Dream Home

I put myself to sleep dreaming up the home I want.

A vegetable garden full of beds that weed themselves.

Photo frames lined up on a shelf,

A desk in a corner, an old piano,

A sideboard for my mismatched crockery, solid enough for any quake.

This could all come down around us, I know.

There are always eruptions,

Always shaking, the rapid flow beneath the earth.

There could open a sinkhole in my parents’ lawn.

I spend hours looking at pictures ---

Cars teetering on the edge of a crater,

A football goal, an apartment block, swallowed.

I dream myself a home liable to snow instead,

A house where I have to warm every piece of it in my hands.

A window above the sink,

Which is all my mother ever asked for.

All of my books whispering their words to the walls.

From a thousand miles away you are drawn into my bed,

And every disaster goes on by, sure as blood on the door.

In My Garden 

A whole garden grown over with mint,

Your slick feathers pulled tight against the weather,

quick punch of stars, body of water,

its limbs trickling quicksilver over the ground,

smoky wick, my skin scented with sweat,

vanilla, lime, almond,

the things crushed under my fingernails.

I wanted to stay there, pouring wine steadily into your silver-chased glass,

Tilting your head back so I could drink from your mouth.

My wild darling, midnight sweetheart,

Sweet one, fair one,

Roosting in this little garden we’ve made.

I thought if not the wine, then the orange blossom,

If not, then the soft rice, if not, then the seashells,

The bone shards, the obsidian eyes, the jade ---

I thought there would be some trick to turn you back.

Instead, your beak turns me to nectar,

And I could feel the pulse of your breast everywhere,

Shaking blossom from the trees,

I was quivering and I thought no one

Would ever ask me for anything ever again.

Hydrangeas 

A stand of flood lit hydrangeas, livid purple,

Shouting their colour and their life,

Sickly after-image in the night on the side of the road.

Pulled out of myself coming home, drawn to their bunched eyes,

Shady serrated leaves.

I couldn’t tell what work called for the light,

Only that the men in high-vis seemed shrunken,

Baffled, too, by a direct and casual beauty.

The flowers --- the dark road --- the white truck ---

The whites of my eyes in the reflection on the bus window,

Everything tinged lurid,

Bruised by their sight.

Rachel Lockwood is a Hawke's Bay gal and a secondary school teacher. She has been previously published in Starling, Mayhem, and the 2023 NZ Poetry Yearbook, among others.