There’s space between the awa lines and the influx of pūkekos in the estuary. When it rains their blue-bird bodies linger by your house and Maketū skatepark, their orange beaks hovering over horizon lines and sea spray like buoys. Ocean tides guide the silvery paths you walk. Crossing the chain-link fence to the fish n’ chip shop, see the men with their fishing rods. Pōhutukawa bulbs. Flax bushes carrying old lives on the tips of their tongues. There is never resistance from the whānau and the home. They appear as tohu. Te Arawa landing site. The woman with the cockle-shaped tooth. Your mates whakataukī. The here and now leaking embrace from the seal-skinned sky. Maketū haze is never more present than the overcast clouds and glare. On the paths count fresh raindrops. The fish bones trailing as bread crumbs. At the steps, a single sea shell. These are crucial numbers to you being here. Because you wonder how things get from one place to the next. Like the time you were seven and found a wētā in your undies. How you can’t remember if you let it go or flushed it down the loo. Or as you walk into the shop and order some fried hoki. And how the woman behind the counter writes down your order. The blue-plastered walls. The smell of hot chips. You hand her the coins like deliverance, like the sound of seagulls, like the waves of many people after and before you, rolling in.


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The Rangiuru gully is a low-slug gut. Dark, dank smog rises from the swamp pit, wafting through the split shadows of wekī ferns. It raises and lifts through the hills, flattening down to low ground, to awa, to sea. There is always that humid swelt. The bath-warm air sticks hair to the backs of necks. Skin to plastic seats. Fingerprint sweat on the chain-link fence. Down below see: Emmi, a girl who once found a wētā in her undies. She traces the path and kicks chipped asphalt into the gutters. Grey clouds form. Soon it’ll rain. Pūkekos shield the driftwood in the sand. Rips swell on the shore. She’s thinking about people and place. Her Koro-not-Koro speaking reo at breakfast. Kei te pēhea koe? His soft syntax spilling over the weetbix bowls and pinstripe walls. And how she didn’t answer. Because all she was thinking about was the rocks in the tidal pools. Iridescent pāua collections in the shed. That one time a black dog chased a seal. The waves that surge up against the fish n’ chip shop on windy days. She has occupied many footprints on the paths. And she’s opening the door to the shop. She’s fumbling the coins in her back pocket. The woman behind the counter clicks her tongue. A seagull starts to cry.

Hannah Petuah is a writer and creative from Te Puke, Aotearoa New Zealand. She is a recent graduate from the University of Waikato where she obtained a BA majoring in English. This is her first publication.