Somewhere Between Leaving and Arriving
Phoebe Rodgers
August, 2023 – Portland, Maine
Mom and Dad don’t ask where she went.
She observes the tide pulling out slowly, leaving everything exposed for a moment before it disappears again.
Her hair remains in knots, she leaves it unbrushed.
She grabs a speaker out of her 2006 used Lexus that she hasn’t named yet, and lays down on the cement storm surge wall as the waves rhythmically crash to the beat of the first song that comes on. She knows those hums. The same ones she once built a story around, never quite finding an ending.
Only halfway through the song and she’s bored.
She pauses the speaker, wraps her sarong around her waist, tosses her board into the back of her car and turns the key.
The song restarts. Three minutes and fifty-one seconds of twangy, crisp guitar strokes that strike the ear with tones of nostalgia. Someone humming, like they are suspended between leaving and arriving, not fully belonging to either.
The road stretches out, steady and unbothered. She passes places she’s never seen, now heading toward Portland, Maine. Her shin, still cut from her fins, stings as the salt dries tight against it. She’s fresh on her junior operating license, so both hands stay fixed on the wheel as the window drifts her sunbleached blonde hair into her face.
She gets a text from Hope. Wanna stay at mine for a bit? I’ve got room.
Waiting tables and helping the prep chefs back home taught her how quickly three hundred and fifty dollars will recover—she’ll be set for a while.
The song keeps playing, and for a moment everything feels suspended. All grown up at sixteen and a half, she keeps driving.
Dunedin Noir
Charlie Gardner
O-Week. The city wasn’t sleeping, and it had taken too much MDMA. Now the city was holed up in a seedy club with a drunken girl draped over it, and the city was too wired to care. It was one of those nights that made you want to smoke—till I remembered that I was out of cigarettes, because I don’t smoke. Never have.
While the delinquent youths—some a bit too long in the tooth for skulduggery—got themselves nicked for boosting a couple shopping trollies from the New World parking lot, I was gazing longingly into the blank abyss of a Word doc and praying that I’d finally think of something clever to say. Raymond Chandler, I am not.
And in the morning, when the booze hounds wake up on their stove with half a bottle of vodka hanging out their mouths and a less-than-vivid memory of the night prior, I’d still be sat in this ramshackle, fire hazard of a $500-a-week flat, so far from campus it might as well have been Invercargill.
It was a particularly stormy night, and the flat was cold and empty, like a fridge with everything taken out. 11:37pm. My mind, like a student flat couch—reeking of alcohol and likely to spontaneously combust—was turning something over.
The mystery had been festering since last semester. An earworm gnawing away my sanity. As much of a mystery as the implementation of Aoroa, powered by Brightspace™, and just as functional. I was tortured. Like these sentences.
Yet, I just couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d missed something, that there was something I just wasn’t seeing. That single question burned in my head.
Why did the professor give me a B- on that essay last semester?
I’ll name your parts for a grade
Alena Khan
laid muscle against plastic,
stripped and strewn.
oh how exposed,
and naked and fragile.
reduced fibres of being,
how can one be?
if not just bundled,
bound and bare.
recognise,
must I address clear
by name, my beloved,
limb of unknown.
willing subject of scalpel,
do they observe?
or seek opportunity
of victim or volunteer.
trimmed are the nails,
clinical or care?
who held you?
white coats, bespoke.
passage of time,
pause softly my dear.
walk or run,
do not miss spoken Latin in ear.
forgive me please,
for I shall poke nor stare
as if eyes were present,
might her gaze be shared.
laid reduced now recognise,
how willingly trimmed
the passage of time,
forgive me
please
In the Corners of the Milky Way
Lizzie Diamond
Bright red boulders illuminated
by the smoldering fire. Coals burning out,
Twisting upwards, like the bursts of light
Dotting the blanketed sky as if the world
Could fold neatly us into it, like mom’s
Quilted blankets. Here, grab your corner
As I grab mine, let’s tuck in the corners
Of the Milky Way. Space on one end and time
On the other—bring them together to hug us
Tight, until our breathing matches, our
Hearts warmed. Until light spews
From the delicate seams, stitched by mom’s timely touch.
Place it with the eons organized in our laundry room,
Stacked neatly on the painted wooden shelves, cracking
With the weight of time. Hold on tight
As the universe spins on the wash cycle.
Spun smooth from the timely wheel, centuries known
To none. Leave its fraying stitches to dry
On the clothesline, warmed by the sputtering coals.
I’ll hold you until it's dried, I’ll sing you a lullaby.
Let’s watch as the Milky Way sways.
