The Friday Poem: The Cry, by Nikki-Lee Birdsey
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A new poem from Wellington-based poet Nikki-Lee Birdsey.
The Cry
I sit outside Chung Hing Panel Ltd,
he’s numbered the parking spaces
in hand-drawn paint. I’m sitting in
4, the lines and numbers like hopscotch.
They rearrange themselves as I think
more.
I rely less + less on my connectivity
to the real. 4 is the number
of this year,
4 is the number of more
import right now. I hear the sea
somewhere.
Maybe you came here
for the gray wind on your face,
the reminder of unsick air.
The gulls in this city cry like humans
before rain, they say go indoors dumb girl!
As one gull pecks violently at a severed
pigeon’s wing on the roof of Chung Hing
Panel. I listen to gulls more now
than I listen to people over 50.
You ask me for a pronoun
for my past. I say look at the
world you made mum and dad.
When you ask me
who I am I give you no thing
you can define. I’m just a rhyme,
a scrappy choice of words
with no parents.
They say I’m naive,
I’m a cynic at core, I say
let the softening current take me
away from the hardening shore.
The Friday Poem is edited by Chris Tse. Submissions are currently closed and will open again later this year.
Nikki-Lee Birdsey
Nikki-Lee Birdsey was born in Piha. She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a BA from New York University. Her poems have been published in various journals including The Iowa Review, Fence, LIT, The Volta and Hazlitt. In 2015 she was a visiting faculty fellow at the International Institute of Modern Letters at Victoria University of Wellington, where she returned as a PhD candidate. Her poetry collection Night As Day (the creative component of her PhD thesis) was published by Victoria University Press in 2019.
