Issue 4: Climate
Issue 4 features oceans and rivers, extreme weather, disability, bureaucracy, forest fires, cryptids, pollution, social media, activism, future generations and mokopuna, and hope.
We’re privileged to release these voices, both new and familiar, of writers from Aotearoa and elsewhere.
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Featuring short stories from Mina Bixley, Phoebe Robertson, Jack Hitchcox, and Ruby-Rose Whitcher; flash fiction from Sherryl Clark; poetry from Éimhín O’Shea, Atareria, Paris Whitehead, Loredana Podolska-Kint, o(l[ɨ]ve) (bly(th)), Ava Reid, Always Becominging, Hana Pera Aoake, Millie Godfery, Kate Twomey, Adriana Che Ismail, Zianna Ruiha, Hebe Kearney and Elena Heffernan; and an essay from Zia Ravenscroft.
Cover design by Madeline McGovern.
Page art by Keith Nunes.
Cover art by Layal Moore & Maxime Vermeille.
Read the issue 4: Climate PDF (copy and paste into your browser): https://www.circularpublishing.co.nz/s/circular-issue-4_climate-cnw7.pdf
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Kia ora koutou,
Welcome to our fourth issue, Climate.
There’s no way to sugar-coat it. Climate is a challenging theme – for writers, us as editors, and for readers. It encourages deep reflection, vulnerability and humility. There’s a heaviness to it. Climate, ultimately, is what sustains us. It is the earth we live on. The Climate issue reminds us we are in a state of symbiosis with our environment, that our actions impact the world around us.
There’s lots of variation within this issue, as there is in the world, with its numerous cultures, identities and environments. We wanted to explore the anxieties people are feeling about the current global state, as well as some of the ways we feel peace and connection through nature and each other.
While there is an eco-conscious lens in Climate, we wanted to go further with the theme, exploring topics like bodies and sovereignty, the ongoing impacts of colonisation, and decolonisation. We acknowledge that here in Aotearoa, we are sustained by and live on Māori land that was stolen.
In seeking inspiration for this issue, we looked to the 2022 AUP anthology No Other Place to Stand edited by Jordan Hamel, Rebecca Hawkes, Erik Kennedy and Essa Ranapiri as a springboard.
Reading the Climate submissions, we found shared concerns expressed across pieces. We encountered many that kept us thinking. Thank you very much to everyone who submitted. We appreciate your ongoing support and your creativity.
Climate features oceans and rivers, extreme weather, disability, bureaucracy, forest fires, cryptids, pollution, social media, activism, future generations and mokopuna, and hope. We encourage you to take your time while reading, to dip in and out, and to pause when you need it.
Ngā mihi,
Stephanie, Madeline and Brooke
Fallout ~ Keith Nunes
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it’s too hot so you push me away / we watch the sky turn red while the island across the sea burns / our clothes smell like smoke / i’m not a doomer / optimism of the will etc. / i just think that cycle lanes are poor stand-ins for the overthrow of the ruling class
when i was 15 the town’s glass recycling ended up in a hole on the farm i lived on / we would shoot at it with .22 rifles to hear the bottles shatter / we made our own fun / and you made the bed we’ll all sleep in
the village i live in floods / it’s on the news for two days / they start planting more trees along the riverbanks / park caravans in front of the houses that no one wants to buy
my friends have a debate about whether or not it’s ethical / to have children / to bring anyone else into this pot that’s getting warmer / when we can see the bubbles at the bottom
we want to live / we want to live / we want to live / and we scream it / through placards / bus trips / beeswax wrapping / keep cups / through every meaningless right choice we’re asked to make / Shane Jones doesn’t hear us / the welfare of a blind frog is the measure of our collective heart
i miss there being four seasons / we watch the sun set over Mana Island in February / i point out to Eddie that every summer is the last of its kind / he asks me if i want another beer / and tells me to cheer up / i do
—
Éimhín O’Shea lives and works in Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington and Porirua. Born in Ireland and raised in rural Manawatū and Hawke’s Bay, they spend as much time as possible looking at trees and attempting to write every day. Their writing has previously appeared in The Spinoff, Salient, and Canta, as well as in the forthcoming Poetry Aotearoa Yearbook 2025. They are very happy to be here, and can also be found on Instagram as @for_eimhins_sake.
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When the blaze reaches its peak
Will the moana rise up
Swallow it all
A new Pō to renew our infinite potential
Will our scales come back
Gills where lovers’ teeth were
Maybe it would be better
And when Hinemoana pulls back her korowai
Trailing rimurapa and karepō
And Rangi once again gazes upon Papa
Will the same motu be hauled from the dark
Hand over hand
And will we clamber out to dry
Or will we choose the depths
Will our mokopuna remember the lessons
When libraries are drowned
Clouds forgotten
When even language fails us
Kia maumahara
Kia tūpato
Translation for lines 20–21
Remember
Be careful
—
Atareria is a writer based in Ōtautahi who keeps the North Island in her heart. Her whakapapa flows from Ngāti Pūkenga, Ngāti Maru, Te Rarawa, Éire, and Latvija. You can follow her work @tuhinga_aa_atareria on Instagram.
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My sister is making a memory box, which would be sentimental enough as it is. Worse, she plans to bury it for a hundred years.
“You’re mad if you think you’ll still be around to open it up.”
“It’s not for me,” she says, giving me that glassy, imperious look – as if I were the youngest, not her. “It’s for the future. So they can see what life was like.”
I laugh at that. “Who would want to know about our godforsaken time?”
But it seems my sister’s serious. She asks each of us for something to contribute – something ‘special’ and ‘meaningful’. She scrounges an empty biscuit tin from somewhere, embossed with floral swirls and idyllic scenes, and tends it every spare moment, her small museum of the present.
Half of it’s mere flotsam, the rest absurdly precious. When I see her putting coins in there, I almost hit her.
“You’re throwing away the only money to your name! Mum will have a fit!”
“It’s mine to do with what I like. What are you going to put in?”
I turn the question over in my mind all the long summer’s day, on my way to work, in the factory’s heat and noise, plodding home again. While I lie bone-tired yet sleepless in the room we all share, my sister stays up penning something for the tin, scratching small letters on her sole piece of paper. Writing, writing, wasting ink and light.
I twirl my locket between my fingers. Something special, something meaningful. The sparkle of sun on water. The swell of birdsong in sprawling woods. Well, that’s impossible to shut in a box; anyway, it’s been gone since I was young, since we moved here from the old house. The river is brown and thick with filth, the sky forever streaked with columns of smoke. Houses and people crush together, like too many teeth in a mouth.
You could fish in that river, when Dad was a boy. What will it possibly be like in a hundred years more?
There are still wild places, I know, if I could afford the trip. I picture myself travelling far away, bringing back an acorn or a perfect seashell. In future those may well be rarer than a coin with a dead man’s face on it. But I don’t want to tear over the country in a great big machine belching fumes. I’d walk to the edge of town, if it weren’t so far away … if I wasn’t fully spent after my sixteen-hour shifts.
I remind myself I’m lucky to be employed. How my sister can think of the future I do not know. There’s too much to be done now.
I find myself imagining more authentic mementoes for her tin. My handkerchief, stained black and red. Dust from Dad’s work boots. A thread caught on my skirt from a day amongst the stuff. When I close my eyes at night I drown in fabric still, surely more of it than could ever possibly be used. Then before I know it I’m tying my headscarf again and I’m back in the sweltering rows, churning out cloth till my head spins and ears ring.
Mum approves of the memory box. (She hasn’t been told about the coins.) She contributes her jam recipe, carefully copied out, though she wonders aloud if the ingredients will be as easy to find a hundred years from now. Even this year, we missed out on jam. There wasn’t time. You can’t ask for extra days off if you want to keep your job. But we’re lucky, as Mum often says, to have a roof over our heads.
My younger brothers put forward their own intangible trinkets for the tin. My sister diligently notes down favourite jokes and easy riddles and made-up nonsense songs, in ever-tinier handwriting. A clutch of ginger cat hair from The Noble Lord Lionheart makes it in. My sister even snips one of her curls and ties it with frayed ribbon. Into the tin with that as well – as if some suitor one day will long for a love token from a century gone.
I’m taken aback when my friends come up to me with things to pass along as well. I carry home a handful of wedding confetti, a baby gown too worn to be repaired, a rose daringly plucked from a walled garden.
They ask me what I’ve added, and I hold on to my locket and say I’m still deciding.
Our eldest brother collects all kinds of pamphlets for the tin. Meetings and manifestos, ads for shows, calls for strikes from unions, calls for repentance from religious loons. The end of the world is upon us, they say. It’s not hard to believe.
“We’re set to tear one another apart,” my brother proclaims, full of zeal. “It can’t go on. We’ll massacre them like the French did.” Dad warns him to lower his voice, though he’s the one who’s always grumbling about idiots in power.
“Anyone can spread their rotten ideas with technology these days,” says Mum. “You can’t believe all that you read, you know.”
“Time will tell,” is all my brother says.
Summer turns to autumn, though they’re almost indistinct. I forget about the memory box – until the day my sister wakes me up before it’s even light.
“Go back to bed,” I groan. “It’s my one day off.”
“Have you decided yet?”
“What?”
“What you’ll put in the tin.”
My hand goes to my locket, tracing its familiar shape. “Nothing,” I tell her. “It’s a waste of time.”
“All right.”
I roll over and slip into a strange dream where I’m a factory foreman dressed as the Queen of France and my big brother is telling me he’ll chop off my head if I don’t give everyone a shorter work week. When I wake again it’s barely dawn, and my sister is gone.
I’m lucky. I catch up with her at the bridge. She smiles in that far-off way of hers, the memory box in her hands.
“Oh, good. You’re coming.”
“Someone’s got to keep an eye on you.” And on the coins in the tin, I think. I wonder if it’s not too late to wheedle them out. “Where to, then?”
“Someplace safe,” she says, her eyes on the horizon.
It’s going to be another long, hot day.
I haven’t been out of town for an age, which is how long it feels we walk for. I focus on my feet and the dry earth as we trudge north, following the slow-running river upstream. The path gets steeper, and the soot-darkened buildings recede behind us till they’re small as dolls’ houses. A breeze pulls at the wisps of hair that fall loose from my scarf.
The sun is high in the sky when my sister stops at last in a patch of sedge on the riverbank. I’ve lagged behind, out of breath, and by the time I reach her she’s digging away with a wooden spoon. The dirt smells rich and real.
“Not here,” I say.
“Why not?”
“It’ll rust and go to rot. Look, you’re too close to the water.” It’s not as murky here, but the river is sure to flood before long. I hate to think of all her work being turned to sludge and swept to sea.
I shade my eyes and cast around for a better spot. Up the slope, an ancient structure looms.
“This way. You want it to survive a hundred years, don’t you? Let’s put it somewhere sure to last.”
The ruins are quiet, lichen-spotted, curtained in ivy and open to the sky. The archway is bricked up, but to the side the stones have tumbled down and made a new entrance. Inside, a slender tree curves from the far corner. No church could hope to be as perfect a temple to peace.
Together we feel the rough edges of wall until we find a piece that slides out with a clink and a scrape. With a little effort we pull it free, revealing a nook that seems tailor-made to fit the tin. What medieval masons first laid down these stones? Whose unborn hands might yet unbuild them?
My sister sets the memory box on the ledge and pushes it in. “Help me lift the stone back, then.”
“Wait,” I say. Slowly I unclasp my necklace, and hold the locket to my heart.
For once my sister looks surprised. “You’re not giving that away?”
I nod. I click the locket open for a final look inside. The four-leaf clover looks back, faded brown and paper thin.
“I remember when we found it,” my sister says, chin on my shoulder.
“Do you?”
“Mm. I miss the old house.”
“I miss it too,” I say.
I snap the locket shut and nestle it among the other treasures in the tin – the confetti, the letter, the rest.
“Are you sure?”
“Just let’s seal it away, before I change my mind!”
After, we sit under a tree that overhangs the river. It’s an apple tree, and we eat until we nearly burst, then lie down and listen to the crickets sing.
“Come on,” I eventually say, tossing an apple core into the sedge. “Or it’ll be dark before we’re home.”
I nudge my sister, but she stays put.
“You said that you’d put nothing in. What made you change your mind?”
“Yes. Well. I figured, in the future, they’ll need all the luck that they can get.”
My hand strays to my chest, where the clover used to be. Then I take my sister’s hand and pull her up. We start back towards our smoke-cloaked town, arms swinging.
“What’ll it be like, then, do you think?” she says, “In 1935?”
Better, worse … who knows, I think, and just say, “Time will tell.”
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Mina Bixley is a writer and part-time swordfighter from Taupō. A lot of her stories seem to involve time travel and important necklaces. Mina is also an award-winning zine maker under the alias of @mina.ziner, and many moons ago she won the youth section of the Katherine Mansfield award.
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We all know my nana
from the cold crust of breath she breezes over our faces
when the windows start to sweat.
The building anticipates my nana
like rainfall, sweeping through
distracting mums with gossip or
patching the little kids’ masks,
slipping lollies into our pockets and
behind the lip of our oxygen canisters.
My nana tells the best stories,
myths and legends
of dragons and tigers and something called
snow
which is icing sugar for the world.
My nana says
this is the beach holiday that never ends
says nothing changes
the same plastic bags cling to our water filters
the same logos from decades ago are dug up in the landfill and
framed over her kitchen table.
When she was a little girl,
her daddy smoked
and he would leave behind a trailing smell which never untethered
from her hair.
He gave her kisses and
ashes danced out of his beard when he laughed.
My nana says
the world is kinder to her now.
She steps outside our building,
gazes up
and smells his kisses enveloping the world
sees the rosy underside of his chin
a dark beard
hanging over the planet he left her.
_
Paris Whitehead lives in the heart of Tāmaki Makaurau, having graduated from The University of Auckland. She spends her time dreaming about neighbourhood cats. Instagram: @pariswhitebread
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Declaration of the Black-Billed Gull –
an endangered New Zealand species
I am tired of being mistaken for my red-lipped rivals,
or hearing you dismiss our “race” for survival,
and speaking of “birds of a feather”
when you know necessity lumps us together.
I am tired of your scarlet promises,
red-beaked histories, red-beaked apologies,
the rusty shovels you drive into my bed,
sunsets on your neon vests—even they are red.
I am not one of your ordinary gulls:
the salt-washed scavengers who worship your hulls.
I will be extraordinary, the icon you need
when the flightless ones disappoint your creed.
You think we come at your bidding, but
the scraps deemed unworthy of your undiscerning gut
do not tempt us like the opportunity to glare
as you invade our ancestral lair.
You cannot tame us, any more than these awa,
though they seem to obey you for now,
unweaving the braids which hold the land,
and feeding their veins into the sand.
We’re hatching an army against you and your nests,
those metallic blemishes—and you call us the pests,
merciless, we will swamp you with slush,
deaf as you were, when our whare were crushed.
You, of pale ngutu, hear my dark words,
you will remember these black-billed birds.
Glossary:
Tauākītia = announcement
awa = river
whare = dwelling
ngutu = lips
—
Loredana Podolska-Kint is a young doctor and nature enthusiast in Aotearoa New Zealand who writes poetry to make sense of the world, and to capture her dreams for a better future. She posts her work on @loredana_poetry, has self-published two books, and has edited a community collection of medical poetry.
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The fertility clinic was nestled in an unmarked building on Cuba Street, squeezed between a kebab shop and the blank windows of a defunct yoga studio. Its only identifier was a modest brass plaque beside the door reading Cryo Health. Chloe appreciated the discretion. No garish logos. No saccharine slogans about ‘miracles’ or ‘new beginnings’. Just a door and an elevator leading to a plain reception desk, where she was handed a clipboard.
She filled out the forms with mechanical precision, her pen hesitating only once—over the question asking whether she’d experienced doubts about her donation. No. She ticked the box firmly. What was the point in doubt? Rent was due in three days, and their landlord had already made it clear there wouldn’t be a grace period.
Dr. Sharma’s voice was jarringly upbeat—his cheerfulness was designed to keep her morale as high as her egg count. ‘You’re doing such an incredible thing,’ he said as she settled into the exam chair, her feet sliding into the stirrups. She nodded without responding, clutching the stress ball the nurse handed her. It was shaped like a peach, sticky with overuse, and Chloe squeezed it hard as the procedure began.
The retrieval itself was brief, an uncomfortable pinch that left her abdomen aching, but it wasn’t unbearable. Chloe had done this enough times to know the drill. When it was over, Dr. Sharma’s grin was almost paternal.
‘Fourteen today,’ he said with a brightness that made her stomach twist. ‘Excellent work.’
The nurse handed her a cup of Milo and a packet of biscuits, the kind that crumbled into sawdust in your mouth. Chloe took them without comment, pressing a hand against the low thrum of pain in her pelvis. Fourteen eggs was a solid number, enough to cover rent, utilities, and maybe a dinner out if Rae felt up to it. But Chloe also knew the fine print: payment wasn’t guaranteed. The eggs had to sell first, and with demand tightening, nothing was certain.
Dr. Sharma lingered, clipboard in hand, his expression a mixture of polite efficiency and thinly veiled salesmanship. ‘We’re seeing an uptick in cryogenic storage requests,’ he began. ‘Climate stability, you know. Families want contingencies.’ He handed her another form, printed on heavy, glossy paper. The Cryogenic Storage Agreement.
Chloe skimmed it, already familiar with the terms. The clinic would store the eggs until they sold, but any mishap—damage, power failure, theft—was her risk unless she paid for the optional insurance. The cost was more than her share of this month’s rent.
‘Insurance is entirely optional,’ Dr. Sharma added. ‘But given the global situation…’
‘I’ll pass,’ Chloe said, signing the form with a clipped finality. She never paid for insurance—on her phone, her flat, her eggs. It wasn’t a gamble she could afford.
Dr. Sharma’s smile faltered briefly, then recalibrated. ‘You’re a top-tier candidate, Chloe. I’m confident these will move quickly.’
She nodded, her focus already elsewhere. Outside, the hot wind rattled the shuttered yoga studio. Chloe imagined Rae and Katherine pacing, waiting to hear how much fourteen eggs would bring—a good number.
Across town, Katherine crouched in the dark beside the factory’s chain-link fence, her heart pounding as Jesse snapped the padlock with bolt cutters. The low hum of machinery filled the humid air, and the faint glow of the factory lights outlined the towering pipes that drained thousands of litres from the aquifer daily.
Masks on, they slipped inside. Katherine carried a spray can, Fran had the others, and Jesse kept watch near the gate. ‘South side’s yours,’ Katherine said to Fran. ‘Leo, stick with me.’
Katherine shook her can, the rattle sharp in the stillness, and sprayed bold waves over the factory’s logo. Slogans followed: No Water for Profit!Stealing from the Earth! Fran’s voice. ‘Done here!’
Headlights appeared in the distance. Jesse waved urgently. ‘Time to move!’
They sprinted back to the ute, adrenaline fuelling their steps. As they sped away, Katherine glanced back at the factory, now branded with their defiance. Jesse smirked as they hit the main road. ‘That’ll be on the news tomorrow.’
Katherine’s breath steadied, a flicker of satisfaction blooming. ‘Good.’
The power cut at 2 a.m. sharp. Chloe bolted upright in bed, heart hammering as the hum of the fridge died mid-cycle. Her first thought wasn’t the flat or the fans—it was the clinic. Her eggs, stored in a facility kilometres away, in a system she couldn’t see, couldn’t control. If their power failed too…
In the lounge, Rae crouched over the generator, muttering under their breath as they yanked at the cord. ‘It’s fine,’ they said, though their voice wavered. ‘Just… hang on.’ Beside them, their work radio crackled faintly, its signal cutting in and out.
‘Can you check on the clinic?’ Chloe asked, her voice tight as she lingered near the fridge, her fingers ghosting over its cool edge.
Rae hesitated, then reached for the radio, twisting the dial to a different frequency. Static filled the room, followed by a clipped voice reporting on local outages. ‘Clinic’s on backup power,’ Rae said finally, glancing up at her. ‘They’re fine.’ Their words were steady, but the tension in their jaw gave them away.
Chloe exhaled, the faintest relief loosening her chest, but the unease didn’t fully leave. Dr. Sharma’s voice replayed in her head, polished and confident: Families overseas will pay a premium for climate-stable donors like you. Your genetics are a gift. She thought of those families—strangers who might one day hold a child that shared her DNA. It wasn’t the science that unnerved her, but the stark contrast. Someone else’s future, growing out of her own precarious survival.
The generator sputtered to life, and the fridge whirred back on. Rae leaned against the counter, wiping sweat from their face. ‘Happy now?’ they asked, their voice weary but laced with a familiar edge.
Chloe forced a smile, though the ache in her stomach twisted into something sharper. ‘Thanks, love.’
The next morning, Chloe walked into the university library, her movements slow and deliberate. The air conditioning hit her face in a cold blast, a temporary relief that only deepened the ache of exhaustion she carried. She found a desk in the corner by a window, opened her laptop, and stared at the blinking cursor on her half-finished thesis. Urban resilience strategies—the title sat at the top of the document, stark and unyielding, a reminder of how little progress she’d made. Every time she tried to type, the words unravelled, hollow and aimless.
Her lecturer, Dr. Kemp, was holding a seminar on climate inequity that afternoon, and Chloe slipped into the back row, notebook in hand. He paced at the front of the room, his voice calm but pointed as he outlined the disproportionate burden the climate crisis placed on women. ‘The care work, the sacrifices—they’re the first to bear the brunt when resources grow scarce,’ he said, gesturing to a slide filled with grim statistics.
Chloe’s pen hovered above the page. She thought of Rae, heading out night after night to repair a failing grid for barely enough pay to cover their rent. She thought of Katherine, always pushing for action, dismissed as idealistic and loud. And she thought of herself—her body turned into currency, her contributions carved into something invisible yet vital for someone else’s future.
That evening, the flat was stifling, the air thick and unmoving. Katherine sprawled on the floor, phone in hand, scrolling with the single-minded determination of someone seeking an outlet. ‘Did you see this?’ she asked, holding up her screen. The headline read: Landlord Evicts Tenants After Unsafe Conditions Exposed.
‘Shocker,’ Rae muttered. They sat by the window, face turned toward the hazy orange sky. ‘Landlords are parasites.’
‘Not all of them,’ Chloe said.
Katherine snorted. She sat up, stretching out her legs. ‘Oh, come on. You’re literally selling pieces of yourself because ours won’t fix the wiring.’
Chloe’s stomach tightened. ‘It’s not that simple.’ A beat. ‘I’m doing what I have to do.’
Katherine tilted her head. ‘Are you?’ Her voice was sharp, deliberate. ‘Or are you just feeding the same machine that’s screwing us over?’
‘Enough.’ Rae pushed up from the windowsill. ‘Let’s get through tonight without biting each other’s heads off, yeah?’
Chloe sat cross-legged on the couch, her bare legs sticking to the vinyl. The fan rattled weakly in the corner, more sound than relief, pushing the stale heat around the flat in tired circles. Her laptop sat on her knees, open to an article she wasn’t reading. Global IVF Market Predicted to Surpass $50 Billion by 2050.
Her stomach still hurt, a dull, insistent ache. Fourteen eggs. Dr. Sharma’s voice rang in her head, as polished and triumphant as it had been when he’d said it. Climate-stable eggs, Chloe. You’re exactly what they’re looking for.
The words felt too clinical, too clean for what they really meant. Her genes, her body, her life—commodified into something someone else could buy. Dr. Sharma had tried to explain it once, during a routine consultation. Her health history made her eggs valuable: no red flags, no environmental diseases, nothing that screamed risk. Diverse genetic material, he’d said, as if she were a product in a catalogue.
She’d never wanted kids. It wasn’t just about the money, the climate, or the fear of raising a child in a crumbling world. It was deeper than that, tied to something fundamental about who she was. As a queer woman, she’d imagined a life outside those expectations—no husband, no white-picket fence, no crib in the corner. She wanted connection, yes, but not like that.
And yet, here she was. Selling her eggs. Selling a future she couldn’t even imagine wanting to people who wanted it more than anything. Dr. Sharma had called it a gift, but that word sat wrong in her mouth. It wasn’t a gift. It was a transaction. A business deal. Her eggs weren’t children—they weren’t even really hers anymore. They were something else. Potential. Hope.
Her phone buzzed on the coffee table, lighting up with another email from the clinic. Your donation is valued and appreciated. Schedule your next retrieval today. She deleted it without opening it, her thumb pressing harder than it needed to.
Chloe leaned back, her head resting against the plaster wall, staring at the ceiling as the fan ticked on. The thought came sharp and fast: What does it mean to sell your future to someone else? To let their hope grow out of your need for survival?
The blackout came just after midnight, swallowing the flat in an abrupt, smothering silence. Chloe’s phone buzzed weakly, its screen casting a dim glow as the fridge gave a final, stuttering hum before falling quiet. Across the room, Rae’s emergency work radio crackled, its tinny voice cutting through the oppressive stillness. Chloe watched as Rae sat up, already reaching for her boots.
‘I’ll be back soon,’ Rae said, pulling on her gear with a kind of tired efficiency that made Chloe’s chest ache.
Outside, the air was thick, heavy enough to cling to skin and clothes. Rae climbed into the work van, its air conditioning humming uselessly against the swelter. Luis, her wiry colleague, hunched over a tablet in the passenger seat, the faint blue glow of schematics reflecting off his glasses.
‘Second line this week,’ Luis muttered, shaking his head. ‘This heatwave’s tearing everything apart.’
‘Tell me about it,’ Rae said, their voice low as their eyes tracked the van’s headlights sweeping over rows of quiet houses. Windows were thrown open in futile attempts to let in air, curtains stirring limply in the humid breeze.
When they reached the industrial park, the headlights caught on a cluster of downed lines sprawled like broken limbs across the asphalt. The van idled as Rae grabbed their tools, stepping out into the suffocating night. The air shimmered faintly, carrying the acrid tang of melted wire. She adjusted her headlamp and set to work, her movements steady and deliberate, even as sweat dripped into her eyes and soaked through her collar.
Back in the flat, Chloe fumbled through the dark, her fingers grazing the edge of a flashlight on the counter. Her breath was shallow, her thoughts a tangled mess: one thread fixed on the eggs stored in a distant clinic she couldn’t control, the other on Rae, out in the night, battling a grid on the verge of failure.
She sent a message to the clinic’s emergency line, her thumb hovering over the screen even after the text went through. No reply came. The silence stretched, thick and relentless, pressing in around her as she gripped the flashlight tighter and waited for a response she already knew wouldn’t come.
By morning, the power was back, but the knot in Chloe’s chest hadn’t loosened. She went to the clinic, her fingers tracing the peeling edge of a pamphlet as she sat in the waiting room. The receptionist called her name, and Chloe walked to the desk on legs that felt unsteady.
‘Miss Carter,’ the receptionist said, her tone clipped but professional. ‘Unfortunately, due to last night’s blackout, the samples in your account were compromised. Without insurance coverage, we’re unable to offer compensation.’
Fourteen eggs. Gone. Not just the money, but the pain, the careful planning, the hope of pulling herself and Rae out of the spiral they were trapped in. She stared at the woman, her mouth dry, as the receptionist continued, offering empty apologies and a free insurance upgrade on her next donation.
Chloe nodded, or maybe she didn’t. The walk home blurred. Every step felt heavy, the weight of what she’d lost pressing down on her until it was too much to carry.
–
Phoebe Robertson is a Pākehā author who has recently completed her MA in Creative Writing at the IIML. She was commended in the Charles Brasch Young Writers Essay Competition and holds further awards from Poetry New Zealand Yearbook, Young NZ Writers, and National Flash Fiction Day. Her work has appeared in the last four editions of Mayhem Literary Journal and various other online platforms.
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[To read this poem in its correct formatting, please consider viewing the PDF of the issue]
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then, when the sun
had risen and set at once
[i] awoke, in the purple dusk-dawn:
no siren sounded
and [i] knew,
amongst all the gaudy,
multicoloured assemblies
[i] could find nasturtiums
growing in soiled gutters
and (uttering words ((un)heard)),
[i] spoke of self-reference
while staring in (my) hand mirror
it all circled ‘round:
a recurrent loop saw
futility, everywhere encircled
(the fallout amounted to
fair, still weather; silent:
like all the pens [i]’ve ever lost
(they all remain
(every toothbrush, too)))
and [i] knew this is (my) immortality
(an anonymous landfill embalmment
(like Tutankhamun’s tomb treasures)):
bottlecapsandtinyziplockbagsandrubberbandsandbankcardsandtakeawaycontainersandhairtiesandpainttubesandtvremotesanddishbrushesandlunchboxesandtendollarbongsandpipesandpipecleanersandsmoothiecupsandhalfemptyeyeshadowpalettesandlubetubesandcokebottlesandwaterbottlesandbabybottlesandemptyfluoxetinesheetsandlipsticktubesandlostsunglassesandtoothbrushestoothbrushestoothbrushesandteabagsandbrokenlightfittingsandwornoutshoesandlostmonopolyapartmentsandplasticbagsandbrokencurtainhooksandandsyringesandpackagingsleevesandusedoestrogenpatchesandtetrapacksandsporksandcondomsandcrushedmonopolyhotelsandtakeawaycupsanddeadvapesandtoothpickpacketsandsellotapeandducttapeandgladwrapandsimcardsandkeyringthingsanddefunctnamebadgesandsquashedsequinsandtornlanyardsanddeadbatteriesandbicpensandlatexglovesandcostumeearringsandstrawsandcigarettebuttsanddirtiedmakeupbrushesandloosenedbuttonsandoldphonecasesandrubbishbagsandeverythingelse
everything except the anti-plastic aspect of
(my) breath: may it decay
and, it was day
and night at once
[i] was crepuscular
pining for twilight
—
o(l[ɨ]ve) (bly(th)) is a wiggly, circular primate/process(ing) and outer-disciplinary artist(ing), primarily based in Te Whanganui-a-Tara, Aotearoa(…) she is parasocially attached to Ella Fitzgerald, plays the piano, writes poetry, paints, and ponders(…) [her] paintings have recently been exhibited by VUWSA and Meanwhile Gallery(…) she studied philosophy at Te Herenga Waka and [her] poetry has previously been published by bad apple, Mote, and 5ever Books(…)
@wiggle.wiggle.inc [Instagram] -
frowning mammals / colonise a clay tomb villa /
they’re naked, bench pressing bouquets / dancing.
a preserved mud lady swallows champagne / archaeologists stalk / as couples cascade.red ochre rituals / drunk haircuts by firelight / massage parlours and melodramatic vanities.
the men are just normal / binary bitcoin babies /
they hunt cougars / sleep in a dirt blanket haze.
in the morning, the / young dusty demons / spew synthetic seeds and grains.
their cheekbones shimmer / while mitochondrial milfs gnaw worms.
yummy mummy bog bodies in thong bikinis / gather around a pool of saliva.
they vote on a new girl to return to the ground.
in the distance / an ancient sea melts / so, they take a trip /
to punch surfing dogs.
_
Ava Reid (Te Ātiawa, Pākehā) is from Ōtepoti and is currently studying anthropology at Ōtākou Whakaihu Waka.
-
Welcome to the dark creek,
where the night sky trickles over rocks.
You look up and see clouds passing behind half the moon.
You look down and see the other half submerged in water.
The raindrops are washed downstream
before ripples have a chance to form.
We carefully dip our thick naked bodies into the creek
and taste the flow on our skin like cold blood.
I bathe in the night and then flop onto the mossy bank
and wait for the sun to rise and dry me off.
Dark droplets roll off my body,
sink into the soil, and encourage black grass to grow.
The bugs take this time to drink deeply
to fuel the dim glow of their wings.
The eels are everywhere,
mouths stretched wide and hungry, calling.
—
Always Becominging is a cool trans girl. Her poetry collection I Am A Human Being won the Jessie Mackay Prize for Poetry at the 2021 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. She publishes other cool trans people through HuRT Books. @alwaysbecominging on Instagram.
-
I watch the truck arrive, a snail crawling up the road with a great bulbous shell on its back. The truck slows to a stop and the Water Watch delivery person opens the driver’s door and swings out. They flash their card over the reader by our front gate and pull the thick hose from the side of the truck, unwinding a few metres of its length. Hauling the end of the hose through the open gate, they slot it against the coupling sitting at the top of a short pipe, which pokes up out of the ground in our front yard like the periscope of a submarine. We’re lucky; our water tank is buried underground, leaving our yard clear. Not that much can grow here.
The water person pulls a handle, which connects hose and coupling snugly. They go back to their truck, turn a wheel. The hose tautens. They lean against the side of their truck, phone in hand, swiping idly. It seems a terribly boring job, being one of the water people. A lot of slow driving, a lot of waiting around. It takes a handful of minutes for our water tank to fill. Then the water person shoves their phone back into their pocket and reverses the process: turns the wheel until the hose slackens, pulls the handle to release the hose from the coupling, winds the hose back onto its place on the side of the truck, swipes their card over the reader again. Climbs back into the cab of the giant snail and crawls along the road to the next property.
~
“Huh.”
It’s a decidedly suppressed noise, considering what it’s made in response to.
“What?” I ask.
“Water’s not coming today.”
I turn my head to her, lowering my book. “What?”
“Water’s not coming today,” my mother repeats.
“Why not? Is it coming tomorrow?”
She shakes her head and holds her phone screen out to me, as if I can read what it says from across the room. “I got a notification from Water Watch. They said it’s not coming. They don’t know when they’ll be able to bring it.”
“What do you mean ‘they don’t know’?”
She shrugs, turning her screen back to herself. “It says, ‘Due to an unforeseen obstacle, water deliveries to southern and eastern suburbs will not be completed this week. We understand this may cause some distress. If you are in urgent need of water, please contact our emergency number on 0300 blah blah blah. Your household will be assessed and emergency water allocations will be made on a case-by-case basis. Other suburbs may also be affected. Level 3 restrictions are in place region–wide as of 12PM today. Follow the link for information on Level 3. At this stage we are unable to provide any specifics on when usual water deliveries will resume, but we do not expect this delay to be long. Please check all future notifications for important updates.’”
“Unforeseen obstacle? What does that mean?”
“Who knows? Probably someone flipped the wrong switch somewhere or messed up a spreadsheet. I’m sure it’ll be sorted soon.”
~
“Huh,” my mother says again the following morning.
I look up from my breakfast. “Is the water problem fixed?”
“Not yet. There’s something in the city reservoir.”
“Sorry?”
“Something’s in the reservoir.”
I’ve never understood my mother. Nothing ever seems to raise her blood pressure or heart rate or the pitch of her voice.
This time I prowl over to get a closer look at her phone. “What kind of something?” I ask as I approach. “Like a bacterium? A dead rat?”
“Like a big … thing,” she says, handing her phone over to me. “Like a creature.”
Her Water Watch app is open, showing the latest update from our regional Water Watch team.
“Scroll down,” she says, peering over my shoulder.
I do. Near the end of the update, an image has been posted of the shape they’ve detected in the reservoir using sonar. I peer at the image. Squint. Zoom in. Zoom out again. “It looks like a…”
“A creature,” my mother says again.
A creature. A big, strange creature. “What—what is it? How did it get in?”
My mother shrugs. She’s already leaning back in her armchair, crossing her feet on her footrest, picking up her e-reader. Her interest in the creature waning at a rapid rate. She has infinite trust in the powers that be to fix this problem before it affects her life any further. “They don’t know. They’ll figure it out.”
“You’re not worried?” I ask, setting her phone back down on the armrest next to her.
She glances up from the book she’s reading on her e-reader. “Hmm?”
~
The page on Level 3 rules says:
No showers or baths
To wash, do a sponge bath from a small basin only
Fill a 2L water bottle at the start of each day to serve as your daily drinking water allowance
Any cups of tea, coffee, or other drinks are only to be made from your 2L daily drinking water allowance
Minimise dishes wherever possible
Do not cook meals that will require dishes to soak
Use dish and sponge bath water to water home hydroponics
All available dish and body cleansers are compatible with hydroponics
Minimise use of water for cooking
Use hand sanitiser instead of soap and water on hands unless they are visibly soiled
Spot cleaning of garments only
I read them over and over. There are exemptions and further guidelines for babies, the elderly, people with certain medical conditions, and for pets.
And I read up about the city reservoir. The gargantuan container buried five metres below the earth that holds the lives of tens-of-thousands—in the form of 35 million litres of water—within its concrete confines. I think of it as our city’s heart, pumping groundwater up from deep below through thick, cavernous veins, storing it in its chambers, and then pumping it on again—mechanically, dispassionately—into the capillaries, the Water Watch trucks, that carry it to our homes.
There are schematics of the reservoir online. I turn them and turn them, looking at all angles for a way a creature of this size could have gotten in. There isn’t one. Water Watch has admitted this defeat already: they simply can’t explain how the creature got in there, and they have no idea how to get it out. But the creature has displaced huge amounts of water, and this has damaged the input and output pumps and pipes. Crews are working to fix the damage, but in the meantime precious water is leaking. I imagine the reservoir like a beast itself, losing blood through its bare wounds. We are the cells that rely on its nourishment. After only a few days of Level 3, they send out warnings that we may have to move to Level 4 by the end of the week if something doesn’t change.
School switches to online. Students can’t be trusted not to leave the school tank taps running or to start a water fight in the hot sun at lunchtime. This is a misread from my point of view, as even the most boisterous and clowning students I know are serious about this kind of thing, more so than their parents. But I have to agree that keeping students home, and out of the late summer sun, will certainly save more water.
I watch Mrs Evans talking on my screen and think of the endless network of pipes lying fallow beneath the town. History of Water is a compulsory subject in all schools now, lest we forget why we need it, and what we did to it. We were supposed to go on a field trip to one of the old dams this week. All the dams and above-ground reservoirs sit empty and dry, ugly industrial memorials to the brief years of convenience that the powers that be exchanged for, well … everything.
I bring a web browser up, covering Mrs Evans’ face, and do a search for the reservoir again.
They’re calling it Nessie II now. The creature. I click onto its name-source and stare at the “surgeon’s photograph”. To me, it looks like an arm sticking out of the water with the hand formed into a beak. But that makes me imagine the rest of the person beneath the surface, and this in turn brings a painful surge of grief and anger, torrid and forceful. I have never swum. I live near the coast but the waves that wash onto the shore bring plastic and taupe-coloured spume and an oily film. The water smells rancid. I have never had the pleasure of submerging myself fully within a body of water, of diving deep.
Back to the reservoir. The creature inside is shaped vaguely like a plesiosaur. They’ve detected a heartbeat but can’t explain how it lives. It’s just … sitting there. Unmoving. There’s no space for it to move. But it’s alive.
Not just alive: it’s a mascot amongst my fellow students. Our group chats abound with their love for the creature. They root for it, and I find myself joining them. It feels as if here—in our city, in our reservoir—is nature’s last hurrah, an eventuation that mocks all of humanity’s efforts to understand, to predict, to control. All that scientific modelling, all those schedules and plans. But nobody accounted for a creature in the reservoir.
~
“Huh,” my mother says.
“What?”
“They’ve killed it.”
My gaze snaps to her. “The creature?”
“Yes. Says they’ve managed to get something into the reservoir and put it to sleep, like they do with dogs, and it worked. It’s dead.”
“Lemme see.” I cross the room and take her phone from her. She’s right: the Water Watch notification explains that they consulted with a veterinarian, infiltrated the reservoir water with the euthanising agent, and successfully euthanised the creature.
“But … but it hasn’t fixed anything,” I exclaim, looking down at my mother. “It says right here. ‘The body of the creature is still inside the reservoir. We have experts working on how to get it out. The water inside the reservoir is no longer drinkable and will need to be disposed of.’ They killed it for nothing and all it did was make things worse.” My voice is rising quite against my will. “It hasn’t fixed anything.”
“No,” my mother says absently, “I suppose it hasn’t.” And she closes her eyes, settling more comfortably in her chair to doze.
_
Jack Hitchcox (he/him) is a healthcare worker and Master’s student based in Te Whanganui-a-Tara. He studies tuna (eels) and likes to write stories with queer and environmental themes.
-
[To view this poem in its correct formatting, please consider viewing the issue 4 PDF]
_
and I wonder if I could still hold empathy given that the fires burnt every form of life
and they forget that fire is also a form of rebirth
and I see
wealthy
zionists
esteemed actors
tiktok stars
plastic surgeons
and
reality tv stars
lose
their
beach houses
and it’s always a video of them being able to leave
and
have somewhere to
go
and I only feel sorry for Paris Hilton
and I listen to stars are blind
and I wonder why it’s so difficult to hold a shred of sympathy for the rich and I hope that they see that they can shield themselves from catastrophe in ways that others can’t
and/but
thoughts & prayers
thoughts & prayers
thoughts & prayers
thoughts & prayers
thoughts & prayers
and I notice that there are less bees
and they aren’t native bees they are honey bees
and the grass is prickly and brown
and I think of sylvester stallone in waterworld 2 as kevin costner’s evil antihero father
and if all the ice melted
and the nuclear reactors went
B
O
O
M
and/but there are knowledge holders who could save us and they were blocked from helping and sometimes they will be murdered if not from violent means and/but also through the air and the trees and the soil and it was all used as disposal and I go to Rotorua and drive past the californian redwoods and wonder all they have seen and we see the same images of pure hell over and over and over and over again and we see the deaths of whole worlds both people and animals and plants and yet it’s never seen as a result
of excess
of waste
of greed
of stolen land
of stolen labour
and in my fingernails I held all the fire and its webs of life and I break one and then two and then all ten scatter inside Pukatea and Patete and Tōtara and Māhoe and Kaikomako and yet you cut down my fire and the cows roam by the river despite the pōhara fence bent down and bioremediation requires plants to suck out the poison it’s not a cleanse like fire burning the monoculture to shreds and it’s the revs of the motorbike and it’s fire being a part of these cycles like a bee but never at this rate and what did we do to all the wetlands and it rains but only softly and the lawn mowers keep toiling away at the grass that’s everywhere
and/but what if all the water
was privately owned
by
a
billionaire
and that’s not science fiction or a cli-fi
and it’s the day after tomorrow
and jake gyllenhaal isn’t available
and/but my money is on the rock as a firefighter flying a helicopter to save his estranged wife and daughter
and his muscles bulge
and can you smell what the rock is cooking
and everything went from the low grill to charred grill
and I’m surrounded by volcanoes
and they all used to be lovers
and the soils here became volcanic after their last tiff
and it smells of sulphur
and/or rage
and/or betrayal
and you cut funds to fight fires to instead put money into policing and you built prisons on dry, former agricultural towns with dwindling supplies of water and you promised jobs and you pumped out whatever water you could and some of it’s taken by kris jenner waterblasting her calabasas jet skis and all the grapevines burnt every summer and the wine became sour and you are driving an suv through gridlock traffic and not that house from architectural digest and I look up and saw pinus radius from california covering Pūtauaki maunga and I think about extraction like finding a plug in a huge blackhead
and
wringing it out
and
the trees in california keep dying
and
amazon drivers are still delivering
and
prisoners work for $5 a day fighting fires
and you wonder when if ever it will all stop
and/but
it
won’t
_
Hana Pera Aoake (Ngāti Hinerangi, Ngāti Mahuta, Waikato/Tainui, Tauranga moana) is an artist from Aotearoa. In 2020 they published their first collection of writing, a bathful of kawakawa and hot water with Compound Press. In 2025 they have titles coming out with Compound Press (NZ), Discipline (AU) and no more poetry (AU). Mostly they are a mum living beneath Pūtauaki maunga and work with gardening, ceramics, textiles, performance, writing and film.
-
The moon
must have
come down
with the rain
to press her
pregnant body
on the banks
of the river,
for the grasses
are all silver
and flattened,
the wild carrot
and baby’s breath
all rotted
and skeletal.
Yes it was
the moon
or perhaps
a thousand
sleepy snails
tracing their
dew along the
river’s tongue.
Perhaps it was
the spiders, their
webs now heavy
with wet sunlight,
their nests burst.
Think of the
thousands
lost downstream.
Oh this silvery
devastation,
to see the
washed out
grasses and
fallen tī kōuka
so gleaming
and hopefully bent
in the twilight
of yesterday’s flood.
_
Millie Godfery (she/her) is a Pākehā Tangata Tiriti writer and grower. She is a Masters Graduate of Victoria University of Wellington and has work published in takahē, six cents, and Correspondence 2.2.
-
after the flood, we sail north
the mountain peaks are
pale islands, and the old world
a half-remembered place:
a harbour to beach our ships, somewhere
strangers smiled at each other.
we drift over city streets, forests.
triton’s hoard: sunken gold and plastic straws
if I knew how, I’d hold my breath
and dive and comb my hand through
the deepest part of my life
sift the seed pearls from the sand.
a spot of rain doesn’t bother us
we’re canny as gulls: we know
the smell of a storm,
we know a whirlpool
has a centre but no edge.
half-finished voyages, stone-pinned,
and other strangenesses:
a fisher king catching mayflies
a wind-jammed tiller
a woman drawing chalk lines on the sea.
no stadiums, no forests
you can’t jump in a car like you used to
drive, like you used to
into the pits of the night to
drink in the sky from a beachside carpark.
I remember books in aquarium libraries
and where the spare key still hangs in deep water
and it went so quietly, when the rain came
now the wind rises everywhere
we can sail anywhere but home
and there is water, but none to drink.
—
Kate Twomey completed her MA in creative writing at the International Institute of Modern Letters in 2023. You can find her on Instagram at @k8.2me.
-
Every time I tell anyone about my family bach at Waikawa Beach, the first response I get is always, ‘Where’s that?’ And I don’t blame them. An hour north of Wellington on the Kāpiti Coast, it’s sandwiched between larger settlements like Ōtaki and Levin, with a permanent population of fewer than two hundred people. Waikawa is the kind of mystical beach a million coming-of-age movies should be set at. And since my grandfather first bought a section on the river in the 1970s, it’s the only place I’ve ever called home.
The beach is named for its river, which starts all the way up in the peaks of the Tararua Ranges and winds down to the Tasman Sea. There’s a slip in the upper reaches that deposits bitter sediment into the water, making it the only river in the Horowhenua region to have two names. Above the slip, the Kaitawa River. Surest water. Below, Waikawa. Bitter water.
Once, my brothers and I spent hours swimming in it at high tide when the seawater rushes in and turns it emerald green. I learnt to kayak before I could ride a bike, paddling by the dunes where the water is shallow and safe. We would make mudballs from layers of wet and dry sand, sometimes constructing elaborate dune obstacle courses with ramps and tunnels to test if they were sturdy enough to make it to the river. Sometimes we’d just throw them at each other. We memorised the deepest spots and dived into them from the rocks or the cockpit of a kayak, trying to touch the bottom and always, always failing. My favourite thing was to spend hours kayaking as far up the river as possible, until it became so narrow you had to paddle backwards to get out again. Once, the banks of the river were lined with nothing but native bush.
On New Year’s Day this year, my family and I woke up at 5am to walk onto the beach and watch the sunrise over the mountains. We joked about following ‘Lord of the Rings rules’, and witnessing the first light of 2024 felt more special than all of the times I’ve stayed up until midnight just to go to bed instantly. I texted the girl I love as I sat in the dunes, telling her about the shades of pink and yellow bursting through the clouds and reflecting onto the river. She and most of my friends were still awake from partying all night down in Wellington. The sky in the city was too grey to see the sun, ‘but I can feel the light soaking back into the world,’ she said.
Later that day, I went to bed vomiting for half the week from a bacterial infection from the river. Every summer for the past decade the Waikawa Beach Ratepayers Association has announced that the river is, yet again, unsafe to swim in. The banks of the river are lined with nothing but radiata pine plantations and farms. The runoff of chemicals and every cow-related fluid imaginable have polluted it beyond repair. This was the first year that the annual Boat Day of kayak and raft races by the footbridge was cancelled because of the risk that someone would become sick if they accidentally fell in. I’ve never been good at accepting finality. I hate saying goodbye to anyone, or anything. I haven’t accepted that I’ve had my last swim in the Waikawa River because I don’t think I know how to.
The river carves the beach into two sections, affectionately (and not particularly creatively) dubbed the road end and the bridge end. The first footbridge was swept away in 1990 from Waikawa’s worst winter flood. Chunks of broken stone still sit at the edges of the water. The current bridge is wooden and painted dark blue, with metal railings at the start to stop motorbikes or quadbikes from driving across it. The road end, closer to the river mouth, is constantly covered in tyre tracks where the tarmac turns into sand. I’ve always preferred the bridge end. It has the pine forests to wander in, and all the biggest dunes, and the best stretch of ocean to swim in, and you don’t have to worry about being run over by a massive ute. A sign planted in the marram grass at the end of Manga Pirau Street has proclaimed THE BEACH IS A ROAD for as long as I can remember. It might just be my autism, but I’ve always thought that the beach is, well. A beach.
There are stories of a powerful taniwha lurking in the depths of the river, possessing the powers to change its course entirely. It feels like the river rewrites itself and forms a new path to the sea every season. I remember running down to the road end to see what shape it took this time when we arrived for the second week of every school holiday as a kid. The taniwha is pretty busy.
Over the last couple of years, since I’ve moved to Wellington, the river has cut sharply against the foredunes and stayed there, forming a cliff twice as tall as myself. The sand is unstable and continues to erode. There’s no way to drive onto the beach straight from Manga Pirau Street anymore. At first, people started using the fields before the dunes as entrances to that half of the beach, driving through waist-high grass and onto the sand from there. Where one road closes, a new one is simply made through good old-fashioned Kiwi ingenuity. Problem solved! Except not really, because those fields are all local iwi land, with extremely limited public thoroughfare allowed in order to protect the delicate coastal environment.
The Horowhenua District Council politely reminded Waikawa residents to please not drive onto the beach from this land, and to wait and see what the council could do about new road access. Eventually, a year ago, after people kept ignoring these reminders and continued to drive through the iwi land, the council placed large concrete blocks around the edge to fence it off. I don’t even have my learner’s license. I do know how to drive, albeit illegally and imaginatively, in the way all rural kids do. The thought of speeding down to the Wairongomai Stream and back again like most cars on the beach do is as nauseating as the E. coli in the river.
This past summer, Waikawa residents were encouraged to submit to a petition by the council on different options for vehicle access. The first option involves restabilising the sandbanks, redirecting the current course of the river away from the dunes, and reinstating the same road with massive expense and effort, and no guarantee of this being a permanent solution. The second forgets the whole idea of driving onto the coast at all, leaving the river and beach free to change itself with the weather and seasons, and just keeping pedestrian access. My family and I spent hours drafting submissions on all the reasons we wanted the second. Yes, the beach would be quieter, safer, and more peaceful, but most points on our lists were ecological concerns. The impact on further geological stability, dune erosion and the lives of the animals and plants all across the beach, from oystercatcher colonies to plantings of spinifex to beds of paua, seem impossible to ignore. Now that the road end has been carless for months, I can’t imagine them ever returning.
One of the main points discussed in angry Facebook comments is that of accessibility — that people with limited mobility are entitled to enjoy the beach even if that means having to drive onto it. This was the summer I was also finally forced to reckon with my own disabilities for the first time. During times where I can barely get out of bed and it takes all my energy to just sit up, frankly the last thing I want to do is drive to the ocean. What’s really entitled to me is the idea that humans are inherently granted access to nature and should be able to experience it regardless of our impact on the land. I’m still slowly coming to terms with my disability, but I know there simply are things I can’t do and places I can’t go to anymore. Any pros of taking the sea air for my ill health like a Victorian invalid would be vastly outweighed by the measurement of the consequences against the environment. Experiencing nature feels like a privilege, an honour, even a miracle — not a right.
When my pain and fatigue restricted me from joining my brothers on tramps through the Tararua Ranges in January, I focused on what I could do instead of what I couldn’t. I couldn’t walk eight hours a day to the next ridgeline campsite like they could. I went and sat with my grandfather on a bench near our bach to watch the spoonbills and white herons in the river instead. Every time I want to ignore my limits and push myself, I remind myself that, just like Waikawa, my body is a thing to be taken care of.
The petition on vehicle access has been submitted for council consultation. I don’t know what the result will be. I want to be hopeful.
Since my grandfather’s fall and subsequent declining health when I was in my first year of university, he hasn’t spent nights at the beach with the rest of my family. The trek down the road, across the bridge, through the forest and dunes to the sea is too long for him now. A few times over summer we drove to his retirement village and picked him up for the day so he could join me sitting by the river and at least look at the ocean. When I take the bus home from campus, I wait for the less-frequent 14 instead of the 2 just so I can do the same.
–
Zia Ravenscroft (he/they) is a writer, drag king, and actor currently studying in
Te Whanganui-a-Tara. He has previously been published in Starling, Cordite, and The Spinoff, among others. In 2023, they performed at the National Poetry Slam Finals. He is a member of the queer filmmaking collective The New New. -
Once, I was human.
Before I was beast, barbarous.
Bluebottles tangled in black hair.
Mud matting furry feet.
I was lovely.
I read the riflemen and the fantails
Tittering in the trees, fondly.
Split rocks to see their shiny insides.
Singing, larking, stretched out,
Lithe in the sunlight, loving. Loved.
Then came farmer.
His pallid petrification,
Musket over leathery red back like nothing.
I saw myself in a still river.
Then I knew. I was a freak.
Bathed in the stream – was it the smell?
Crouched on all fours – was it the height?
But I knew. I knew.
In the stream, the weight of knowing made me cry.
In his shed,
The heavy tears of envy.
Us two beasts.
That night he visited. Empty shouldered.
He nodded at the rock in my hand.
Split. Shiny inside.
Resting, lovely.
Stretched in the moonlight, free.
Where the foliage is just so
That he could see a milky moon.
Where the riflemen and the fantails and
The earth under us can say our names
And have them mean nothing.
_
Adriana Che Ismail is a poet and writer from Malaysia and New Plymouth. She is currently based in Wellington. She does what she can with what she has. Instagram: @adrianaaaida
-
cicadas nestle in my ears & bones,
my density has dwindled down to
the percentage for a perfect home
but white blood cells rise as ivy suffocates
i don’t know if it soothes or aggravates today’s migraine
my bones chip & shatter, connecting with nan’s plum tree roots
hairy bark is revealed as I tear my porcelain cheek away
countless spores spill from my pores
a diet of pills, scans, manifestations, & physio exercises has still left me sore
my cries in pain become the hum
of a symphony of insects
i’ll faint & dislocate,
forget my meds today
& forget tomorrow’s too,
when you stomp & crush my dress of leaves
they’ll call me a Cronenbergian summer tale,
when all that’s left of my mossy skin
is crunchy exoskeletons
my broken nerves will regenerate
into roots & branches
i will become the cicada
haunting you in the garden
you will find the remains of my failed exoskeleton
in a few weeks
crumble them in your fingers
& sprinkle me on the lawn
like biodegradable confetti
does my illness
my return to nature nauseate you?
if so, look in the overflowing drawer
the sea of pill sheets, bottles, & creams
i have some ondansetron
if this doesn’t turn you on.
_
Zianna Ruiha (Ngāti Toa) (she/her) is a queer, disabled writer and procrastinator in Te Whanganui-a-Tara. She has pieces featured in Awa Wahine, Broken Antler Magazine, Knee Brace Press, Mote Journal, Overcom Mag, and Querencia Press. IG: @sillysausagezi
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DAWN
the apocalypse has happened & so what?
still sickly sky yawns dawns,
her red teeth glowing, we know
what she signals,
but we have forgotten how to fear.
we lost it when ashen-fingered terror
slid into our limp hands
& wouldn’t let go.
BUSINESS
the apocalypse happened & i’m over it.
can we move on already?
i’ve got fires to light & kūmara to harvest.
besides, it’s my shift on watch tonight
& the bloated things lumbering
out the flooded CBD these days
need no small degree of fighting off.
LATENT
the apocalypse didn’t ruin anything
that wasn’t slow-motion disintegrating anyway,
capitalism’s boom & bust was breakneck.
i suppose the cataclysm was impressive,
but it started way back
& no one admitted it.
G-TYPE
sure, it rains in concerning ways,
but still the earth dries under a reliable star;
my palms on the dirt feel the heat – the sun
has no idea the world has ended
& she’s still too hot to behold.
SELENE
the moon has other ideas,
flirting with us through her phases
& the billowing toxic plumes.
she’s so coy, she knows what’s happened,
but says nothing because words don’t exist to her.
on clear nights we run way out
from the settlement, remove our protective suits
& bathe in the silken sustenance of her light.
HADAL
the acidic ocean laps at my heels
& yes we have lost much,
yet waves are incorrigible
& so is joy.
when the storms come again
& we mourn & move & try again &
i imagine how
deep you’d have to go to find
the last of the whales rotting
on the ocean floor & life
blooming from their flesh.
i imagine how
those crimson tubeworms, 10,000 meters down,
happily huddle around their hydrothermal vents
& know nothing
about the apocalypse.
—
Hebe Kearney (they/them) is a poet from Ōtautahi who now calls Tāmaki Makaurau home. They are also a proponent of found art, constantly creating hand-cut collages, blackout poetry, and taking photographs of ironic signage. You can find them on Instagram @he__be and @blackoutpoetryaotearoa. And yes, they would like to pat your dog! Their poetry has appeared in places like: Aster Lit, Mantissa Poetry Review, Mayhem, Overcom, Mote, Poetry Aotearoa Yearbooks, samfiftyfour, Starling, Sweet Mammalian, Symposia, takahē, Tarot, The Spinoff, and Turbine. For a full list of their publications, see https://hebekearney.wordpress.com/
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[To read this poem in its correct formatting, please consider viewing our issue 4 PDF]
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I. John Key said my city’s dying (and he pulled my hair)
I am no satirist.
In fact the closest I’ve gotten
is a Juvenal modernisation.
Cast Wellington as Rome;
watch it fall.
The closest I’ve gotten
to poetry—at all—is verse.
Scribbled lines on a page torn out,
and never looked at again.
I am no satirist.
But even I can see
the irony in our situation.
The Catch-22s. The hooks on which
my ponytail will snag—
And leave me dangling like rotting fruit.
Watch me fall.
II. Carbon neutral ideation
It is possible,
I would be more help
Dead. Take my footprint
away completely.
It is possible,
I’m yet to create
work that will change the
course of our species.
III. Globalisation brings Alabama to Hawke’s Bay
We exist in the time of a Great Squeeze
—Your auntie Mary with a vice-like hug—
Windows, open yesterday, now boarded up.
And none of them matter to Mary.
Mary’s new dementia is endearing.
She tells you to practise kissing with your
second cousin. Warm laughter, and blushing.
Really, you see nothing to practise for.
Mary went to uni for free. Mary
birthed six and never worked a day of her long life.
Mary means well. She complains about change.
But it’s not her future narrowing.
IV. If we let them, how would the albatross evolve?
Species die out and so does potential.
The job market dries up.
The Earth squeezes us out like pus, washing
Her hands of us for good.
I am not sad to see us go. I’ll live
in anticipation
for an apocalypse I’ll never see,
and I’ll let my anxiety kill me first.
My generation will have less children.
Some day we’ll tear down Rome
and put up a colossal retirement home
in its place.
V. Dinosaurs did not have scales
One day I think a new species will think
about themselves in the same way we do.
They will think about us like dinosaurs,
they will hang skeletons in museums
opposite pictures of other mutant creatures.
On this day I tell my boyfriend I want
to be cremated. I tell him: I don’t
want to be bones. He doesn’t understand.
I explain to him about future museums
it doesn’t seem to click.
VI. Saturn is the sixth planet from the sun
I am cool and dry, like melancholy.
Some days the dread makes my bones feel hollow,
brittle, like little pieces of expired plastic.
Makes it feel too cold to get out of bed.
I sometimes wish I weren’t even awake.
But dreaming is never any better.
I always get to that point in my sleep—
I’m about to die, stabbed or shot—something
violent—but nothing ever happens, those dreams never end, there is no release—
only hesitation
—
Elena Heffernan is a philologist, dreamer, and syncopated music lover. She is a big believer in the Oxford comma. She spent the first 23 years of her life bouncing around Te Whanganui-a-Tara until recently moving across the Pacific to Taiwan. She’s super interested in sci-fi (in particular, cyber and solar punk) and the ongoing collapse of neo-liberal institutions worldwide. She loves the sun, hates the sound of styrofoam rubbing against itself, and believes that the human capacity for abstract thought is our greatest strength, and also our biggest weakness. You can find her on Instagram @3lena4nnie; however, she rarely posts about poetry, and this is simply a personal page.
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He hefted the bag up on his shoulder, planted his boots and kept climbing. Her taunts
echoed in his mind.
‘Why the hell are you delivering letters, you stupid git?’ And, ‘Why aren’t you delivering
something useful like eggs? Or flour?’
Because I don’t effing have any, you idiot. But he never said that. Just kept going, postbag
over his shoulder, back aching, feet stumbling on the broken path.
Two forty-foot containers, they’d found. Dumped in a ravine. Full of mail: letters, cards,
parcels. Of course the looters had nabbed all the parcels, ripped them open, taken the
contents, no matter what, chucked the packing away. They left the letters and cards.
Even if there’d been money inside … no use now.
He’d been a postman for nearly thirty years. Then it all happened … all that. Him and
Mossie had barricaded themselves in the house until things settled. Now it was just
survival really. He couldn’t bear it, sitting around, trying to grow stuff, bartering with
bastards who just wanted you to die.
Now at least he had a purpose. Even if everyone thought it was stupid.
He shuffled the envelopes for the next street. Sighed. Half of them would go into letter
boxes and rot there. But there were a few houses left with occupants. Sissy Jones – she
was eighty last year, tough as, birthday card was way late. Better than never. And little
Maryanne. She’d be at school now, if there was still a school. She’d like a card. He could
tell it had glitter on it by the feel.
Yep, he was almost halfway through the first container. Got to keep going, didn’t he?
Even if this was his very last pair of boots.
–
Sherryl Clark writes fiction and poetry, and loves the challenge of flash fiction where just a few words have to tell the whole story. Her most recent crime novel is Woman, Missing (HQ). @sherrylwriter
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and he kisses like an animal, like he fears the end of the world. His hands are everywhere: shoulder, waist, back, face. His breath is all mint, mint, mint and he really loves this song. I really love this song! He shouts over the hyper-electronic techno beat, the bass dropping into my belly, dropping further and further through me. The roof is sunrise-tangerine-blood orange bleeding into snapdragon pink. His teeth are on my teeth, grinding together. His name is something stupid, something lost to earlier in the night. My eyes zero in on the lightbulb flickering in the corner of the club.
How haven’t we met before? he asks once the song has ended and we’ve moved outside. He’s going to buy us another round, but he’s waiting for me to answer first. Outside, I notice his teeth. The bottom row is janky, teeth pushed up against each other, he’s got a canine that juts out in front of another tooth. They are coffee bean–brown. Tea-bag stained paper–brown. I pull my cardigan down a little, clutching it against my chest.
I’ve been away for a bit, think we met at Jess’s before I left. He’s frowning now. Looking behind me or through me. I am bone-cold, the chill of the night slices straight through my skin down to the muscle. I shiver and snap my teeth together without meaning to, drawing his gaze back to me. He pulls his jacket off, draping it over his shoulder before making that beeline to the bar.
My body sags into itself the moment he disappears from my eyeline, becoming indistinguishable from the mass. Everyone looks on the edge of terror. Eyes bulging, mouths flushed red and swollen. On the news they’re saying to remain calm. The pot plant next to me has withered up and died. There hasn’t been basil for months. I can’t remember the last time I tasted the soft mush of a banana, but neither can anyone else. It’s the middle of summer and the South Island has a lake that has frozen straight over.
He emerges from the crowd with two beers. I wrap a freezing hand around the ice-cold glass. His neck is lean, long. He tips it back as he takes a swig from the bottle. His Adam’s apple bops up and down, up and down. His wrists are tiny. I could wrap my hand around and still have space. I am trying my best not to notice these things, so I look away, I look back down at my own beer and peel the label away. The moon casts a silver glint across the band of my ring.
Where were you? he asks. When you said you were away. He gestures behind him, indicating the past, our past conversation. Like Europe or something? You girls are always in Europe. Isn’t Jess back in London?
Yeah, yeah. My lip splits open. From the beer or the ring or his teeth or the lie. The blood slides into my mouth. Sharp and tangy. London. Sure.
Environmental experts are urging everyone across the globe to immediately halt all travel. But our prime minister says it’s good for the local economy to have tourists and outgoing exports.
Decide you’d rather die at home, you’re from here right?
I’m from here, yeah. Just down the road really. Sometimes when I smile I feel the elasticity of my skin threatening to break clean off.
You’re really beautiful, you know. His beer is half-empty and I’m half-touched, half-anxious that he has said beautiful and not hot. I’ve yet to take a sip and when I bring the bottle to my lips, the beer mixes with the blood and I know I need to go home.
The sun doesn’t rise for days. Mum and I pass each other in the hallway like transitory ghosts, occasionally stopping to say hello or stare through each other. When she thinks I’m not looking, she surveys my body. I want her to find what she’s looking for, but I know that I’ve been good and she won’t.
In the garden the grass is wild and overgrown, tangling around my knees. I cut chickweed and agapanthus in the dark. Fish up stonewort and clasped pondweed from the lake. It could be Wednesday or Thursday, 10am or 8pm. I smoke one of the cigarettes I stole from the boy in the club and think about his wrists again, how dainty they were draped over my shoulder or cradling my neck or looped around a bottle of beer. There is blood in my mouth again and when I look down I have an open gash in my knee.
I separate the recycling and facetime Jess. In London the sun shines so bright it turns her translucent through the screen. It’s forty-five degrees, she says, and when she moves I can catch a glimpse of her arm, sunrise-tangerine-blood orange sunburn fading into snapdragon pink. My stomach turns.
Bodies are packed together like a tin of sardines, wiggling and writhing underneath the harsh LED lights emitting a pulsating red glow. He’s sitting by the bar with a beer already in hand, talking animatedly to a girl I don’t know. His hands are in the air. The sun has begun to edge us all. I can see the outline of it through the window. It keeps rising and falling, rising and falling, casting a ghastly limoncello glow across buildings.
On my phone I look at Hilma af Klint’s The swan no 1.
I spend a lot of time looking at Hilma af Klint’s The swan no 1.
When they brought her exhibition to Wellington I spent the last $350 in my bank account on a last-minute return flight to make opening weekend. I flew even though my heart arrhythmia was in a critical condition and I couldn’t afford it, even though flight emissions were causing the earth to rot underneath the soles of our sneakers. In the City Gallery bathroom I passed out and hit my head clean against the sink, chipping open my forehead. I had to wear a bandaid for two weeks.
Hey, it’s you. The girl is gone and he’s standing in front of me.
Hey, it’s me. I test out a smile but it feels sloppy on my mouth.
Time stretches between us but he’s smiling easily, sweetly.
Can I hold you? he asks, taking a step closer. I’m really cold.
I nod and his arms are around me. His fingers press into the bone of my shoulder, the dip in my back. His bicep is so close to my head, engulfing my shoulder, and I catch a whiff on his Lynx. The ice-caps were melting and now they’re not. His body is cold like gelato or milk or the back of a liquor store freezer. I try not to think about how he is probably thinking about my body: how it feels, what it looks like, how much weight I carry, how cold I am. Everyone in the bar is swaying back and forth, limbs all entangled. The government is saying this is a good thing. Everyone is touching everyone again.
We sit down at the bar. It’s too late to ask his name. The bartender brings me a beer.
Wish we could still get lemon wedges. He clinks our bottles together.
Wish we could still get wine. This makes him belly-laugh, like the desecration of our crops is a line from a stand-up joke. I only started eating again around a year ago, when everything began to wilt. How is that for a joke?
His hair is a feathery child’s blond, eyes lake-blue. His nails are cut very short, to the skin. Back when the earth had been climbing record temperatures of heat, he’d come with Jess and I to the beach. I remember him faintly, how nervous he had been when he had stripped to nothing in the sun to cool down. We hadn’t spoken then. He had only had eyes for Jess.
He’s telling me he used to be an environmental lawyer before he crashed his car in spring, before the environment collapsed and cases spiralled out of control. He had been driving drunk. To keep warm, he says.
I pretend not to notice when he asks what I do, or did. There are lots of people out of work now. They are hesitant to call it a recession: it might be something worse. I just want him to kiss me again so I can lose myself until something that resembles a feeling starts to emerge from my body, so I can feel an artificial warmth spread from the pads of my fingers to the crook of my elbow to the bend of my knees to the curve of my ankles.
I take him home. Mum has all the lights on, even though we’re supposed to keep them all turned off. She’s curled up on the couch, reading The Road. I feel like an adolescent as we stand in the doorframe, as she inspects us. I’m wearing one of her dresses and I can see that this pleases her because it fits, and she’s four sizes bigger than I was this time last year. He fumbles an introduction, tripping over the name Oliver.
Did you live here as a kid? He’s picking through my things: swan trinkets and jewellery boxes and teddy bears. Taped above my bed is a postcard I nicked from the exhibit.
No, we moved around lots when I was a kid.
He seems surprised, picking up a felt figurine of a rabbit that has a silver ribbon with a bell looped around its neck.
Why?
Guess the lease was always up after a few years.
His face twists in surprise. I’ve only lived in the one house my whole life, he says. I don’t want to think about what his house is like. If it has a white-picket fence like in storybooks or a manicured garden, although all the gardens are overrun now, mortgage or no mortgage. It came as a shock that money couldn’t continue to buy nature’s compliance, it could only prolong it, or contort it to a new form, or destroy it completely.
He sits down next to me on the bed. His lithe body barely makes a dent in the mattress. I suddenly loathe the idea of having him here, of beginning to undress, of answering any more questions, of learning anything new about him.
What was London like? he asks. I’ve never been.
He’s looking through me again.
You really like swans, he comments when I don’t answer.
Do you know they bond for life? I reply.
When I am underneath him, I study the ceiling. It’s a sunrise-tangerine-blood orange bleeding snapdragon pink. The sun has risen. He has a lurid scurvy glow to his skin in daylight. He says goodbye at the door, his front canine jutting out.
The tulips are bleeding in the sun. Mum plucks the pink petals one-by-one and I watch from the deck, knees pulled up underneath my chest, arms woven around my shins.
Oliver’s touch lingers like a freezer-burn against my shoulder. I haven’t seen him at the club or the bar in weeks. I have been thinking about his neck a lot. How badly I yearn for my own neck to look the same. I touch it gently with the pads of my fingertips and wince when I meet flesh. My own neck is short and stocky. Since I’ve begun eating again, I’ve developed something curvy, blocky.
The swans are back! Mum calls out. It’s the sign of something good that they’ve returned. It’s positively dystopian the way they announce the death toll at noon on the news every day, but it has been slowly going down. There have been twelve days of sun. Everyone in the neighbourhood is wearily smiling a little more.
I watch the swans glide through the lake. How badly I want to be one. I pick at the scab on my knee until the ground is littered with my skin cells and fragments and blood and DNA. I stand, stretch, call out over my shoulder that I’m heading inside.
When I facetime Jess she’s shrouded in a glittering moon-lit darkness, teeth biting into a ripe and crunchy apple. I can taste it through the screen. I don’t really remember him, she says when I ask about Oliver.
I describe his teeth and little waist and dainty wrist in detail. His eyes and his hair. The conversation crawls along to her latest fling and the new layer in the ozone and the housing crisis. Should I come home? she asks.
Sure. I’m not sure what else I’m supposed to say.
How are you doing? she asks gently, as if caressing my hair. The care in her voice makes me uncomfortable, on high alert.
Fine, I say. I’m doing fine.
This kiss is sloppy and hot and ultimately useless in the current climate. As I move through the crowds, my limbs become entwined with others. My head, my belly, my hands touch heads, bellies, and hands. My skin feels like it’s sloughing off from the unimaginable heat. The pōhutukawa is bleeding bright red outside, but it’s the wrong season for it. I watch it through the window. The club smells of mint and sage and orange. Someone throws their arms around my neck and squeezes their body into mine. I can feel the squish of their stomach pressed up against the squish of mine.
I walk outside the club into the overbearing daylight and think about Oliver. It could be 7am or 11pm. His neck. His teeth. I think about the first time I bit down on a salt and vinegar chip once I began eating again. How strange it was that it took the beginning of the end of the world to propel me towards wanting to get better. I pick the petals of flowers and rip leaves off trees to tear up in my hands as I walk back home.
When I look up at the sky it is sunrise-tangerine-blood orange bleeding into snapdragon pink. There have been reports of increased wildfires across the globe. I unlock the gate and slip into the garden. Mud sinks under the weight of my steps. The death toll is rising again. The air tastes like anise.
I plunge head first into the lake to cool down. I want wings and to glide and to trumpet and to bond for life. Feathers and a beak and a desire to protect. It becomes so cold I stop feeling. I’m like an animal and
–
Ruby-Rose Whitcher (she/her) loves watching the swans at Western Springs Park and turning women into animals in short fiction. @rubyrosewhitcher on Instagram.
Greek God ~ Layal Moore & Maxime Vermeille
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Keith Nunes (Aotearoa New Zealand) has had poetry, fiction, haiku and visuals published around the globe. He creates ethereal manifestations as a way of communicating with the outside world. Nunes is entertained by Kurt Vonnegut’s hopes, Cole Swensen’s descriptions, Lydia Davis’s prose and Miranda July’s outrageousness.
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Layal Moore is a writer, artist, and mother of Lebanese-Irish descent, living on the Hibiscus Coast in Auckland. She has taught art at the Estuary Arts Centre, Art Kaipara, and hosted workshops from home. She has also sold work at the Estuary Arts Centre and online. Layal currently teaches English at Mahurangi College in Warkworth, where she leads the Writer’s Club, organising workshops and hosting guest speakers. She is awaiting publication of her first solo poetry collection – Amoral Intersection: My Life through Poetry, which is due out late 2025.
To see more of her work, visit https://www.facebook.com/livetocreate.co.nz
Maxime Vermeille is an exceptionally talented French carpenter who works for Unique Creative and is the fiancé of Layal. He contributed a wooden sculpture to Dimension Festival 2024, and displayed and sold art at Lost in Paradise. He enjoys psychedelic painting and is at his happiest when he’s listening to music, touching wood, and hanging with his dog.
To check out more of his work, visit https://www.instagram.com/woodlegend7
This is their first creative collaboration.
