IAIN BRITTON is published internationally. Recent New Zealand publications include Bravado, Blackmail Press, Takahe, Kaupapa: New Zealand Poets and JAAM. Forthcoming poems will appear in White Fungus and Poetry NZ. Cinnamon Press will be launching his first collection of poems on February 28 at the Poetry Society’s, Poetry Café, London.


       A Consciously Diminishing Equation

       Quarried from a rockfall of disused angels
       and put together to fulfil a purpose, we begin

       to track my scent across town, lamppost by
       lamppost – a town that flops in terraces

       down to a river where locals, crouch, wash
       and push away parts of themselves. They wait

       as if for long-legged streaks of divine light
       to touch them. In Anzac Park

       we squash into the backseat of my father’s car,
       listening to hedgehogs

       grunting in the grass, the footsteps of someone
       very close. We move like conjoined moons

       in slow motion – touching, searching – and for a
       while, we go into ourselves

       consciously diminishing. A family
       stares at us from trees pruned back

       for the winter, the oldest male seems incomplete,
       cannibalised – he sits at roots

       bulging from the grass. The oldest female
       is crumpled up, reshaping the branches, unsure

       about the reality of resurrection - whether it works
       or not. I’m alert to the pedestrian

       history of this town,
       the reconstructive touch-ups that begin annually.

       Each year the streets look different.
       I repossess sightings of the two of us

       leaning against walls and fences, or standing
       under windbreaks in overgrown sections,

       behind a library, or amongst the framework
       of a face-lifted church. I repossess a shrivelled-up

       passion, the vapour of a faded hunger, two young
       people trapped in their own artwork. In this park

       there are lovers doing what we’ve done all along.
       They burrow into themselves, become

       inconspicuous, motionless. They stain
       the grass, their intimacy only a whisper.