Paola Bilbrough, New Zealand. Bio: Paola Bilbrough was born on Waiheke Island in 1971. Her first book, Bell Tongue was published by Victoria University Press NZ in July 1999. An excerpt was republished as part of an American anthology entitled, Wild Child: Girlhoods in the counter culture (Seal Press). Her work has also appeared in various Antipodian journals including, Heat, Cordite, Westerly, Imago, Sport, and Landfall.

BMP4 nzpoetsonline

BMP4 nzpoetsonline

Altitude Elbows on the table we sat, lamp hissing, cheeks and lips lit. Outside lilacs grazed the window. The turf walls exuded a girls sweat, fresh willow sap. Words floated as snowflakes onto an earth of silence, occasionally a faint musical note sounded between us. A woman suggested poker but some cards were missing, others peopled by, fierce, unfamiliar characters I had no memory of arrival, guessed we were by the coast, yet there was also the windswept feel of a prairie. A stranger entered, gaberdine coat gleaming with phospherous, rusty hair. A few of us thought we knew him and a chair was offered. He'd been walking, he said, in the mountains: there, the air was sharp, birdsong a dense waterfall. As the trees thinned, he felt the wings of bees against his face, his body lifting. He was on a white road, stones warm through his soles, smelling of wet chalk. Death, he told us, was simply a change in altitude. Selves On an ocean-blue lawn the fig tree raises bare arms, the sky breathes the colour of morning. Posters on the toilet walls announce your preferences: obscure boy bands, Hal Hartly movies. Returning down the hall the floor is punctuated with tiny holes, dusty spirals. In the music room drums and an electric guitar wait with an air of petulance. I see your waking self: your Joe Orton demeanour. And the self you see of me: a girl in a champagne slip, diamante choker. Comma curled beneath the sheet you reach out: we form words and notes without speech. Empty House The walls are Naples Yellow, a colour that reminds him of a cake of soap a rat once took when he was bathing. He reaches for her face and the rooms hold infinite promise. Sometimes he longs for someone pale and clam. -he feels he may have missed the sound of bare feet on a bridge, the scent of budleia at night, an invitation to live in another country. Fickleness frays him. He runs his hands over her vertebrae, stars glowing through skin. The linoleum is silver flecked, a mosaic going on and on like the Milky Way. Someone's scrawled siempre -blue crayon on the white door. Shinjuku Gyoen Here the lily pads are curled at the edges, perfect cylinders -veined tea trays. In the glass house, which must be explored in a set order, are grandiflora, lantana. Daytura arborea covering the ceiling. Outside the grass is short and resilient, one's soles spring back from the earth and everyone removes their shoes, retains their socks as if in a vast, green room. I believed I might come upon you here: serene and concentrating, eyebrows unplucked, cheeks soft as the inside of convulvulous, your finger tips tracing the shape of a back on the ground as if mapping the city's tsubo. But I cannot find you. You are not part of a noisy group or couple. Not the girl combing her lover's hair, watched by a Manx cat and two large crows under a japanese pine. Ballroom of Yellow Velvet For Martine Hands lined with worry, you sit at a scarred table, a black dog at your feet. The figs are still unripe but the heat has started. Other people's saucepans crowd the kitchen; the thought of a life spent renting is terrible. In dreams I've seen all your houses. In one you climb driftwood stairs to the sound of rain, in another your friends sit in an internal room, teeth gleaming in the dim. The third is labyrinthine: there's a ballroom of yellow velvet, a salt water pool. The door of a man I once loved is full of splinters, opening onto the dark shapes of trees against sky. You wear a rose petal dress, in the ballroom I wait for the dance to fill me. Yellow Entering the first time, traffic roaring past Ella peeled back a corner of piss-smelling carpet; the wood underneath stained and pitted, worm holes an inscrutable language. Dan thought of skinning a sheep: the layer of fat below the wool, carmine flesh, gush of blood as the knife slips. Shearer for a season; bouquet of razors in a jam jar, chairs with tea-stained armrests, stale sweat and grease. Now he lives between walls fresh and white as new sheets. In the hall: three paintings: blue and yellow, burgundy, dark green. Briefly his skin sings and he hears the colours breathe with the building. He remembers gates covered with lichen, clear skies, free range egg yolks. Beneath the window, Ella's cargo: pastels, charcoal, tubes of paint. Kneeling he begins to colour the floor, yellow moving forward: an incoming tide. Towards morning the pastels are crumbs. He walks along the widening cadmium stretch. To where, he can't be sure.