REBECCA HAWKES is a painter-poet from rural Aotearoa/New Zealand. Her first book Meat Lovers (Auckland University Press), won Best First International Collection in the UK Poet Laureate's 2022 Laurel Prize and was a Lambda Literary Award finalist for bisexual poetry. She is head shepherd of warm-blooded literary journal Sweet Mammalian and co-edited the Antipodean climate crisis anthology No Other Place to Stand (AUP). Rebecca is currently topsy-turvy between hemispheres studying an MFA in yearning (and, to a lesser extent, poetry) at the University of Michigan. In the US her poems have been awarded Salt Hill's Philip Booth Poetry Prize and Palette Poetry's Sappho Prize, with more work published or forthcoming in places like Glass, HAD, Cordite, and Turbine/Kapohau.
Idiot!!!!! That is not your wife (the moon) it’s a plastic bag
stuck in a tree. It’s a biblically accurate pickup truck
overtaking at impossible speed. Gun to your head
how many kinds of cloud could you name right now?
A hawk banqueting on roadkill flares its wings
over the possum carcass, not meaning to flee
but to defend its catch from the oncoming headlights.
It’s the third time at this bar tonight I’ve held my hair
against the candle at our table til it catches light. As I blow
dark that sizzling wisp, the flame goes with it. Dumb ghosts
drifting mutely from the wick. I keep saying I don’t even need
a face. Let the hard robot of your body hate what it hates.
"Immortality" sounds lousy to me. What doesn’t kill you
presumably makes you wish it would. Today to be healthy I ate
a purple wildberry fresh from the vine, assuming it would be a grape.
It wasn’t that. I spat for my life. Bitter biter better go down
swallowing. Gargle all the moonshine. Somebody is always
trying to lead me to water. I’m just here for the free drinks.
Volume 15.1, winter 25
Rebecca Hawkes
