Two poems by Bronte Heron

FOR WANDA

A packet of hair rollers thrown from the window of a moving car. A pretty yellow top; a headband of plastic flowers. The question being asked here is about direction, drive. Inside me is the desire to give up and the desire to keep going. Every day goes something like this: I wake up, get dressed, make coffee. Who is the man sitting beside her? Why, when he gives her the chance to leave, does she choose to stay? She smiles with practised vacancy. Before, when the sheet was pulled up over her naked body, the room seemed like it could be anywhere. The brightness of the morning made her face contort. I look hard into that room: the walls are blank and perfect. Every day I walk to the same train station and wait to be taken somewhere else. I didn’t do anything wrong, she tells him, before closing the open door. 

INSTRUMENT

The musician demonstrates 

by forming a bridge

with his hands

at the base of his chest.

This is the place

where the air is kept,

where every word

becomes sound

at the end of its thought

passage. He inhales

and his knuckles flex,

pushing the arc 

downward until 

his lungs have inflated 

as far as they will 

stretch. He waits

a beat’s rest 

before softening 

the interlacing 

of his fingers

to make them convex,

the circle of his lips

letting out 

a thin stream 

of breath.

Bronte Heron is a pākehā poet and educator from Aotearoa. Their work explores the intersections of gender politics, phenomenology, ecology, and social justice, and has been supported by the Fulbright Foundation, the Lois Roth Foundation, the Jack Kerouac School for Disembodied Poetics, Sundress Academy for the Arts, and Story Inc. Recent publications can be found in The Baltimore Review, Landfall Literary Journal, takahē magazine, and the 2024 Poetry New Zealand Yearbook.