TALIA MARSHALL
Laughter makes the river rise better than her rain
Kelly eats the pastry not the mince and Accidentally Kelly Street
is her song and we take acid and walk to the beach but on different sides
of the street because it’s so funny what she’s thinking, it’s so, so funny
Later we fall asleep in Nana’s conservatory and wake baking in glitter
I take my cousins to the gardens to feed the ducks and the brightness stays
Kelly says you never spit you are a lady
Kelly says let’s get away from her she’s boring
Kelly says we’re hitching, it was so fun hitching, she laughs
I was terrified tho and then there’s more laughing followed by cackling
And I insist NO, you were there until she remembers being the trouble horse
Kelly puts on Get Free by Major Lazer, Kelly is child free tonight and we split tall cans
of bourbon, I show her the little whare I am making for my dead grandfather
I explain my dolphin religion to her, she is dancing to Get Free by her fourth can
because reincarnation is boring
I watch the music video over and over after she leaves
especially the man stroking his bantam
the girls twisting into the road like screws
& especially the boys
making the blue knocking motion of bells in their dance
I tell Kelly the Zumba videos she posts on Facebook make me happy to be alive
but she doesn’t believe me
You can trace the world by the pattern of the snake’s skin can’t you?
Diamonds are just straight lines afraid of their kinks
or the time I pulled Kelly’s hair and punched her when I shouldn’t have
and much wiser blood, hers, keeping its heat and saying it’s okay
beside me in the gutter, and it is now, 22 years later because I’m laughing
and asking her if anyone knows she’s Māori in Gisborne, if they can tell
I mean maybe they can tell just by the way we dance
Talia Marshall (Ngāti Kuia/Rangitāne ō Wairau/Ngāti Rārua/Ngāti Takihiku) is a poet and essayist with one son and one dog who has a poetry collection forthcoming from Kilmog Press titled Bad Apple. This year she is writing about Ans Westra’s photographs of Māori as part of her Emerging Māori Writer’s Residency at Victoria University. Her essay titled ‘This Is the Way He Walked Into the Darkest, Pinkest Part of the Whale and Cried Don’t Tell the Others’ was quoted on the cover of POETRY magazine’s February 2018 Aotearoa issue.
Marshall comments: ‘Kelly is one of my oldest friends and I was staying in Gisborne after quite a fraught time in my life and couldn’t get over how lucky I am that we are still friends after almost 30 years and that by chance we also happened to be in the same place. I love her to bits and she is the fun one. Plus I decided there are not enough poems about female friendship so I thought I better have a go, lately I’ve been writing quite a few poems about my old friends so maybe that’s my genre. This poem has a bit of an underbelly too, it’s not just nice, but that’s my contribution. Forgiveness can be a rare and beautiful thing which is what I’m trying to get at with the dance.’
Links
POETRY magazine Aotearoa issue (February 2018)