Hunters and gatherers

There is always something dead at my neighbours’: a doe’s hide crumpled as an old coat in long grass, antlered heads sunbaking on the lean-to roof. He brings me soft parcels of sika, sambar, red stag, goat. The last time I went there, I took fresh-dug potatoes, blackberries found tucked into the brow of the hill just below the bushline, a sugar sack, dripping, of water-cress yanked from the drain where it pools. There was a mound of guts in the grass, red skin glossy in sun. Stench rose up like a dark balloon. I circumvented it as best I could, trod a track through bone pocked earth  to his den. That night, butterflying chicken, a hawk framed in my window swooped fast as his finger on the trigger.

Janet Newman

Janet Newman’s poems have been published in journals and anthologies including Aesthetica Creative Writing Annual 2017, Atlanta Review, Manifesto Aotearoa, and Poetry New Zealand Yearbook. She was the winner of the New Zealand Poetry Society International Poetry Competition 2015, and the International Writers’ Workshop Kathleen Grattan Prize for a Sequence of Poems 2017. She is working on a PhD thesis at Massey University looking at New Zealand ecopoetry.