Poetry
Bone Hook
My home is a bone-hook, catching at my heel.
Maudlin in the suburbs, where kittens rip up birds
And the ocean salt eats at the paint,
Living again the summer I combed days into sestinas,
Drinking dry white wine and wanting to kill my friends.
Each silver christening cup detailed with grime and restrained eroticism,
My sister on speaker phone, the tomatoes weeks away from showing their faces,
Reading books about wineries and knowing no angels ever come here.
Razed
We are planting our marigolds in an adopted climate,
Leaking guts all over this place so
Rich and loamy with fish heads and mānuka,
Rich with the careful skin of tāhā,
With the thought to make still-water beautiful.
Us, here, with our fallow heads
And our reaching limbs.
Teeth like clotted cream, fingernails like salt,
Digging them down into the soil and wishing ill on others.
The plait of your hair reaches out to the ground.
There is music while you sleep,
The night birds with closed throats, telling us of their future absence,
Your fore-fathers getting blood and bone for their herb gardens.
The forecast is for slash to crowd up the beach,
And the river where you watched a horse shit into the current
Will climb its banks, crawl to your house,
Built on sand and old seashells, the earth raising you up
Just to fall.
Rachel Lockwood (she/her) is a Hawke's Bay gal and a High School teacher. She has been previously published in Starling, Mayhem, and the Poetry Aotearoa Yearbook 2023, among others.
