I notice them first because nothing happened.
They stood at the bus stop without leaning,
hands loose, faces unarranged. Someone checked
the timetable. Someone else didn’t. It mattered
to no one. This was already enough.
On Great King Street, they passed each other saying
sorry, cheers, all good; none of it changed.
A woman adjusted her scarf against the wind.
A man held the door, not heroically,
just because the door was there. This was not
kindness or grace. It was Tuesday.
Later, in New World, they waited
while a student counted coins twice, then again.
No sighs. No glances exchanged. Someone remarked
on the weather, which was doing its usual work.
The harbour outside lay flat and metallic,
unconcerned with who was looking.
They walked in pairs or alone. Some wore beauty
openly. Some kept it folded inside their coats.
They knew the names of birds. They forgot names
of people they’d met last week. They lived
with this imbalance without commentary.
Beauty here is distributed unevenly. The people
moved through it, or alongside it, like fish, or like people,
which was enough to let the day continue.
Taken with kind permission from the newly published Landfall Tauraka 251 edited by Lynley Edmeades (Otago University Press, $35), available in bookstores nationwide.
The latest edition of NZ’s most distinguished literary journal also features new writing by Dame Fiona Kidman, Grant Smithies, Jillian Sullivan, Uzair Khan (a 17-year-old student from Auckland studying Cambridge International qualifications, and winner of the young writers essay prize), the Wellington firm of Nick Ascroft, Stacey Teague and Erik Kennedy, an interview with Tusiata Avia (who says, strikingly, of the brilliant writer who later committed murder and then took her own life, “In the very early days, when I first read Sia Figiel—bless her—I recall that…feeling of, oh my god, this is possible? That was really influential. In my first book in particular it is probably quite obvious to some readers how much I was influenced by her”), and an especially illuminating review by Sally Blundell of Stephanie Johnson’s short story collection Obligate Carnivore, noting its “smart, unsparing indictments of social prejudice”, its themes of “careless prejudice” and the “disturbing nonchalance” of racism, and “the sheer verve and originality” of a story about a double-amputee Olympic athlete who murders her lover “in a late-night, drug-fuelled brain fug [which] has clear parallels with the Oscar Pistorius case”.
