Islanded Here
Officer, thing is, an old song came on the radio and in two high, beer-roughened lines,
the singer’s heart left its own guard rails and this city was gone. The lost years poured in,
my husband’s hair malt-brown as craft stout, his arms on my waist as if touch
enrolled us in a prestigious school of dance, while friends’ talk enfolded us as night foxes
silked through the back gardens that linked like a street-long park, starlight strewn amid
the ice-boned trees of winter. Under his leather jacket my husband wore just a thin, retro, paisley shirt, creased as if its cotton was a purple chocolate foil that never uncrumples from opening, unfolding. When he shivered, I liked to slip the love notes of my fingertips into the slots between his shirt’s black buttons, each one of those discs a tiny vinyl record that would only play silence, a silence the savour of salt from deep in the mine of your chest, when you don’t know how to say what you must . . . At the swerve of that song . . . All of it, just now, spun again, alongside the memory of a trust in the power of trying strong enough to be a faith in itself, and, sorry, I’m so sorry, I think I muddled the heat and the light, the advance and reverse, so I stalled, islanded here, this car and I both disabled, snow-skinned . . . Speak into the device? Like this? I know they say time isn’t linear but honestly, I’m trying to move on.
Emma Neale is an author and an editor. Her poetry collection, Liar, Liar, Lick, Spit (Dunedin: Otago University Press, 2024) won the Mary and Peter Biggs Poetry Prize at the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards for 2025, the same year she also received the Janet Frame Prize. Her recent novel, Maybe Baby (2026) has just been published by Bateman Books.
