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HeraLindsay Bird

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2017

Poetry Prize Winner

UPON WAKING IN A MOTEL ROOM I BECOME IMMEDIATELY CONVINCED YOU NO LONGER LOVE ME AND BURST INTO TEARS

Not only that, but maybe you never loved me in the first place.
I sit by the window like a woman in a civil war re-enactment
With my grieving shawl on
It is easy for me to make myself sad on purpose by thinking of you as a dead soldier
you, and all my other civil war boyfriends
who died so young & well endowed
their fresh hearts riding the grass
They died so long ago I forget they were real
I bet some of them were real
I bet some of them stood on the brink of their lives in great astonishment
I can’t be the only one
I can’t be the only one to feel so weird all the time

I don’t know what I dreamed that made me call you
you sounded tired and hung up to go buy cigarettes.
Most of my fear is just artistic posturing
I know you love me
because I can feel it when you look at me
your eyes like evil black suns
burning all my kites off
I turned on the TV & started watching Indian in the Cupboard
and then I turned it off again
I lay down in my bed thinking of small campfires in the dark
I don’t know what to do about my love for you, it goes on and on like happiness
I change my screensaver to a white horse on an overcast day
standing knee deep in a field of flowers
sometimes a picture can feel almost as real as the thing itself
sometimes a poem can feel almost as real as the thing itself
I think if I had to choose between you and poetry I would choose poetry,
but I’d always think of you
I’d always think of you
and wonder what you were doing
Hera Lindsay Bird

Hera Lindsay Bird debut self-titled collection Hera Lindsay Bird was published in 2016 with Victoria University Press; it has been reprinted many times, and is currently on the shortlist for the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. She has an MA in poetry from the International Institute of Modern Letters where she won the 2011 Adam Prize in Creative Writing. She works as a bookseller at Unity Books Wellington.

 

Bird’s work has been featured in The Guardian and Vice Magazine. She has been published in a number of journals and publications including Best New Zealand Poems, The Spinoff, The Listener, The Hairpin, Hue & Cry and Sport. In 2016 she ran a free, ten-week creative nonfiction class called TMI. She likes watching the figure skating at the winter Olympics and murder mysteries set on trains.