There it's happening

The world blackens and separates into poetry

The helmet of stars above like the undercut of Jeffery's toilet bowl hair, which curves around

his head, how pretty his writing was, the twirled J, looped f's, twisted y, the exact brown of

his eyes

Now a man has walked all the way down the sidewalk towards us, me and the cat crouching

in shadow

Is that a little dog? the man says, skirting.

Cat, I say and the man leaves his hands like letters in his pockets

It's so hard to tell if the crickets are singing the same note, vibrato harmonises their songs

into each other, their perfectly invisible bodies, slick as Kit from Knight Rider.

Cricket nights, cider days, too hot to be indoors and the cat shouldn't be out here alone,

remember how he vomited into the napkin the vet held beneath his straining chin saying

poor kid, poor kid and next thing you were imagining her and her sister, two blond girls, like

saplings and a dad by the river with kayaks, and then, flipped it, to my dad, who wears his

Tonganness intentionally now, like moko, on his face, which couldn't help smiling

sometimes, a mound of corned beef in one hand and a raw onion in the other, a salt pile in

the middle for dipping, his memories of food, from childhood, more true than anything

learned since, now my memories of his memories, as distant as the biographies of American

presidents in his roomx, with too many references to get past the first page, next to piles of

Woman's Day

He Called them women's magazines, took them away to read secretly, and forgot to put them

back.

The dadness of him and the impossible task of letting it mean less.

Simone Kaho, New Zealand, (b. 1978), is a poet with Tongan ancestry, part of a new generation of Pasifika voices. She was awarded a Masters in Creative Writing from the International Institute of Modern Letters at Victoria University of Wellington in 2011. Anahera Press published her first book of verse, Lucky Punch in August 2016.