Title: EBD

Author: Ashleigh Young

In: Sport 39: 2011

Publication details: Fergus Barrowman, 2013, Wellington

Part of: Sport

Keywords: Verse Literature

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Sport 39: 2011

EBD

EBD

A man asks my father, ‘Who was that girl?’
even though we’ve all flown together in EBD,
all the way up the South and North Islands,
over a hundred green rivers, even though I’m my dad’s daughter.
My dad laughs Ha and doesn’t answer.

I don’t like the smell of the airport. Brown couches and stale
chicken chippies and other kids’ dads, men in short shorts who drink
from the emerald cans you find in those rivers. The smell of engine oil
in cracked hands. I ride on the swingset.
I buck like a horse. I grip my rusty reins and pray.

One day Macintosh toffees come bulleting out of the clouds.
The kiddies flap all over the runway. My dad
takes my brother to do aerobatics in EBD.
My brother comes down, grinning through vomit.
My father, pure muscle, pushes the plane back to its stable.

Cars go slow from the air, like they’re driving on velcro.
His favourite observation is that the sheep
look like grains of rice. Nobody can argue
with those tiny white bodies trickling down a slope.
And on a clear, still day, afterwards he says
it was like flying on a magic carpet.

At airfields I sit in the grass, stomach bubbling
while he siphons fuel from a lone pump
into a hole in EBD’s wing. Because there’s no one around
that feels like stealing. We are always miles, days, years
from our house and the wind is always heavy and blowing.

page 236 The mike in front of my dad’s mouth wobbles as he speaks
in a secret code to the secret man
inside the radio. The back of his neck
has moles from the seventies; they are as big and round as eyes,
watching to make sure
I’m still here.