As a Child

Because you have olive skin, she says to me, you should wear black, not white. I was a seer. I haven’t seen it yet. I suspect that someone else is driving. The main character: duplicitous, confused, mad. I have no desire to go to America. I write a book with seven chapters, there is a shipwreck in five of them.

If I could be anyone. I search out a plastic bowl from the cupboard, brown with white polka dots you can feel. I fill it with water and, dipping a fine toothed, orange comb, I wet my long hair from root to tip. Kua noho kūare ahau. I admire the radio. I feel approachable, singing Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star. It is practically swimming out of me.

I lift the portable typewriter onto a wobbly stool on our front steps. A tumbling waterfall of fluorescent orange light around her. Stories of Jehovah, eighty words per minute. After school photographs I say to my mother What are those funny lights around people? Tihei mauri ora. Tihei māori ora. It makes people envious.

I sit on a step in the sun and type, the whole book in red because the black stripe. Silver, not gold. Dwindling as I get older. Trying to draw with crayon on my arm. I can’t get the hang of metres.