Seven Poems
In my country of origin, far across the sea, the women sweep the floors with what you would call broomsticks. These are effective until their ends begin to fray and snap, creating more debris than they clean away. This was also the problem with our government, which is why my father disguised us as suitcases and brought us here.
I was a victim of circumstance. The wind funnelled through the streets. I saw whole families picked up and carried away. The Pembertons held hands like paper chain people. One day, I stopped fighting and let the wind take me too. That food bank was once a petrol station, which was once a field where my sister looked after a horse. Mostly she just brushed it and blew softly into its nose. Some horses like that.
You were a semicolon in the last printed edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, which ran to 32 volumes. You provided a crucial pause between two connected but discrete ideas about the nature of being. But no one wants printed editions anymore. Editions before your time, back when everyone was pausing to consider things, might be sought after; you, however, have been hurried past and swing like a hook and eye between two seams coming apart.
The time of near enough is almost here. Goodbye perfect pencils, flawless features, names in lights. Welcome you who tripped coming into the room. Take a seat among us. What have you forgotten to bring to share?
Desperately Seeking Baby. Oh Baby Where Art Thou? Babyspotting. Hunt for the Wilderbabies. Heavenly Babies. Hidden Babies. Sleeping Babies. The Wicker Baby. A Clockwork Baby. Edward Babyhands. Butch Baby and the Sundance Kid. The Princess Baby. Kung Fu Baby. The Big Lebabeski. Babylon. The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Babies. Dead Poets’ Babies. Reservoir Babies. The Lost Babies. The Remains of the Baby. Baby to the Centre of the Earth.
They were a loquacious people. Even their ears could talk. I saw a small boy crouched in a corner covering his, trying to make them stop.
‘Their arms were songs and their language a series of clicks.’ ‘Language? How do you know they were speaking?’ said George hotly. Dick ordered another margarita. ‘Maybe “language” is the wrong word.’ The lights flickered, then went out – common in this part of the world. Anne returned from backstage wearing a red-checked headscarf – her hilarious ‘basket of goodies’ impersonation. I knocked over Dick’s drink with my tail. ‘Come on everyone,’ said Julian, ‘I could eat a horse.’ ‘I could eat an elephant,’ said Dick. ‘I could eat Africa,’ said George. I was starving too, but I couldn’t eat Africa because all the animals and people there might not want to be eaten. They might feel we were taking advantage of them.
James Brown
James Brown describes himself as ‘a Sunday poet who fell in with the wrong crowd’. His poetry collections are New Days for Old (2026), from which the above extracts are taken, Slim Volume (2024), The Tip Shop (2022), Selected Poems (2020), Floods Another Chamber (2017), Warm Auditorium (2012), The Year of the Bicycle (2006), which was a finalist in the Montana New Zealand Book Awards 2007, Favourite Monsters (2002), Lemon (1999), and Go Round Power Please (1996), which won the Best First Book Award for Poetry. They are all published by Te Herenga Waka University Press.
James's poems are widely anthologised, including in the annual anthology Best New Zealand Poems. James has been the recipient of several writing fellowships, including the 1994 Louis Johnson New Writers Bursary and a share of the 2000 Buddle Findlay Sargeson Fellowship. In 2001 he was the Canterbury University Writer in Residence, and in 2002 he was one of four New Zealand writers shortlisted for the inaugural Prize in Modern Letters. James was the Victoria University of Wellington Writer in Residence in 2004. He edited The Nature of Things: Poems from the New Zealand Landscape (Craig Potton, 2005), the literary magazine Sport from 1993 to 2000, and Best New Zealand Poems 2008. In 2002, as Dr Ernest M. Bluespire, he published the useful booklet Instructions for Poetry Readings (Braunias University Press). In 2018, James created what he calls ‘a transcribed poem’ out of Herbert Morrison’s famous radio commentary of the Hindenburg disaster: ‘Hindenburg: A transcribed poem’, and also produced the small booklet Songs of the Humpback Whale. In 2019, the band Polite Company (Alan Gregg, formally of the Mutton Birds), turned two of James’s poems (‘Shrinking Violet’ and ‘Peculiar Julia’) into songs.
James works as an editor and teaches the Poetry Workshop at the International Institute of Modern Letters at Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington.
Alberto Regueira
Alberto Regueira, born in 1994 in Havana, Cuba, is a visual artist currently living and working in Havana. His primary focus is painting, though he also explores printmaking, and drawing.
He began his studies in 2011 at the “San Alejandro” Academy of Visual Arts, where he experimented with sculpture, printmaking, and installation. In 2016, he enrolled at the Superior Institute of Art (ISA), concentrating solely on painting. In 2020, he completed his graduation and earned a Bachelor’s Degree in Visual Arts.
His artwork serves as a narrative expression of esoteric themes, weaving analogies and symbols into a rich tapestry of meanings that connect the everyday with the mystical. His painting style centers on the oil technique and draws inspiration from classic painting landscapes, infused with surrealistic elements.
Regueira has showcased his work in numerous exhibitions, both in Cuba and internationally, including in Switzerland and the United States.