Poetry Aotearoa Yearbook
Edited by Tracey Slaughter
25 Noir is a field of unequal informatics, like a poem that could have been a sestina if it didn’t end too early, if it hadn’t been organised randomly out of order
NEW POEMS
60 Adam Day Administrative Error — CECOT
62 Adrienne Jansen Breaking
63 Agnieszka Filipek Lunatics
64 Ahimsa Timoteo Bodhrán Sage
66 Airini Beautrais Dead flowers
67 Alastair Clarke A small moment in the tolerance of ambiguity
68 Alexandra Fraser A list for our times
70 Alice Hooton Where is Penelope
71 Alice Miller Of How Mary
72 Alvia Farooqui Relapsing
73 Amanda Faye Martin God is my dom
76 Amy Menard One Night After Cutting Up a Rabbit, I Talked About Abortion with My Son
78 Anna Hoek-Sims Gone
79 Arielle Walker Medusozoa
81 Ashlee-Ann Sneller #563 Shame
82 Ava Dilly Aeneas
83 Bob Orr Island Bay
84 Brett Cross new town
85 Briar Henderson Cows
87 Cassidy Presland-White Daniel Fast 2014
88 Catherine Fitchett Ode to the James Webb Space Telescope
89 Chantelle Van Vuuren Twilight, Moonlight, Midnight, Mood Light
90 Chris Holdaway Particle
91 Chris Stewart your funeral
92 Christopher Reed Māori Diacritics of Love & Hope
94 Cindy Botha the dinner table
96 Dara Bautista The 27 Club (& Wanting to Live More Than Ever Before)
97 David Čiurlionis new years plans
98 David Gilbert The Sunset of the Century
99 David Romanda
Sometimes We Do Things and Don’t Know Why
100 David Simes White Whale
101 Devon Webb // The vision of you tapping away at a typewriter with a cigarette hanging from your lips wearing one of your cunty little tank tops has me feeling like God isn’t dead //
102 Elizabeth Morton O-O-O
103 Elliot McKenzie Bereavement leave
104 Erik Kennedy Classic Rain
105 Erin Ramsay The Worm
106 Ethan Christensen Unsent
109 Frankie McMillan The last hen of the Rhode Island Red dynasty
110 Freya Turnbull 4-7-8
111 Gail Ingram Bad Space Comic
112 Gary Allen Youth lying on a wall
113 Gillian Roach Dream-movie has a shaky aesthetic
114 Graham Bates The Boat Builder
115 Guy Bojesen-Trepka broken
117 Hayden Pyke Maybe it’s me, maybe it’s Crimea
118 Holly Shanahan Stolen water
119 Iain Britton Matawhero Odyssey
123 Imé Corkery Katarwiri
124 Jackson creating becoming
125 James Norcliffe No Gloves
126 Jan Napier dipping for sand whiting
127 Jane Bloomfield ‘Speeding’
128 Janet Wainscott Mapping the Solar System
130 Jeni Curtis Daphne
131 Jessica Le Bas When my father died
133 Jilly O’Brien Toka tū Moana
134 Joanna Preston Portrait of my father as a white-bellied sea eagle
135 Joel LeBlanc There is stardust in my blood
136 Jordan Hamel
Self-Portrait as a Former High School Superstar
137 Jordan Irvine I Often Write Poems When I Go to Therapy Because that Is When I’m Most Emotionally Vulnerable Which Helps Me Write and Process How I Feel
138 Keith Nunes Out there with all the rest
139 Kerrin P. Sharpe nothing like himself
141 Kim Cope Tait If/Only
142 Lara Koppers wide open and wet
143 Lauren Prinsloo mother told us to
144 Leah Dodd pure expression of colour
146 Lee Fraser You Found the Now World
147 Lee Jane Taylor Ketamine and Other Holes
149 Leonard Lambert Book Launch
150 Les Wicks Traveller
152 Liam McBreen pinkish
153 Lillian Kelleher Composition with fur, rust, and sun
154 Lily Gladstone-Gallagher Toybox
155 Linda Collins At the tide edge, we touch the universe
156 Lisa Stanley summoning sun
157 Lucy Miles A Garden
158 Maia Armistead Wild Houses
159 Mark Broatch Titles for a poetry collection (rejected)
160 Mark Prisco the dead are at it again
162 Mary Cresswell Cento: I am a part of all that I have met
163 Mary Kelly Sestina for Emily
165 Medb Charleton Making Love to the Muse
166 Megan Clayton Mercury blues
167 Megan Kitching Fire
168 Melanie McKerchar Herons fly at night
169 Melinda Szymanik Fool
170 Michaela Selby Two hours
172 Michele Powles Brown paper envelope cake
173 Michelle Peat Cost of silence
174 Milan Dulovic The message 2022 (rap poetry)
175 Mirabai Pease The Deep Down Dance
176 Nathaniel Calhoun life goals
177 Nicholas Wright Inland
178 Nicole Maree Barratt Hands
179 Nigel Skjellerup After The Amy Winehouse Tribute Band Plays Fat Eddie’s
180 Nina Tulloch Homeostatis Report
181 Piet Nieuwland Te Riu-a-Māui, the submerged continent
182 Rebecca Ball it was a dream / it was not a dream
183 Rebecca Hawkes All Souls’
184 Richard Reeve Wake
185 River Broomhead-Greaves Mother One
187 Robert Kempen Seemingly so
189 Robert Stratford Waiuta
190 Ruby Macomber In body
192 Ruth Arnison Billy, again
193 Sabrina Li Venice Syndrome
195 Sandra Berridge White Room
198 Sara Al-Bahar clouds shaped like crouching child
199 Sarah Penwarden Sign
201 Sarah-Kate Simons The Odyssey Is Named after the One Survivor
203 Savannah Patterson purple pulped plums
205 Sharne Nadine Ballad of a Not Lost Cause Molloy-Turpin
206 Sherry Zhang 章雪莉 First swim of the summer
207 Sian Doole Inheritance
208 Sophie Rae-Jordan O Borderless Navy Fugue
209 Tara Leckie sticky footed ‘n’ abundant
211 Tim Grgec
212 Tim Saunders
213 Tony Beyer
214 Vanessa Li
215 Vaughan Rapatahana
217 Vicky Curtin
218 Willow Noir
REVIEWS
220 Amber Abbot
223 Carin Smeaton
229 David Simes
237 Elisabeth Kumar
242 Elizabeth Morton
248 essa may ranapiri
253 Ethan Christensen
258 Jane Matthews
269 Jessica Thornley
273 Lara Koppers
281 Marcus Hobson
291 Mark Prisco
299 Michael Steven
New World
Paean
So it lasts
Dead Infant
broken chair leg
Old faces
Faux Religion
Claire Beynon
Nafanua Purcell Kersel
Hana Pera Aoake
Eric Kennedy
Nick Ascroft
Simon Sweetman
Fiona Kidman
Alison Glenny
Anna Jackson
Carin Smeaton
Xiaole Zhan, Margo Montes de Oca and J. A. Vili
Jane Simpson
Rhondda Greig
Brent Kininmont
Mikaela Nyman
Mary McCallum
Cadence Chung
Kate Camp
Brian Turner
Michael Fitzsimons
Philip Armstrong
Craig Foltz
Brett Cross
Richard von Sturmer
302 Shaynah Jackson
308 Shivani Agrawal
313 Tracey Slaughter
318 CONTRIBUTORS
335 ABOUT THE EDITOR
Michael Giacon
Emma Barnes
Jiaqiao Liu
Nina Mingya Powles
Paula Green
335 ABOUT POETRY AOTEAROA YEARBOOK
Publisher’s foreword
And so it began, 75 years ago in 1951, with a slender, 96-page volume, wrapped with a cream dust jacket on which the title was set elegantly in a serif font. It introduced itself thus:
In launching the first issue of Poetry Yearbook, the editor and publishers are attempting to establish an annual collection of the best New Zealand poetry. Such a selection in one handy volume should commend itself at once to the public. In particular is it recommended to those in our midst who are still heard to exclaim: ‘New Zealand poets — have we any?’
. . .
It is evident from this collection that New Zealand poetry is not a mushroom growth, but something that is developing its own traditions and characteristics — something that is being shaped by many different hands in different ways; and something which, at its best, will stand alongside the poetry of any English-speaking country. . . .
My special thanks go to Mr A. W. Reed for his enthusiasm in publishing this book; to the many editors who allowed poems to be reprinted, to Mr Erik Schwimmer, editor of Arachne, for many valuable suggestions, and to the Advisory Committee of the State Literary Fund by whose good graces and recommendations it has been made possible to pay contributors.
The support and interest of poets themselves is the final means of assuring the continued appearance of Poetry Yearbook.
By the fourth volume, 1954, the printing had been taken over by the
Pegasus Press in Christchurch, and Johnson was cleaving to the task he had set himself, to argue for poetry:
It is not given to everyone to write good poetry. But it has been given to a great number of our countrymen to want to grapple with their situation, and the truth of it, in a way that only poetry and the dedication to it can make concrete. Poetry is not easy — either for the reader or the poet. Its demands are heavy. But faith should not be made easy. It is to be acted upon by those with the will.
As he went about that task he could be scolding. In 1958 he wrote about Allen Curnow’s introduction to the Penguin Book of New Zealand Verse:
Though in his introduction . . . Mr Allen Curnow assures us that nothing new happened after 1950, one knows very well that this is just his particular way of refusing to look at a situation which has become too complex for quick analysis, and quite impossible to sum up with the broad generalisation which is Mr Curnow’s method of deciding such issues.
He could be jaunty. The dust-jacket flap of the 1960 edition, volume 10, reflected on the Yearbook’s first decade:
Over ten years New Zealand poets often faced the criticism that their writing was lacking in certain directions. Humour, for instance, was said to be a quality lacking in the national character. While it was also claimed that the way not to sell a book in New Zealand was to have the word LOVE in the title.
For the next edition Poetry Yearbook therefore invites contributions of humorous, light and occasional verse for a special section of the anthology, and also love poems for another section — with this proviso: that if critics are proved correct, the editor reserves the right to abandon these sections at the last moment if the search provides fruitless or unpromising.
He could be despairing. In the 1963 edition he fretted about:
a most ominous cloud on the cultural front at the present time. Regular TV screenings are now being made in New Zealand . . . Its danger lies in the potential threat to other cultural activities . . . Yet in many ways poetry could be the art least affected by the changes TV will bring. For it remains the most individual of the arts and, with painting, the least dependent on large support for its survival. More disturbing to the poet is the thought of the impact of this new press-button entertainment upon a public already softened to a blancmange in its values.
In 1964, volume 11, he was, frankly, marvellous. In his review of Baxter’s In Fires of No Return and Howrah Bridge he wrote:
Baxter had come to prominence as part of a well entrenched poetic orthodoxy; his arrival must have been seen, flatteringly, as an extension of the regionalist philosophy that dominated New Zealand verse at that time [this, a dig at Curnow]. Perhaps he even appeared to be ‘that child born in a marvellous year’ who would ‘learn the trick of standing upright here’. Unfortunately, for those who thought this, he Louis Johnson photographed at his home in Pukerua Bay in 1984.
changed pubs. He arrived from Wellington about 1950, and found the bars there only a refuge from the grey canyons of Willis Street, not, as they probably are in Dunedin, some No Man’s Land for swapping yarns with rabbiters or thinking about the empty of hinterland that press upon the mind from no great distance.
In 1964 he was also furious. As the jacket flap advised:
This is the controversial issue of the New Zealand Poetry Yearbook which has become a cause celebre in the columns of the daily Press, in Truth, and in the New Zealand Listener as well as a number of other journals. With this issue the New Zealand Literary Fund refused to make its annual grant toward production unless six poems (three by James K. Baxter, two by Richard Packer, and one by Martyn Sanderson) were withdrawn from the manuscript. In proceeding with publication without a grant, the publisher and editor have decided to present the book as it was originally planned to appear.
Packer’s poems were indeed fairly lewd, but it is difficult to discern what could have so agitated the State Literary Fund about Sanderson’s ‘Church-goer’:
Like a child who loves sweets, But distrusts the grocer, like a prude watching a tight-rope walker whose pants are slipping, like a satyr in a dark suit, like an alcoholic in a milk bar, an artist, offered the smudged, crayon copy of an El Greco, Mr Jones sulks in the back pew and scratches his crotch.
And after that brouhaha Johnson was gone, and the Yearbook went into recess, to be revived as a biennial volume by the Wellington academic, and later Baxter biographer, Frank McKay in 1971 in a series which lasted until 1984. David Drummond (in collaboration with Oz Kraus’s Brick Row Publishing) began to publish the Yearbook again biannually in 1990, each edition printed by John Denny of the Puriri Press. The editorial boards at this time included Riemke Ensing, Brian Turner, Leonard Lambert, Elizabeth Smither and Harry Ricketts.
Alistair Paterson took over as editor in 1993 and retained the role until 2014, when the journal reached its forty-eighth issue and Jack Ross of Massey University’s School of English and Media Studies became the managing editor and publisher. Massey University Press became the publisher in 2017, with Jack Ross as editor. He was succeeded by Johanna Emeney, and since 2021 the Yearbook has been edited by Dr Tracey Slaughter of the University of Waikato.
And so we arrive in 2026: at volume 60 after 75 years, the differential being explained by all those lacunae. Journals come and journals go, and the Yearbook has morphed over time — Louis Johnson, who published 32 poets in volume 1, would surely be astounded that the Yearbook now features 120 or so poets each edition. The New Zealand poetry he was so anxious to support and sustain has only grown in all those years.
In 1990 David Drummond wrote, ‘There now seems no shortage of slim volumes of powerful poems — every year brings home its slippery, silvery catch.’
Now as then. The Poetry Aotearoa Yearbook net continues to go fishing.
Nicola Legat Publisher
Editorial
All souls
Things I have been doing while bringing together the poems that fill this anniversary volume: drifting through restructured office-blocks where document-disposal bins are crammed to the brim with offcast books; marking papers printed with elegantly line-broken soullessness spat out from AI; doomscrolling clips of the latest inhuman rights abuses slipped into state-sealed files; sitting in small rooms with writers I love who wonder if their art is dying and who are whispering each other back into resilience, resistance.
I can’t help thinking there’s a link between these private stations and the poems that arrived — because this year’s book is ‘all souls’. I’ve never had eyes much given to watching god, but I couldn’t look away from that theme. Submissions came in and it struck instantly, ignited, ‘the air all charged with wings’. Call it meaning, call it god, call it the void where divinity should be, it was clear this year’s poets ‘got pain in [the] spirit’, were searching, sounding something — some ancient link between poem and prayer, petition, rite, plea felt valent, reanimated.
Panning out through infinite levels of sky, scraping distance for the data of stars, grasping for scattered light-particles of passing deity, the poems wouldn’t let me unsee it: ‘I stand at the crossroads to wrestle / for answers, fists up / but no one comes / and i search for God’; ‘God rolling the dice in a simulation / full of American non playable characters’; ‘Our lives are short / and the universe is vast / . . . There is a yearning in us the size of Utah’. ‘God is a blue silhouette’ across this volume. Over and over these poems hold a ‘lens up to the sky’.
Perhaps poetry is always engaged in sifting the void for any ‘scrap of information’ we can set against loss, always flicking matches into
‘our memories . . . full of black holes’ for a brief hiss of illumination. But there was a signal intensity in this year’s need to ‘reflect a little data back to sender’, to wrestle with a god who has ghosted us, to chart the wide-angle chill of a universe whose ‘electronic impulses’ we can break into scientific code and yet still feel orphaned by.
The concentration on ‘space-time’ is urgent and granular, as poets turn ‘the astronaut’s gaze’ on ‘this blue world’, scouring the shadows for saving traces of ‘the light and the time — and the body — / all with us’. ‘The stars are a fraud / . . . The icy depths of space are a cliché’ the imagery of one poem cautions, but in its evocation of vacancy it can’t stay out of their existential wake. The ‘sky is [the] centrifuge’ of this issue, its poets ‘eat[ing] the Old Testament’, singing out into its starstreaked space, ‘with one synapse holding the wound of the world shut’.
The telescope appeared a multitude of times, along with mirror, monocle, microscope, measuring the dimensions, edges, surfaces of being, criss-crossing the ‘busy disco’ of particle existence, pressing for visible meaning. There’s a sustained and s(p)ecular intensity in these poems’ repeated ripples and echoes, waves of written line sent skyward to scan and sweep the vast, and pulsing inward to pierce meniscus, cell.
Poem after poem pushes to ‘the furthest reaches of [our] knowledge . . . / galloping from planet to planet, / reading God’s mind, seeking the divine’. They are ‘watcher[s] of cosmic clocks’, bent on ‘mapping the solar system’, its mechanisms of unthinkable splendour, its ‘negative space’. Acutely attuned to our status as specks, observing scenes that shimmer with distance, they run a series of restless calculations on how long we have to shine. And answer with a chill — a blink, a glimpse.
‘Every poem is about death, even / the happy ones, since what they celebrate / cannot last’ declares Catherine Fitchett’s ‘Ode to the James Webb Space Telescope’. And indeed so many elegies and eulogies were sent in that these pages could not encompass them all without becoming solely a ‘departures lounge’.
‘The bit at the graveyard’ was a constant feature, the ‘so-solid coffin
/ lowered’ through myriad poems, a black ever-presence whose mortal lines each ‘played out’ between the ‘long white straps’ of inexorable silence. So many poets were determined, this issue, to reach ‘to take a handful of earth / from the heap . . . / No gloves’, to stare six feet down through the circling black suits to the certain end that causes all faces to swing ‘skywards / looking for whatever may be found’.
It was clear the ‘river styx surges through the isle’. Within this issue, ‘the dead are at it again’ and again and again — they ‘lie still where you last saw them. / they are serious & nothing you know / sways them’. But, like Orpheus, that does not stop us. Calls to the dead come in hushed entreaties, heart-coring lullabies, blunt fuck-you deals struck at grave-edge — or alone in New World ‘still desperately searching’ the aisles for a dead mother, ‘calling at [her] feet, / only wanting to be held’.
The pain of losing a child was another experience revisited, that terrible private entropy set amidst ‘globes unfurling . . . pixels of weather’, the deep red pressures of the body drained of its whole world travelling out to ‘black waves [of] sky’, where the devastated mother must somehow ‘make myself / a pattern, force myself some meaning’. Over and over ‘the quiver of light’ within these poems calls to those we’ll ‘never reach’, releasing into the atmosphere traces of love that know they’ll never land.
In poetry’s location of patterns, even ‘songs that sound like suicide notes might aid in survival’. Writing issues reminders of what a slender, endangered thing it is to choose to simply go on, up against drifting versions of life you might elect to leave ‘mid-sentence’, to ‘sit quietly on the edge of the world, / and want to live / more than ever before’.
Because ‘sometimes — sometimes there is / a moment, a change in the light’. And we’re sent ‘across someone’s radar / a blip in the universe of their doing’ and something unspeakably luminous is catalysed, ‘space between hips or bird against sky’. So you won’t find ‘a sermon’ in these pages — instead the questioning branches out into the embodied and sensual, its pilgrims ‘pace the orchard’ in responsive skin, seek the mystery orbiting its ‘englobed gifts’.
‘Seeing, with fingertips touching’ is the practice these poems propose to elicit grace, a concentration that sucks in miracle, ‘snapping a secret image to be seen later’. The god-force of muse induces us to ‘lie open to a nursery of stars, / though in fear that [we] might drown’ and ‘feel a close heaven / . . . when we render our prayer’.
‘Poise yourself for sensation’, these poems urge, go ‘wide open and wet . . . / exposed bare-foot / flesh ripe’ into the felt world. If there’s a spiritual lean and reach coming through in these poems, it knows we’re ‘soil-bound’ and the ‘vitality of skin on skin / of material presence/ [is] too’ crucial to be sacrificed to any belief system.
Although these are poets ‘hunting for warmth / like comfort in a church’, they still do battle with the ‘biblical gargoyle’ — they set forth poems that ‘rip the guts’ and take the piss out of pious indoctrination, rattle off a stinging litany of sacrilege against organised pillars. They’re on watch for ways that yearning can be coopted, or can choke ‘in deficit’ on punitive strips of scripture, taking issue with rites which persist in throwing the (especially female) flesh to a ‘bed of flames’.
The church must ‘stare beyond its scars’ and encompass ‘people / whispering soliloquies altered by broken bones’ — those ‘praying & praying mainly’ for deliverance from endlessly revisited trauma ‘in a godless house’, or those kneeling bulimic in stalls searching for the ‘release valve to our exploratory prayers’, or those lost in the tunnel of addiction, the matter of consciousness smashed by supernovas of substance, staring down the ‘shaft that opens up inside a self / . . . its chemistry rippling dark space’. These poems know what it is to pray for sanctuary in the messy human garden, flowers and abortions, sweet figs and incest, moonlight and meth. We have to eat the fruit that grows from headstones and tattoo ourselves with crows.
Again and ‘again god’s surge pushes up’ within the tactile, the haptic, the vulnerably lived. ‘[R]ed digital / countdowns’ are the background before which the tender tick of lovers’ sweatshop hearts light up, the ‘faintest little whir’ of touch a lyric mechanism to stop time;
or small miracles like ‘a litre of light’ are gulped in love from a son’s stolen bottle.
‘[S]ending questions to the air’ repeatedly, the message that travels back is a lesson in pressing awareness into the now, where sensuous instants suspend us at ‘a precipice / a vortex bewitched / like we couldn’t see / the dark whirl’: ‘a sweet percussion of now’s / present moments colliding / until they began to collide less / linked only by the ghost of closeness / a silvery web draped over / the churning earth beneath us’.
The sage, here, is not a disembodied wisdom but a sense-rooted cleansing, drawn from dirty roughened flowering, immersed in the elemental and ancestral ‘ground / beneath us’: ‘fragrance felt, rubbed, lifted to fingers / . . . inhaled in’. ‘Wonder is carried much / Like mass’ through the poems’ ‘endless supply of mystery’.
And the practice of poetry itself is envisaged as channel of solace, as ‘prayer turn[ed] praxis’. There’s persistent faith that ‘at the tide edge, we touch the universe’. ‘[W]et sand’ in the poet’s palm forms ‘a tactile writing workshop’, tracing ‘how poets shift the world when we put our hands / under the planet’s many coverings, / how our feet glisten with the grains / of all the hard things we dare walk upon’.
Poetry New Zealand/Poetry Aotearoa has distilled this pattern from our shared lives for 75 years. This issue shows how critical it is that it lives on.
Featured Poet
Josiah Morgan
INTRODUCTION
To read a Josiah Morgan poem is to accelerate through a glass darkly, visions of culture’s cutting-edges radiating out in electric fragments. The force of consciousness sensed at fierce work and sharp play in his writing is shattering, his pages showered with graphic radiance. Limits disintegrate, language implodes, lightning-strike thoughts ricochet against the unsayable. I’ve loved the velocity, hot-blood, intellect, linguistic pressure and unholstered queer kick of Josiah’s work since I first encountered it in local journals. It’s a thrill to take Poetry Aotearoa readers in through the kaleidoscope of his fresh ‘Black Window’.
Noir is a field of unequal informatics, like a poem that could have been a sestina if it didn’t end too early, if it hadn’t been organised randomly out of order
by some American moniker once bourbon floats from the image or your tongue a cadaver in its caked-on lipstick made less coherent transformed carcass do you remember your name? She called you to draw, which you did, poking your tongue
the way you as a kid thought you’d become once. everything black and white there in the frame, ushered into a coherent frame, like evidence. All the objects you in your own freehand style, graphite, carcass out the side of your mouth imagining her tongue
the kind of face that hides behind lipstick. the drained body, the woman you made out once the field of information is in the frame smearing even swallowing her lipstick -like sitting there posing naked for you a carcass and an image of a carcass
Black Window
After Ralph Hotere
In a black square behind you, with its little stars exploding into further black, you were illumined by Ralah Hotere, by what he meant: Black Win dow — towards A ramo an a was the painting’s name and when you spoke of it you spoke not with awe but malice saying ‘but anybody could do that’, never minding that you didn’t, never minding that it was Ralah who’d made you beautiful in the first place, same way he showed that aluminium beauty, the smelter black, blacker than any thing it stood a chance of obfuscating, it hung, that proposal, in the Aramoana air, ’til Ralah hung it in an exhibition, which illumined what it meant until you came along.
Family secret
I.
No poetic structure can support the famila secret without a vocabulary to sustain the weight of what was done, the famila mano seeming, like this poem, normal, of course, his seeming normalcy setting the structure for us other famila men to follow, like when, for instance, Dad called, today, in secret, crying because of the weight of what our vocabulary could sustain if we wanted it to, and as he cried, his vocabulary, well, it seemed normal, normal to weight his words with weight instead of structure, because a structure was built to smother the secret made by the other man, so us, we write in code, vocabulary indecipherable, hiding the secret, because we know, we know, the secret, normal, we have to find a public structure, some way without saying outright, some way to sustain the weight our women carry, our weight, so the other family men can no longer get off on his structure, which has become, after all, our entire vocabulary, entire, because the secret is normal, because our normal has been, too long, secret.
II.
If you want to know the famila secret, its weight, how normal it is, and what was done by the famila man, pick your own vocabulary, then read between this structure. Nothing normal about the famila secret. Don’t use structure to restrain the weight of the man my family carries without a vocabulary.
It could happen to you too
An ugly, queer little man walked into a bar. He placed a table under his tongue. He carried the table under his tongue. Though the man was bipedal, he had six legs, then. He carried Chapter Two under his tongue. He carried a tiled roof under his tongue, diarrhoea under his tongue. He carried his tongue under his tongue. A camera under his tongue. Atlantis. Beauty. A chamberpot. Hung history under his tongue. Twenta Hillcrest Place under his tongue. He carried Steve’s memories under his tongue. Then the man reached out, picked the bartender up and put him under his tongue. He put an apology under his tongue. He carried the profane exhibition under his tongue. The man put the bar under his tongue, before swallowing, grinding his teeth a few times, and spitting the whole mess back up. There was no bar left for him to leave from.