LILY WRIGHT
tsunami warning
it smells like the ocean in mount albert. this is not my anxiety talking. the salty tang brings
me mussels, crowded up and crunching against one another on a too-small rock, blue-green
and shining heineken caps. brings me a beach walk in someone else’s winter coat, poking at
bluebottles washed up on black sand tide marks. it smells like the ocean, here on this side
street, and i am afraid. nothing is about love anymore. everything is about fear. or, everything
is about trust. nothing is about love. i have a terror of natural disasters. my mother wonders if
this is rooted in some other fear. is it not enough to be afraid, i snap at her. i have this
misplaced trust that the world will stay the same, and i piss myself off by taking my foot in
and out of the rushing river. i have a vision of anthony bourdain wandering through the
streets of the afterlife with a cigarette dangling from his lips. i have a vision of a great wave,
destroying the reasonably priced three-point-seven million fixer-uppers that line the edges of
a long-dried wetland. i have a vision. i have a piece of broken glass. i have a recurring
dream. i have the high ground.
Lily Wright (she/her) is a poet based in Tāmaki Makaurau. She spends her days thinking about horrible things and reading middle-grade fiction. Her work has been featured recently in Tarot and The Spinoff. You can find her on Instagram @lilyedithw.