Because a Woman's Heart is Like a Needle at the Bottom of the Ocean

Sugar Magnolia Wilson

• Publisher: Auckland University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781776710317
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

This is a first collection from a significant new voice in New Zealand poetry. Through fun and gore, love and monsters, Sugar Magnolia Wilson's riveting first collection takes readers inside a world where past and present, fiction and fact, author and subject collide. Playful and yet not so sunny, these poems invite you in with extravagant and surprising imagery, only to reveal the uneasy, Frankenstein world within.

Pen pal

1.

Hellooo. How are you?

I’ve only just started

witchcraft so this letter

includes some of my hairs.

My two guinea pigs had

million dollar babies –

two lots of babies.

Mum says they have the

eyeless ways of newborns.

Friday and I’m sitting

in the quad under the

acacia tree.

The bell has rung

and I’m waiting for

Mum or Dad to pick me up.

No one has come. It is

strange.

Did I tell you? I owe $1.50 to

the school canteen.

Mum says I don’t feed

them often enough but

I do.

My lips are in a terrible way –

they are so fannyish

when I am older they

will droop.

Everything gets older.

With my third eye I sense

my little guinea pigs are

in

some kind of

life-ish trouble.

P.S. Did I tell you

in July a meteorite fell?

Blue flashes in the

field it

still glows in the

rain sometimes.

But that doesn’t mean nuffink –

it still sucks shit to

live in the bush.

2.

Important data:

the geese are naked.

I owe $1.50 to the school canteen.

I think I am carrying a grief tree.

It is tiny and luminous.

Yesterday I broke one cutting

from each of Dad’s African plants

(he was down by the Para pool

slashing ginger).

Remember, I told you –

I only have one booklet?

It said: Spell for sadness –

Look for your inner breath.

Into a quiet room take

some clean beeswax and

a selection of branches – mix.

On your back – breathe like a

long canoe – let the sadness

wash off your

secret underside.

Plant to redden in your

garden.

I look every day but

I am still waiting.

Meanwhile: there has been

irregular blood on my shorts –

a Japanese doctor had to

feel my fanny.

I have nuffink else to say.

Write soon.

3.

Halleluiah, konnichiwa and

jumbo.

There is a tortoise that has

a broken shell and I

want to climb into the TV

and kiss it on the face.

My guinea pigs ran away –

I was sick of feeding them

anyway – some kind of

horrid relief.

I broke the last of our

bad luck cups – Mum thinks

I smashed it on purpose.

She says I need to

contemplate the importance

of all sentient beings (wha?!).

You have not written.

I think I am cursed with

pen pals – first Dev Kalsha

masturbated on me. And Sky,

she just stopped writing.

4.

This letter is in a terrible way –

knows no end.

She (Mum) is a sk...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dear sister
• Anne Boleyn
• The monster
• Betty as a boy
• Newton Gully mix tape
• Conversation with my boyfriend
• Bathhouse night chat
• Home Alone 2 (with you)
• Full moon celebrations
• Heat wave
• Snow chart
• The moon and my ‘house’: A review of Haruki Murakami’s novel, 1Q84
• Pup art
• Final 80s exposé
• Glamour
• Moon-baller
• Spent
• Gingerly
• Spirit-liver
• Cabin
• Because a woman’s heart is like a needle at the bottom of the ocean
• Crane fly
• Mother
• The lake has a long memory
• Muddy heart
• Town
• Bone tired
• The sleep of trees
• Dear X
• Pen pal
• Notes
• Acknowledgements