They Could Have Stayed Forever by Joan Fleming

There’s a free beach somewhere close to here, where everyone’s covered in sand. And everyone knows that sand is time, or time is sandy, and all the barriers are striped, red and white, like Christmas candy. But no-one’s there. They couldn’t find the rhyme for fun hiding in their pocket money. There’s only the space where they ate spun sugar, then floated off the boardwalk after their snack. Now, open palms in the endless season of these audacious empty spaces shiver, wave. And now, you can find out what it is the dead sea craves: for you to wade in and let your eyes sting in its salted buoyancy. To watch the sky change as you float on your back, from blue to grey to silver to black. 

                                     

Editor: Orchid Tierney

Joan Fleming is not a British writer of crime and thriller novels. Joan Fleming has not had a distinquished career in the field of psychoanalysis. However,  I have seen Joan Fleming read Freud. I also witnessed her take 20 dollars from our swear jar. "I'll pay it back!" she said. We never got that beanbag for the office because we have both been helping ourselves.  

Joan Fleming, the Joan Fleming that I know, is a super talented poet, and probably one of the kindest people I have met. So I am very pleased to present one of her poems here on Tuesday Poem. 

This poem was written to accompany an exhibition of photography by Kate Van Der Drift, made up of large scale, high-key outdoor scenes of abandoned holiday places. These quietly still, beautifully eerie photographs, taken near Israel's dead sea, convey a sense of migration, emptiness, and change. Something has happened: the people have left, found another place or another planet to inhabit. It is not sad but hopeful - the end of one thing and the beginning of something new.

 

Photos by Kate Van Der Drift reproduced with permission

Joan Fleming

Joan's debut collection, The Same As Yes, was published last year by VUP. In 2007, she won the Biggs Poetry Prize; her work has also appeared in a number of places such as Landfall, the Listener, Sport, 150 New Zealand Love Poems (Godwit: 2012) and The Best of Best New Zealand Poems. She is currently finishing her MA at the University of Otago where she is writing about Anne Carson and iterative poetics.

This week's editor Orchid Tierney  is currently finishing her MA at the University of Otago, where she is writing about electronic literature. 



Enjoy more wonderful poems from our Tuesday Poem contributors by navigating the left side bar.

ALWAYS ALMOST, NEVER QUITE by David Howard

            at home 
in the interpreted world

            - Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies I

1

The tree on the slope is contingent upon your voice.

I hear nothing so the tree won’t bend –

I need that tree to bend.

The horizon does not want poetry to keep going.

Intention? No star meant to be admired and yet…

Praise is impossible without doubt, ask a teenager.

The beautiful people hear a mirror’s echo;

What they know is special

Pleading. As if poetry needed their vanishing lines!

Always almost, never quite –

Laureates talking up a void rather than a storm.

Whatever, sorrow outlasts wonder.

For most of us it will be winter

Three seasons out of four. Ever had the feeling of feeling

Before?

Parmenides had it too; he knew

Nothing comes from nothing,

The universe is eternal, like first love.

It is hungry work, returning.

2

Because language is the history of being human

A cannibal is somebody who eats his words

As if they were fire.

Embers then ash are what comes of desire.

A food basket made from hope holds the lovers.

Like them, it ignites easily.

Saying is only one way of doing, it is

A narrow cloth for a long table.

However hungry, everyone must leave table

Without much thought for the stained cloth.

3

Anyway, songbirds are followed by birds of prey.

Both balance on top of the ballroom

At the end of the harbour pier.

The rowboat waits – that is what it was made to do

So it won’t get impatient, it won’t

Chafe the rope that will soon be thrown

Over. Hear the soulful violin, out of time;

Feel shoes moving in unison

Towards the edge of what was always known.

Why do we hold on

To the belief that infinite growth is possible

In a finite world? (Brian Turner)

At sunset my daughter gets a red cheek.

Her head separates earth from heaven, now from then

With a wall of fire. She will dance

On that wall, calling for the boy

Who tastes of juniper. His juice will keep her

Free from disease…

I smile through three decades

At this innocence. Always almost, never quite

A bullock hauls itself out of estuary mud

To shuffle through the Milky Way.

[published online in On Barcelona]

David Howard, photograph by Alan Thompson

                                                 Editor: Claire Beynon

'We imagine we are observed and are of concern to someone.' (Czeslaw Milosz, 'I Saw') 

Born in Christchurch, David Howard co-founded Takahe magazine (1989) and the Canterbury Poets Collective (1990). He spent his professional life as a pyrotechnics supervisor whose clients included the All Blacks, Janet Jackson and Metallica. In 2003 David retired to Purakaunui in order to write: 'The rural hinter is perfect for this; by getting clear of the social whirl you realise what matters is the dirt under your fingernails. 

In November 2011 Cold Hub Press published David's collected works as The Incomplete Poems. In September 2012 his collaboration with printmaker Peter Ransom, You Look So Pretty When You're Unfaithful To Me, appeared from Holloway Press, the same month Otago University announced his appointment as the Robert Burns Fellow 2013. 'Yes, I feel lucky.' David's poetry has been translated into Dutch, German, Italian, Slovene and Spanish.

*

HAPPY NEW YEAR, Tuesday Poets and loyal readers - and welcome back to the online lap of poetry gods and goddesses. 

You'll see I've taken a slightly different - collaborative - approach to things this week. I invited four members of our collective (names more-or-less pulled from the hat) to read David's poem ahead of time and then to respond to his words with a single question. As the questions came in, I forwarded them on to David who in turn tapped out his reply. The ensuing discussion became not only the body, but the arms, legs, head and heart of this post; each bracketed dialogue, a small-vast world in itself.  

David initially sent me for four poems to choose from. Almost Always, Never Quite was the world that pulled me back, insisting I return - and, again, return. A poem that set me wandering and wondering, I found myself considering the ways in which mathematics, music and metaphysics underpin, shape and inform poetry, whether unconsciously or by intention. I was curious to know, for instance, whether David's poem 'arrived' at fifty-one lines by coincidence or by design, for is there not as inherent and reliable a magic in poetry as there is in prime numbers? Do such matters matter? I believe so. 

In response to my question, 'What prompted this poem and gave rise to its title?', David replied -

'To begin with an aside... Always Almost: Never Quite is the blue-blooded title of the second volume of Outsider by Brian Sewell – a man whose snobbery is so expansive it could fill the Kingdom of Heaven without assistance from any (other) deity. If ‘The beautiful people’ are his, the immediate provocation for the poem was an invitation to the intimate and honest Going West Festival 2012, with its declared theme Almost Always, Never Quite. 

What a shift there is from a colon to a comma! The former is a mark for equals, the latter for what only follows. In the monotonoverse of larger literary festivals, which are peppered with touring almost-celebrities, what most presenters ‘know is special/Pleading.’ Yet the best know more; they know that ‘language is the history of being human'. And that, while the vanity of their colleagues may appear infinite, vanity is one among many finite things: chiefly our species and the planet that we insist on calling, in error, ours. 

The poem goes beyond its occasion because, to be worth reading, a poem has to.'

*

Many thanks to David not only for agreeing to be this week's featured poet but also for investing so fully in this collaborative process. Thanks too, to Marylinn Kelly, Orchid Tierney, Renee Liang and Susan T. Landry for your attentive reading and for contributing so meaningfully to this discussion. (Susan - together with Boston writer and artist, Melissa Shook - recently launched an online journal on memoir you will be pleased to visit - Run to the Roundhouse, Nellie).

*

          For most of us it will be winter

          Three seasons out of four.

Marylinn Kelly: Are you saying that (for most us) time is 3/4 not about producing, growing, flowering, emerging but rather existing in a dormant state? Is that wasteful or desirable? 

David: While my daily experience is that most of us are dormant most of the time (we often call it ‘being busy’), which I find wasteful rather than desirable, I also own the problem - logical and psychological - of becoming. It’s a contradictory matter; it often seems to me that ‘contradictory’ and ‘matter’ belong in the same sentence. As a child I intuitively subscribed to Parmenides’ notion of block time. Its most prominent adherent is Einstein, who was taken to task by Popper for a view that reduces change to the status of an illusion. While I am intellectually uncertain about essentialism I write from the imaginative position that what is, is; everything already exists, and for always.

                        Nothing comes from nothing,

            The universe is eternal, like first love.

            It is hungry work, returning.

*

Renee Liang: How often does other poets' work kick off your own work, and in what ways? 

David: Not often because I’m wary. Some poets are close friends. Hesiod, Cavafy, Pessoa and Pasolini are the ones I trust most. They have the good manners to stay out of the way when I am beginning a piece; once it is underway they occasionally pop in with advice. Rilke, who orients the opening lines of this poem, is a rare and rather superior visitor to my cinder block tower. I needed to argue through a few of the assertions in the opening of his Duino Elegies, especially: ‘For Beauty’s nothing/but the beginning of Terror we’re still just able to bear’. That's because I view poetry as a way of knowing; it is primarily an attempt to understand rather than an aesthetic endeavour. Incidentally, this means that I treat contemporary notions of hierachy (The Best of the Best of…) and associated technical models as fluorescent red herrings. And a dialogue with the dead, which I welcome, does not presuppose reliance on authority.

            Saying is only one way of doing, it is

            A narrow cloth for a long table.

            However hungry, everyone must leave table

            Without much thought for the stained cloth.

*

Susan T. Landry: Your poem made me think of people who ask why is the sky blue or how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. It made me think of an ancient Chinese carving I saw in a museum as a child, the tiniest people and boats and trees carved from a slightly larger but in any language still tiny piece of ivory, and all I could think of even then even as a child, was why?

My question to you is this: is the optimism inherent in the question about blue sky and angels and why enough? Is it always almost, never quite?

David: Your question brings up the ghostly whisper of Montaigne: ‘A straight oar looks bent in water. What matters is not merely that we see things but how we see them.’ He was writing at a time when the intellectual optimism of the Renaissance was being bruised by religious conflict. We read at a time when the economic optimism of the American Dream has visited nightmares upon the have-nots. Always almost, never quite: optimism – whatever its occasion and its object – is not enough. Songbirds are followed by birds of prey. The rowboat waits and, one day, no one will notice how the straight becomes bent yet remains straight. But the optimism of ‘the question about blue sky and angels and why’ is necessary for poetry, which is a kind of analogical thinking. Why? Because it takes faith to leap. The privileged authorities (whether from the state or private sector) use words to circumscribe, to diminish, whereas poets use words to open, to expand. 

*

Orchid Tierney: There are two poetic gestures that really stand out for me in this poem. First is the use of citationality, the borrowing of other voices, or more specifically, the absorption of what-has-already-been-said-and-written, what is historical and passed into public space. Second, section two of poem contains two wonderful clauses:

            Because language is the history of being human
            A cannibal is somebody who eats his words
            As if they were fire.

"Because language is the history of being human" suggests to me that language is an after-effect of experience. In this way, one's gendered, sexual, socio-economic, and ethnic relations to the world not only shape our relations to the structures of language, but in fact, they generate them too. The second line of this stanza: "A cannibal is somebody who eats his words" indicates to me of the pervasive cultural recycling of pre-existent text which leads me back to my first observation of David's use of
citationality. That language is like "fire" would underscore the first line of this stanza: like fire, language is product of human ingenuity; it can nurture us from a distance but once spoken, it cannot be easily reabsorbed back into the human body. At least, to do so would pose a level of danger. But note, language here is spoken by the male subject; he consumes "his words." In this sense, David is referring to a specific gendered experience that produces a language in which its echoes share a male centre (*a* male centre, not *the* male centre).

I'm wondering how David sees his use of citationality as elaborating, expanding, investigating his male-centre relation to the structures of language. 

David: Citationality is a technique for interrogating the self, yet it requires empathy for others and respect for silence (which I regard as generative and therefore feminine). Again, to echo is to enter into relation with the greater-than. When I speak you hear more than me.

*

Claire: I'd encourage multiple readings of Always Almost, Never Quite. My experience has been that with each reading, the poem's landscape inhabited me more, and I, it. My curiosity was repeatedly piqued as to the relationship between Parmenides (c. 515/540BCE) and his muse - and I found myself wondering about the conversations David might (and surely does?) strike up with Rilke when no one else is around.

I asked David if the three-part form of Always Almost, Never Quite was prompted by Parmenides' poetic and philosophical exposition, On Nature (his response: 'Yes, my poem's echoing structure is intentional. .  .'). In his largely-lost 3000-line poem, Parmenides asserts that 'to be means to be completely, once and for all. What exists can in no way not exist'. I admire - and even envy a little - the language he uses when describing the structure of the cosmos as a fundamental binary principle that governs the manifestations of all the particulars: 'the aether fire of flame', which is gentle, mild, soft, thin and clear, and self-identical, and the other is 'ignorant night', body thick and heavy.

What an exquisite image he paints! 

'The air has been separated off from the earth, vapourized by its more violent condensation, and the sun and the circle of the Milky Way are exhalations of fire. The moon is a mixture of both earth and fire. The aether lies around above all else, and beneath it is ranged that fiery part which we call heaven, beneath which are the regions around the earth. . . '

There's a soft/loud echo of this in David’s two closing lines - 

            A bullock hauls itself out of estuary mud

            To shuffle through the Milky Way.  

*

David takes up his position as Burns Fellow on 1 February. David, we wish you exhalations of fire. 

To read more about David - his pyrotechnics and poetry, collaborative projects and solo publications, awards, service and residencies - please click on the following links:

Under Government and Restraint (David in crackling conversation with TP poet, Tim Jones)
New Zealand Electronic Poetry Centre
Trout Press
Cold Hub Press
New Zealand Book Council

Claire Beynon is this week's Tuesday Poem editor. Born in Johannesburg, South Africa, she immigrated to Dunedin, New Zealand in November 1994. Claire is a visual artist, art-science collaborator and writer of poetry and short stories. She blogs (somewhat sporadically these days) at All Finite Things Reveal Infinitude and Waters I Have Known. Her web address is www.clairebeynon.co. nz

After you've enjoyed Always Almost, Never Quite please take time to read the other poems posted this week by members of the Tuesday Poem community. You will find them listed in the sidebar.

Tension Rises by Dmitry Golynko, Translated by Cilla McQueen and Jacob Edmond

high tension
you will contrive to play with us
bends over, to
fix on one point

a pantomime character
got toasted in the sun                
none too soon
intoxication sets in
–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
to raise tension
blow the nose, a dried fruit
wrinkled is chewed
and the gruel crawls out

in due course, what in a goddess
doesn’t satisfy a mortal is
a bad smell acquired by her                                                   
through self-contempt
–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
tension will rise, should
you get the hots for, try it
those loosened by paradontosis
masticate in the subconscious

impresses an attraction                                                    
not to the usual filth, such as
blah, blah, to the particular
rhythm tapped out
–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
envy raises tension
pissing envious
where slops on the sly
stream together

pulverized spanners
in the wrong works, still
in the company the joker
started his own bullshit
–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
tension rises when the beam
of the searchlight goes blind, over their faces
the punch spreads
a small haematoma cloud

completely off his head he
got his brains set so straight, turned
all eyes on himself, having butted the punching bag
the fist moved back
–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
the tension is increased by the weather,
slushy, a small piebald pooch
whimpers, pink tongue
roughens

in the moment of licking
unknown things, they bought
lots of booze and by agreement
without twisting arms
–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
heightened tension threatens
in the anger of a being of the highest ranks
or a wench’s laughter, gathering strength
from its habit of helplessness

to achieve a good chunk
chopped off, enough
to smooth out the place of removal
and level what is unnecessary


12–16 February 2004

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Дмитрий Голынко

Напряжение повышается

напряженье высокое
вы сыграть сумеете с нами
наклоняется над, чтобы
уставиться в одну точку

опереточный персонаж
перегрелся на солнце
чуть позже, чем бы хотелось
опьянение наступает
–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
чтоб напряженье повысить
надо высморкаться, сухофрукт
сморщенный разжеван
и кашица выползает

своим чередом, что в богине
не устраивает смертного, это
дурной запах, ею приобретенный
от пренебреженья к себе
–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
напряженье повысится, если
втрескаться в, попробуйте
расшатанные пародонтозом
пережевывают, в подсознанку

впечаталось влеченье
не к обычной пакости, типа
тыры-пыры, к особенному
дробь отбарабанили
–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
напряжение повышает зависть
писающая кипятком туда
где втихаря помои
сливают в них же самих

перемолотые кости
не в том горле, еще живехонек
в компании приколист
завел свое трали-вали
–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
напряженье повысится, когда луч
прожектора слепнет, по мордасам
данный тумак растекается
облачком гематомы

на всю голову трахнутому
так вправили мозги, и весь внимание
обратил на себя, грушу боднув
кулак двинулся в обратную
–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
напряженье повысит погода
слякотная, песик с подпалинами
поскуливает, розовый язык
приобретает шероховатость

в момент облизывания
незнакомых вещей, накупили
винища и по согласию
без выкручивания рук
–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
повышением напряженья грозит
гнев существа из разряда высших
или бабский смех, набирающий силу
от привычки к беспомощности

чтобы просечь, откуда оттяпан
кусман хороший, достаточно
место отъема подгладить
и ненужное подравнять

12–16 февраля 2004 года

editor: Orchid Tierney

I would like to thank Dmitry Golynko, Cilla McQueen, and Jacob Edmond for allowing me to post this poem and its translation, which first appeared in Landfall 213 (May 2007) and subsequentlly in Ka Mate Ka Ora 11. Click the link to read about how Jacob and Cilla approached the translation process. The poem's new title is "Высокое напряжение" but I have retained the original appellation.

Dmitry Golynko is a poet, literary and art critic whose innovative poetry enshrines a keen examination on the interconnections between post-Soviet language and society. He is the author of Homo Scribens (1994), Directory (2001), and Concrete Doves (2003) and has published critical essays on contemporary art and literature.  His book As It Turned Out is his first English language release and is available from the esteemed publisher Ugly Duckling Press. I recommend visiting Penn Sound to hear some his recordings.

Cilla McQueen is a former Burns Fellow and New Zealand Poet Laureate. She has published ten volumes of poetry and she has won numerous awards, including the Prime Minister's Awards for Literary Achievement (Poetry) in 2010.  In addition, she has scooped up the New Zealand Book award for Poetry three times. 

Jacob Edmond is a senior lecturer at the University of Otago. His book A Common Strangeness has been recently published by Fordham University Press and his articles have appeared in a number of journals including Comparative Literature, Contemporary Literature, Poetics Today, The China Quarterly, and the Slavic and East European Journal.

Please take some time to experience the marvellous selections of poetry from the Tuesday Poem community. You can find these listed along at the sidebar.

Orchid Tierney is a poet and an MA candidate at the University of Otago, New Zealand. 

 

The Hammock by Terry Moyle

Editor: Orchid Tierney

Terry Moyle is a vector artist and a top-notch experimental poet. His debut book, Cominghomeland (Auckland: Ducks on the Wall Publishing), was published in 2011. He has an MA Hons (English) from the University of Waikato and currently resides in Kaiwaka, Northland. 

What I particularly enjoy about Terry's work is his diversity.  Ranging from comic strips to 3D milk cartons, his work pushes poetry off the page into real life tangible artefacts. In this way, his experimental works are suggestive of new forms of literacy where text, image and object are inextricably related.  Yet, if I can sum up briefly, I want to suggest that works like Terry's are conversations that challenge binary demarcations of high and low art. Comic strips and milk cartons-throw away items in consumer society-are rendered unique through the interface of poetic language. The resultant work is a new territory between old and new forms of text.

I'd also encourage you to view his challenging Ugly/Beauty poem found here, in which typefaces  exert unusual pressure on the textual meaning.

Want more Terry? Feel free to visit his website here.

Orchid Tierney is an MA student at the University of Otago.  She has numerous publications on and offline.  Her first book, Brachiation, was released from the Gumtree Press in 2012. She edits Rem Magazine, a journal dedicated to New Zealand experimental writing. Wander over to her personal website here.
 

Please take some time to experience the marvellous selections of poetry from the Tuesday Poem community. You can find these listed along at the sidebar.

pidgin peace meal by Iain Britton

the man

in feathers

shuts his eyes          squats

amongst jacaranda fallout

drinks cold tea /

forgets to speak up /        as if his beginning

had its faults in a syllabic nod

in the screwed-up mechanism of a missing tomorrow

#

he spills daylight

steps on bones

washes his feet / my feet

blackens my shoes / whitens my face

for the photographer
at the gate

#

I tick all the right boxes

check names              tickets      

the red and blue ribbons
the winners of categories

I cross out others          with heads tucked into chests

convinced every fast-food supper is their last /  every scrap of blue sky/
field of lupins /    every girl washed by the sea /       

#

the man

paints a tree

a hot pool of mud

a gap where  molecules breed


he pushes me into blurred possibilities

where cargo-cult customers line up

to dismember old myths


flying nuns grab at wasted prayers

the city

exists

on the edge of a steaming oven


I read a book

see for myself how characters are hung out to dry

and how they live


the heat
is in the language
in the breathing fragments

#

my favourite pastime

is watching my neighbour

through a hole in the fence

dance       birdlike

into a thanksgiving heap


he offers cold tea

to whoever he thinks is thirsty

whoever’s hungry


he speaks to a snapshot

a face in a face

he’s cracked and marred

by three score years

of  sucking

on the smell

of an oily rag


he lives in a drought-stricken room

shifts occasionally

a collage of grafted hybrids

sends out mixed signals

of what branch

what fruit

what tugs the belly


why wait for this flawed human product

to track amongst last year’s residue



I bypass today’s callers

meeting outside



staring in

                                                       Editor: Orchid Tierney

Born and educated in Palmerston North, and now teaching in Auckland, Iain Britton is a prolific poet of work with (what I consider) a philosophical-real world engagement. His debut collection, Hauled Head First Into A Leviathan, was published by the esteemed Cinnamon Press in 2008, followed by Liquefaction (Interactive Publications, 2009), Cravings (Oystercatcher Press, 2009) and Punctuated Experimental (Kilmog Press, 2010).

Iain's work is published with permission.

Orchid Tierney is a New Zealand poet who runs Rem Magazine: a NZ Journal of Experimental Writing, and was involved with the Mapping Me anthology of women's writing, although her primary focus at the moment is trying to secure a placement in an MA programme. Visit her at www.orchidtierney.com. 


Please check out the sidebar for other offerings from our Tuesday Poets.

The Map (you give me) by Stephen Bett

You point out
places & it's
like doors
opening

Hallways
filled w/
sudden
light

So caught in
the frame

Dead ends
dark glass
frayed
wire

You are so
open to me,
place a
finger
new spaces
unfold
a map
of my need


Editor: Orchid Tierney

Stephen Bett's works are characteristically sharp and superficially simple. Yet they mask a sincere emotion which, in subsequent readings, grows deeper with intensity. Brevity yields nuances, words become packed with unsaid dialogue, lines are meant to be read 'in between.'

That being said, the layers within the poems are wonderfully subtle. It's true that I have little patience for works where the skeleton is even remotely obvious. If I go to a restaurant, I don't want to be served the ingredients of my meal.

Minimalist poetry makes its own rules to convey meaning but any successful poem should read beyond the printed word. My personal obsession with semiotics, cultural signs and their processes which adapt and form meaning, made me fall in, like, love at first sight with Stephen's work. I spent hours pouring over his book Track this trying to understand how he melded particular nuances to words that normally yielded none.

At the time, I assumed the faint linear structure of the collection imposed a vague, connect-the-dots memory where subsequent poems rode on the metaphors that preceeded them. Although several months on, I'm not so sure that line of reasoning is correct. The one thing I do understand of his work is this gut feeling: the hallmark of authentic poetry is the ability to inspire a determined thought process and - 'I wish I could I write like that!'

Stephen Bett is an insanely prolific Canadian poet of eleven poetry collections which include 'S PLIT' (Ekstasis Editions, 2009) and 'Trader Poets' (Frog Hollow Press, 2003). A new edition of his humourous spoof on the softcore porn industry, 'Extreme Positions' is due for release shortly. The Map (you give me) appears in the collection, 'Track This: A Book Of Relationship,' published by BlazeVOX [books], 2010, and is reproduced with permission.


Do check out the Tuesday Poem sidebar. Every Tuesday, our 30 poets post poems they've written or have selected by other writers, ranging from Sappho to Baxter to Hass.

This week's editor, Orchid Tierney, is an Auckland-based writer. She graduated from the Masters of Creative Writing Program at Auckland University in 2009, and edits Rem Magazine. Her website: www.orchidtierney.com.


Curator's Note: Next week, we celebrate the first birthday of the Tuesday Poem with a communal poem written by each of the poets line by line over the week ... drop in and watch the poem unfold.