Harold Coutts was born in Nelson but lives in Wellington. They write poetry and is currently working on what they hope to be their debut novel. They have a self-published collection of poetry called fissures in flowers, and several poems and short stories across Re-Draft, Starling, Several Hundred Fools, and Poetry New Zealand Yearbook.
Coutts comments: ‘this poem took a long time to write. i had a few lines for months, but nothing i put around them seemed good enough. i spent a while thinking about boys i’ve seen, and how i found myself writing terrible poetry about them. i found it annoyed me to no end. why should i be spending so much time on these shitty men, when i could be writing about anything else? and so i found the tone. a lot of the lines were inspired by true events, and it was just a manner of slotting them in a way that felt correct. the last stanza is a continuance of my annoyance at myself, as i realised i’d ironically just written two other stanzas about boys again. funny how that happens.’
Photographer credit: Maddie Christie