Five years later

Nothing has changed and everything has changed. You can only hold on to you, to me, to us until your grip slips and there’s only a soft whistling between your fingers. After you’ve let go the imprint remains: droning bumblebees in the bride’s feathers, scent traps of birch and pine resin in white summer nights. Black snuff grains on your lip, a necklace of wild strawberries threaded on timothy grass, red granite smooth against your palm. Midnight dips and sauna confessions. What I meant to say is that memory still holds me in its grip like the lagoon holds the kina, the anemones and the stonefish, whose dorsal fin spikes penetrate the soles of my feet to release its poison.

Mikaela Nyman

Mikaela Nyman was born in the autonomous, demilitarised Åland islands in Finland. She loves Wellington, but the housing madness has forced her to shift to Taranaki. Her writing has been published in various journals including Sport, JAAM, Minarets, 4th Floor, SWAMP and Turbine. She should be focusing on her novel, but art and poetry keep interfering.

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