Beginning of a Longish Holiday

 So: the average cordless drill is used

for thirteen minutes in its lifetime, in case

you think that your abilities are squandered.

They are, of course. I’d like to see you grow

prize-winning cauliflowers or be the first

to domesticate the wasp instead of this—

whatever it is we do. At least it’s work

and counts as such in the labour statistics,

our simple jobs slumbering unnoticed there

like pet skeletons buried in the garden.

But still, I sometimes think that if we went

together to a choppy, chilly harbour

and swam, just swam, for weeks’ worth of weekends,

we’d find our use as manic storytellers,

enhancing first the choppiness and then

the chilliness of the harbour until we

were telling anyone who’d listen that

we had defied nature’s many and terrible powers

and were not, in fact, just people in wet towels.

Search the listings for a little coastal village

where the hills are steep and the affect is flat,

where you can still know the good lies from the bad.

Erik Kennedy is the author of There's No Place Like the Internet in Springtime (Victoria University Press, 2018), and he is co-editing No Other Place to Stand, an anthology of climate change poetry from Aotearoa New Zealand and the Pacific forthcoming from Auckland University Press in 2022. His second book of poems will also be out in 2022 with VUP. His poems, stories, and criticism have been published in places like FENCE, Hobart, Landfall, Maudlin House, Poetry, Poetry Ireland Review, the TLS, and Western Humanities Review. Originally from New Jersey, he lives in Ōtautahi Christchurch.