The Friday Poem: Two new poems from Clay Eaters by Gregory Kan
Photo taken from the National Archive of Singapore
Two poems from the new collection Clay Eaters by Gregory Kan, launched this week at Unity Books Wellington.
(Editors note: The poems are untitled but can be found on pages 3 and 19 of Clay Eaters, published by Auckland University Press.)
From Clay Eaters
Satellite view of the island
The jungle canopy a green so dark it’s almost black
It looks like a giant black square in the sea
The giant black square is a photo
Of us
Attired strangely
Walking on a soft dirt road at night
We look like we have walked a very long way
We look like we don’t know
Where we have come from at all
**
For mission and exercise planning, we used aliases for places
ROME, LONDON, PARIS
AUDI, FORD, MERCEDES
A way to make the jungle seem a fraction more manageable
A way to hack the mess into fractions
FALCON, PENGUIN, OWL
To feel like there were boundaries
And that we could know them
JERICHO, ISAAC, JORDAN
Some occult military incantation
JESSICA, CHRISTINA, BRITNEY
The Friday Poem is brought to you by Nevermore Bookshop, home of kooky, spooky romance novels and special edition book boxes. Visit Nevermore Bookshop today.
The Friday Poem is edited by Hera Lindsay Bird. Submissions are now open. Please send up to three poems in a PDF or Word document to fridaypoem@thespinoff.co.nz
Gregory Kan
Gregory Kan is a writer and developer based in Pōneke/Wellington. His first collection of poetry, This Paper Boat, was shortlisted for the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards for poetry in 2017. Under Glass, his second collection, was longlisted for the award in 2020. He was the 2017 Grimshaw Sargeson Fellow.
