Little Death at the Mall


You arrive at St Luke’s. It’s a summer afternoon. When you get off 
the bus your gut rushes like it used to when you occasionally played 
sport or fell in love.

You love the rungs, you don’t know why. That the carpark is oily like 
hell and people deal dope down there, and the sun filters through the 
Brutalist concrete like a protestor in a bright vest. 

You love that the first floor is stuff you can’t live without. Cheese, 
plastic boxes, matches for a power cut, wine. That the middle floor 
is for covering yourself. Top to toe. 

The top floor is all about uncovering – underwear, perfume. There, 
shoppers are neither happy nor sad. You find that you always want 
to feel this neutral. 

Everything is blue and green. You want never to go home. All your 
previous addresses will be washed away. Thank Christ. Heterotopia 
is your address. 

People promenade as if strolling along a riverbank or looking at 
pictures at an exhibition. Shopfronts are paintings you walk into and 
they close behind you. 

Your body has left you. Divorced. In a good way. All of history has 
gone. You walk along, you are walking into a store. Everything 
is stories.

Once you bought a tee for you son at Hot Topic, when he was 14 and 
into Metal, and they put two in the bag by mistake. You took one back, 
and were showered in praise by the staff for your honesty. They were 
sweet teenagers with a lot of piercings. 

You liked Hot Topic because it made you nostalgic for The Clash, The 
Dead Kennedys. In retrospect, you may have looked on Hardcore too 
fondly. You were a Morticia Addams kind of mom. 

The praise was worth at least $20, the price of the tee. You took it 
home. The house was already quite full. I’m sorry, son.

In those days you believed in karma. If you stole, you’d lose three 
times that amount. Yeah, $60. Nowadays, you might think, They’re a
huge company exploiting people, and I’ve worked for low pay my 
whole fucking life. Now you might keep the tee, and everything else. 

This kind of thinking got one branch of your forebears transported to 
Tasmania. Possibly. All you know is, they reinvented themselves 
for food. 

In New Zealand they got jobs as servants, then bosses, going up, up 
until they had a cabinet full of crystal, and your mother had perfume 
on her dressing table, so it turned out okay. 

They went to Mass. You went to Mass. Through all the generations, 
everyone kept going, like an addiction. At Mass you listened to the 
Bible, never read it yourself, you don’t know why. Everything is 
remembered. 

It was all stories. If anyone asked Jesus a question – an apostle or 
some random person – or if there was a problem like people selling 
stuff in the temple or just being mean, Jesus would start with, Did I 
ever tell you about the time

You carry them about, and it’s a blessing and a curse. A blessing 
because in every situation you can say, Remember the Good Samaritan, 
or the righteous anger against the money lenders. It’s like having a 
Simpsons episode for every occasion. 

A curse because you move at the speed of a homeless person with a 
supermarket trolley containing all their possessions. Not really. 
Sorry.

The stories are often set in the marketplace. The disciples were 
always popping out to buy an ear of corn, a loaf of bread. 

You didn’t have a marketplace. This was before malls. You just had 
shops. The shops were predictable. Butter, cabbages, sausages. Your
mother would address the shopkeepers politely. Hello, Mrs Far, 
Hello, Mr Sharples, Hello, Mr Zino. 

After school you’d bump into the neighbours and address them 
politely. Hello, Mr Loibl. Hello, Mrs Tonga. Hello, Mrs O’Sullivan. 

At the shops there were no sex workers, sick people, dead people, 
lost people, late capitalists, sinners, miracles. But in the marketplace, at the marketplace, anything could happen. 

There was a Bible story about children begging in the marketplace. 
They said, ‘We played the flute for you, and you did not dance; we 
sang a dirge, and you did not weep.”’ (Luke 7:32) End quote. 

You remember it like playing music except look no hands. You didn’t 
know what it meant, but now translate it as, What the hell is wrong 
with you? You’re at the mall. 

One day at the mall, at a counter, a counter busy with people buying 
meat, no, it was socks, no, moonstones, you accidently bump against 
a person who says, Fuck off, bitch. 

That’s you. Bitch. You turn. She turns. There’s a kind of mask which
is made of stainless steel, no cardboard. It’s Death. Not really. 

You don’t care. Anyway. You get on the train and go to LynnMall. 
Not really. You go home. What is waiting there.





​Anne Kennedy lives in Tāmaki Makaurau. Her most recent books are The Sea Walks into a Wall and The Ice Shelf and, as editor, Remember Me: Poems from Aotearoa New Zealand to Learn by Heart. Awards include the NZ Post Book Award for Poetry and the Prime Minister's Award for Poetry. She is the current editor of AUP New Poets series.