Some stones

By | 1 February 2021
to waylay thirst on long distance walks, my tūpuna

carried stones in her mouth. to survive

my tūpuna heeded stories.


i heed & hold, in my mouth, a bush pebble. no taste

but I feel it smooth, round & cool

then warm, saliva pooling.


then nothing. just my clifftop cave mouth

beyond water table & sea level,

parching.


i feel my mandelbrot gums self-opening.

this clay crumbled mouth crying

water.


I heed & hold like an uri: be the stone,

smooth & mute, not the tongue.

want nothing.


then, like other ancestors, i swallow it.

take it into deeper organs. pebble

becomes kākā stone 


fetched up from avian gullet, with avian powers

accrued down there.

i’ll have those.


& if it isn’t all absorbed by my tissue,

my bones, eventually i’ll

shit it out.
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Cassandra Barnett (Raukawa, Pākehā) is a writer and mum based in Te Whanganui-a-Tara, Wellington NZ. Her poetry and short fiction are published in Tupuranga, Te Whē, OraNui, RNZ Reading Room, Turbine | Kapohau, Brief, Huia Short Stories, Landfall, Black Marks on the White Page (Penguin Random House) and others. Her essays can be found in Te Manu Huna a Tāne (Massey University Press), The Spinoff, Pantograph Punch, Ate Journal of Contemporary Māori Art, Counterfutures, South as a State of Mind and many art publications and catalogues. In 2019 she was writer in residence at Zealandia, guest editor of 4th Floor Literary Journal and a finalist in the Pikihuia Māori Literature Awards. In 2020 – when not simply weathering the storm – she has been writing a book of autofiction and a poetry chapbook, both forthcoming.

More by Cassandra Barnett on Cordite Poetry Review →

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