HOME   EDITORIAL   ABOUT US   CONTRIBUTORS   SUBMISSIONS   PREVIOUS ISSUES
Fiction    Reading Room    Memoir    Interview
James McNaughton

Drizzle

Drizzle insists a boyish philosophy. Rain contains. A Fender bass lopes around the café. From an arrangement in black in the corner comes a gleam of shoulder like the sunlit handle of an amphora. I imagine, predictably, a bloody history: her heart opened and closed like a slamming door, men’s eyes covering her skin with climbing roses, etc.   A smoggy sun is drawn on the end of my cigarette. Could I occasion, I wonder, the gift of her surrender – the night when she becomes a breathless witness to her body’s pillage?   No. There is one she writes to, Spanish, who wears a snake-skin belt and wipes tables. Like all the best hypnotists he has facial hair. Her lifeline. Her ladder. A pot plant dreams a cabbage tree’s green pyrotechnics.   I step into barely falling, swarming drizzle. Gutters chuckle, the city lurks in battleship grey. Draped, loomable, the harbour is a place where large mammals come to die, a wet and odorous plain.

About this author ... 
 
Poetry
Johanna Aitchison
Michele Amas
Angela Andrews
Airini Beautrais
Jenny Bornholdt
Amy Brown
Lynn Davidson
Emily Dobson
Fiona Farrell
Cliff Fell
Janis Freegard
Helen Heath
Anne Kennedy
Stefanie Lash
Jan Lauwereyns
Vana Manasiadis
Talia Marshall
James McNaughton  
Alice Miller
Gregory O’Brien
Frances Samuel
Robyn Schiff
Marty Smith
Elizabeth Smither
Chris Tse
Nick Twemlow
Ashleigh Young

Hosted by the New Zealand
Electronic Text Centre