Title: Sport 43: 2015

Editor: Fergus Barrowman

Publication details: Fergus Barrowman, 2015, Wellington

Part of: Sport

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Sport 43: 2015

Faith Wilson

page 179

Faith Wilson

p | q or alternative denial

to touch your clean-shaven face, to lick your wind-chapped
lips, to make quiet use of your parents’ bed while they’re
out is pragmatic as it is instrumental to the spice of life.

instead you read me philosophy at bedtime and i dream
of crystalline structures and ladders to climb then abandon,
of the logic of our expression: my body never with yours

sheffer stroking not anding, skating on ice plains, you or i but
never together and in dream speak you will tell me to wake up
and find the rough ground but we’re glacier-loving lovers of

knowledge, we’ll analyse our relationship and mind our
ps and qs, roses don’t grow in ice but snow
drops do. how do you want to seduce me? coldly, perfectly

in sleet sheets? sweating and unctuous, wrapped and rolled
in a pocky feather duvet? i can’t even say that i know my way
out of this lacuna: i am an islander but that doesn’t make me hot.

you will push me to the edges of language to find an answer
and at the rim i’ll try to describe my love for you, but all you
hear is nonsense. in the early hours of the morning, dozing,

we’re as pretty as a picture, i think. i’ll try to wake you with a kiss,
whispering that the meaning of language is in its use.
you put your finger over your lips:

whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

page 180

I’m out for dead presidents to represent me

My words ain’t worth shit
and since I was a girl I was told
to put my money where my mouth is.

As a brown kid in Aotearoa it was all bout
dem dollar dollar bills yo, even though they
became defunct in ’91.

Before I was born, I was a nickel
in my mother’s ovaries and a dime
in my dad’s moneybags.

You could even say I’m made of money.

I’m your two-dollar coin
golden and baby oil shiny:
slip me into your slot machines

I’m your tatty fiver
a regular mountain climber

I’m voting for the Mana Party
with your tenner

I’m fucking Queen Elizabeth

I’m decolonising your fiddy

Preparing you for nuclear
fallout on your C Note

page 181

’Cos my words ain’t worth shit
but I know how to spend my body

I’m made of money and I’m burning
bullet holes in your pockets.

boogie nights

I am a disco globe.
I’m only ever useful
at parties and in the off season
I hang limply from the roof attracting flies
and their shit, spinning listlessly until the door is opened
where I whir with the little gust of door wind, asking for attention.
I’m still shiny! I’m still cool! And sometimes you will look up
and see your face in mine, all fractured and cubey
then you find your shoes in the
corner kick up dust gimme
a spin just to hate
yourself again
in the a.m.