The painter
I’m just another genius who will die young of tuberculosis. If you could poke your finger in you’d feel the last under-cliff of the lung, though you probably don’t want to. While a little jealous, I still like to observe men at work. This morning they feed out a monstrous net. Tomorrow they’ll repair any tears in the great floating violence. I wasn’t expecting that red spotted shawl of weed. See how it is cast over bones of bright wood that rise up to the interrupted height of a man? I’ll invite you to look up as the sun sets, the tomb deceptively empty.
A heavily cloaked articulation of Man
The cold staircase had never been ascended. At one point it seemed light would go up. It seemed that way for many years. Eventually someone came down ‘for supper’, they said. However, the official recorder of events was an existentialist, so we have the account of a spider ‘winding up its small victim/ securing it immobile in the dark.’ The story has been altered since to reflect the shifting values of our times. Now ‘a cold staircase unravels a heavily cloaked articulation of Man/ a very bright still inmate of an impenetrable world/ in possession of a small gift.’
An extreme explorer
My friend has a picture of his father, an extreme explorer, on his person. I dreamt of him once, my friend told me. The awning flew open. I saw it was the final tent. I can’t believe you found me here, his father said, as a boy might playing hide and seek.
It’s an interesting time
Everywhere the air blots up or presses down on something once speechless in the ground. I might have said it’s an interesting time. I’m now forced to accept that anyone dying or dead will return. Like my mother, who arrived at Christmas in a rusted overcoat. That’s her coming now, with the armour on.
Rachel O’Neill
Rachel O’Neill is a writer, filmmaker and artist based in Te Whanganui-a-Tara, Aotearoa. Their debut book One Human in Height (Hue & Cry Press) was published in 2013. They were awarded a 2018 SEED Grant to write a feature film and held a 2019 Michael King Writers Centre residency. Recent poems appear in Landfall, Stasis Journal and Ōrongohau | Best New Zealand Poems 2019.