, the plastic camellia, the boy, eleven, on an old bike, new-haired legs veeing out from the seat, then the light hinges on its bright black axis and the childhood street swings slow over into drained colours. Somewhere, a huge cube is
tipping off its too small pivot.
Almost lost, but
for the yearning.
By Emma Barnes, Sam Duckor-Jones, William Connor, & Madeleine Slavick:
Emma Barnes
Aro Valley local. Prefers hearing poems and/or speaking them out loud. Once set a poem to be performed by three voices where everyone poured wine over themselves in a dark little club on Cuba St. Editing an Anthology of Takatāpui and/or Queer Aotearoa NZ writing that will be released by Auckland University Press in 2021.
Sam Duckor-Jones
Sam works as an artist from his home in the Wairarapa. His first poetry collection, People From The Pit Stand Up, was published by VUP in 2018.
William Connor
William Connor is a Wellington-born teacher, translator, puppeteer and writer of poems and play scripts. He gained a Masters of Creative Writing at the International Institute of Modern Letters in 2016 and has since been living in Berlin where he is collaborating with the Goethe Institute on a web series about German-New Zealand cultural differences. In his next project, The Quiet Living of Lost Things, he hopes to illuminate with dim light bulbs, improbable puppets and impractical machines, the world where the unfinished beings and ideas that never made it in this world accumulate in an endless labyrinth of workshops.
Madeleine Slavick
Madeleine Slavick has authored several books of poetry, photography and non-fiction, most recently contributing to Bonsai (Canterbury University Press) and My Body My Business (Otago University Press). She has performed her poetry in several countries and lives in the Wairarapa, where she coordinates the writers' series Wairarapa Word, works for an arts & history museum, and involves herself with various writing, editing, and photography projects.