In your imaginary garden, I am peach thrown at wall

When you read poetry about fruit softening in cardboard boxes

you don’t remember my bared teeth. You think about dripping

mouths and misted cherries. You think about girl as hot precipice.

Strawberries forgotten in the back-seat don’t evoke goblin markets

or horse-flies biting. They evoke wraparound dresses, opened viola cases

marsupials and bubbleweed. You think about girl lying prone on riverbank

cicada-girl, staggering bovine, mead bottle full of aphids. In your fantasy

you gambol over miniature hedges to take me in your arms. When I squirm

and bite your thumb I become a mess on the doorstep. I am dropped

and rotting, splattered on your welcome mat. I am punished, fly-struck

in heat, riddled with tunnels, skin flapping loose in the suburban breeze.

Looking down you feel a little repulsed. First by yourself, then by my body.

sine spe recuperandi

The moonlight over Aro Valley peeks into the superette window

witnesses the fruit seeping out of its skin into corners of cardboard boxes

newspaper slick with peachy effluent, fruit flies bopping into each other

drowsy messengers making soft war in the refrigerator light

and up on the hill, the lovers are colliding in their icy apartment

firing cannonballs that hiss into thick flesh, the screech of broadside

scraping against broadside; they are asking, is this how you leave me

a ghost ship? Will the morning kākā scream wreck! before we do?

my love, a braided river

when the hills first flooded and the swollen bodies

smashed against my deep-set boulders

who knew rage would lay them down

to be buried under the sand of your bank

I’d call our meeting a confluence but I cannot pinpoint its beginning

now one vein, I feel the elvers swim upstream, whitebait quavering,

the sun through the beech trees hits your face, you’re laughing

and I can feel every golden engine block, fish hook, larva, boat hull

every person dead or drowning under our weight

Lily Holloway  (they/her) had their first chapbook, a child in that alcove, published in 2021 as a part of AUP New Poets 8. You can read their recent work in Peach Mag, Cordite, and Ōrongohau | Best New Zealand Poems or find a full list of where to read their writing at lilyholloway.co.nz. Lily is currently in their first year of an MFA in Creative Writing at Syracuse University.