Mākara Beach
by Michael McLane
I fall in love
my first step
southerly slamming
car door
back onto my leg
I bleed a little
into my sock
a good start
the baches
more driftwood
than intent
the lone café
closed and closed
and closed
paint of it
sheared
annually a reptile
coming into its own
cold blood
I smell death
from the car park
a short distance
to the sandbar
hiding the sea
lion bloated
about to sublimate
there is peculiar
sweetness
to the air
to the stiff flipper
over the eyes
the invasion
began here
as certain as tides
as certain
as barbed wire
twisted into
crumbling cliff faces
men stormed ashore
frigid and trembling
funneled up
the valley
to Karori
and beyond
we need monsters
most days—
printers’ marks
survey site
or crosshairs—
gun emplacements
is a gentle term
gift or softened
stance
the pedestals
still fit the human
form perfectly
parallel to wind
farm perpendicular
to wind
these are old fears—
Dunedin’s guns
trained on
the 19th century
Russians invisible
invincible unease
teens fucking each
new generation
into being
in crumbling
batteries
ghosts of drowned
Cossacks
in the harbor
each time I return
the beach littered
with thousands
of bluebottle jellyfish
their spent casings
saturated
and prophylactic
as myth
This poem was another early one in the NZ work, when I was still trying to navigate the tremendous beauty of my new home, the ferocious violence both inherent to its wild places and imposed upon them by humans, as well as the myths and urban legends that arose from the intersections of these qualities.
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MICHAEL MCLANE is the author of the chapbooks Trace Elements and Fume. He is an editor with Dark Mountain and Sugar House Review and was a founding editor of saltfront. He currently lives in Martinborough, Aotearoa/New Zealand and recently completed a PhD at the International Institute for Modern Letters at Victoria University of Wellington.