Anita

I’ve been in the archive trying to find

information about the women who are

my ancestors.

I know this —I’m the eldest daughter

of the eldest daughter —If I was a man

this would mean I had land, a secret

handshake—the kind of mind that accesses

memory like facts stored tidily in small

card-catalogue drawers—always able

to lay a hand on the benefit of the doubt.

But I’m a woman, and women have been thrifty

with their appearances on the record—

attending to the context of men, then—

blip, disappearing. Try searching their husbands’

names, the archivist suggests, their sons’.

The only way I find them is through

births, deaths, and marriages.

They are not mapped to anything

that doesn’t concern their bodies. I want

to know them in the moonlight—thinking.

Stepping outside is like diving into

a chlorine-bright pool where everything

is hard and modern and floating.

To give myself the gift of physicality, I open

a new lipstick standing in the undertow

of foot traffic on Lambton Quay, twisting

the square-ended tube to reveal a creamy

French nude—Anita. The crisp, unused point

of it emerging like the toe of a shoe

from under a full-length black gown.

Anita, by NARS™, my everyday lip.

Anita—applied at my desk without the aid

of my selfie camera. Anita, who were you?

A ballet teacher full of quiet discipline?

A set designer for the theatre—pulling other worlds

into this one, briefly, then letting them ping back

through the meniscus, leaving

audiences astonished. The type of woman

who would never sweat. Anita—

the French version of my own too-common

name—history looping back like overdone hair,

unable to write—not even to let your parents know

you had made it here alive.

Anita—the Frenchwoman married to the

Norwegian whaler, sleeping with a rifle

and an axe beneath your bed when

he was away, and he was away a lot.

Did you sleep Anita, really, with your small

girl and then all of those sons?

Anita— did your thighs spackle beneath

your dress like mine, or were you

the bony hungry type. Anita—is that you crying

at the edge of a wild river remembering

the bridges back home? Anita—

with the fragrance from the under-layers

of your hair picked up and dispersed by the wind—

you are part-animal here, part woman.

Anita, could you have imagined

that 150 years later the Coca-Cola Company would be

bottling this river for sale. Anita—

I see you. Through the goose-egg glaze

of the mirror where I parse

my own reflection for some kind of meaning—

pressing my kiss onto folded tissue.

Hannah Mettner (she/her) is a Wellington writer who still calls Tairāwhiti home. Her first collection of poetry, Fully Clothed and So Forgetful, was published by Victoria University Press in 2017, and won the Jessie Mackay Award for best first book of poetry at the 2018 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. She is one of the founding editors of Sweet Mammalian, with Sugar Magnolia Wilson and Morgan Bach.