Maria Zajkowski, New Zealand Bio: Maria is a New Zealand writer currently based in Melbourne. In 2001  she recieved a grant from Arts Victoria to assist with the completion of her first collection of poetry "From an Island". Her work has been published in New Zealand and Australia.

Moieties (Travellers note) On the map cities stand out like wagons drawn from the sea on the alpine back of a farmer, like my father, who built steel forty years and snuck in late, speaking English. My polish tongue chokes, sinks, hook 'n all, I am hysterically twenty - seven with a broken word for every whole one - good as a mouthful of nuts. I wear the map; tuck and knot it round my neck till I am three or four or twelve, blue for the sack that could've been armour. I ride the back of a wild statue while the head of a locomotive turns miles to songs from the big, tight hearts of my cousins. Cousins I lost as a fleet of steps sailed one morning through Warsaw, drowning them and other monuments of war. The forest floor I saw the Polish House in the city where the high boots of dancers once branded the floor, and I, small, in my inherited costume; in the velvet waistcoat I snugly wore, its ribbons patted my back like cats tails as I danced with women, my head up and open, we moved in wreaths across the floor. Boys, miniature hunters, leapt over flames of cellophane with axes of wood, a peacocks feather in each of their hats as lookouts over us all, while I, a soldier in a paper white blouse, my skirt a bloody hill red, waltzed on as music squeezed through speakers songs my father knew, I blew over the floor like a wish he'd made... in front of the Polish House I hear singing like a bell's dark ring calling down clouds. Solitudinarians We assume because we see people in two's and three's that they are not lonely. Women ride bicycles to a date in time, somewhere, and we think they are not lonely. On the bus people sit next to at least someone and they are not alone or lonely. Girls in shops buy presents for lovers, or friends, and they are settled and rounded and sometimes literate; they are never lonely. We see the people who walk in ones walk toward each other, something of a distant, converging two. In a restaurant two people sit at one small table and leave not one lonely plate; serviettes, crushed with passion and thrown, have had their function functioned. On a mown sloping parkside dogs run to people under a single stone steeple, all avoiding its sharp single shadow pointing to who? We sit and hit glasses together to toast ourselves and assume we are not lonely in the freedom of being ourselves. See the drinker and the drink, now the distant, converging two. One side of the Ocean My father and I visited the graves, we talked without our throats. Our hearts dictated the weight of silence we'd carried with our home- pruned camellias and ferns. We walked past the lawn of children, plaques close together, after finding the right angel to lead us in. I was proud of my father, so businesslike in packaging his loss into a few seemingly tidy words. Of course he'd lost half a dozen chances, one died in his arms. There is nothing I can say to relive those lives even though they often find their way to me. It is considerate to scrape away the layers of old paint and moss living on tombs. I have been taught the art of this and also not to question all the room in hearts - there are at least two countries in mine, plus a dividing ocean; the source of all my tears. Movie stars My parents were movie stars; beautiful clear-skinned people in black and white photos in front of a Mondrian curtain in evening wear. My father's hair was rich and viscous, my mother's big powdery dimples pocked her dusty moon cheeks. Ah the glamour of it all - - the spruce-tainted sweat of my father (slightly nervous), the calcium in my mother glowed; what healthy babies they had! Of course some children are always prone to addiction, gambling and women. I, the least famous daughter, (producing exercise videos and motivational tours), will guarantee that my parents are somewhere out there gesturing, posing, laughing their way into old age, toasting re-runs of their most famous moments, occasionally being jostled by a crowd in love. Ah the glamour, the glamour, the glamour of it all. The elements of one In all the world, under the rain, through drafty passes and over ice floes once a sea i have only one body to travel in and only one language. Wanting to see in the mirror that I had the travellers nouse I looked for trails under my eyes beaches on my lips. I searched in my bones for artefacts, proof of my journey and that I existed in more than just the mirror. It is true I was lost on the frozen wave of a mountain, turning black, disintegrating. Had it not been the wind or gravity that made me leave, nothing would. I was alone, existing in a lake of ice, tapping at the world to see which of us was real. All works copyright Maria Zajkowski

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