Blueprint for an essay on houses

Villagers from one room dwellings come to the city.

     All sorts of calamities: eruptions, tsunamis, getting lost, losing ground,

     gusts that hollow bellies and blow down the telephone poles, eg Miramar

        No one owns: the weatherboards (wet), the flax slapping against the wall

        (green), eg along the The Parade where the paint's peeling off in strips,

            or the cemetery registers, eg Makara, the details of where someone is or isn't

            (like grandfathers born into shoe-boxes, then incubated in hot-water

                cupboards).  Lyric, lyre, cord and gut-string,  'Last stop before the end

                of the world, baby.  Last stop and first'. 

Care Home

You looked a shard: sun-shrunken, back bent,

hips crook after the century you paced to tame

three kids. And what of your shaman electrical hair

– telegraph, phone - never came close to its weird

precision: daughters married to foreign bodies

is what it all came down to, and a son too wet

to notice. Oh dear, that's OK, fade, lie-down. There

were no helpers, there was no dim switch.  As if

you were a scarab, or a safety pin nick, as if you

hadn't blown a blizzard over the runways or dazed

the town with blackouts.  And how about the coats

we wore, all suitcase-creased, the black scarves covering

our faces?  Do you think we were turning blue with

penitence, or chill?  Do you think we thought

it would be as simple as forgetting to pay the bill?

Vana Manasiadis

Vana Manasiadis is back in Aotearoa/New Zealand after nearly a decade living in Crete. She has published writing in NZ journals such as Sport and Turbine, and a poetry collection, Ithaca Island Bay Leaves. She would like to see healthy housing available to everybody.