Bee Trudgeon
Winner - 2024
I am a writer and children’s librarian, living and working in a haunted house in Cannons Creek, Porirua, and anywhere anyone will have me. My journalism has been published in Rip It Up, The Sapling, The Spinoff, NZ Poetry Shelf, and Audioculture Iwi Waiata; my poetry in Kiss Me Hardy 2, NZ Poetry Box, NZ Poetry Shelf, A Fine Line, and the New Zealand Poetry Society Te Rōpū Toikupu o Aotearoa anthology paint me. I moonlight in service of the Patreon page of my alter ego, Grace Beaster. Returning to Te Herenga Waka Victoria University to undertake the CREW253 Poetry He Rotarota paper has been the highlight of my poetic endeavours to date.
Candy and the Mothers
Watching TV on the couch
at my mum’s,
like someone else’s daughter,
like someone who comes when she’s called,
crawling into the Lladro lair,
calculating potential damages.
Like we need an excuse to fight like we used to,
when I was a nail gun,
in a house of bare dwangs,
and she was crazy,
like the kind of pavement
that doesn’t know if it’s fun or trashy,
like it tripping you up to skin your knees, regardless;
divisive as Miami wine coolers (for the ladies)
and those date-and-licorice spiders
we only ate the legs off,
at paper-hatted birthday parties that always ended
with someone vomiting a rainbow;
like the way all the sisters
on her side of the family
spent their first pay cheques
on the same porcelain ornaments,
to display on window sills
with curtains never closed,
like the world was welcome to see anything it wanted –
a prehistoric social media
where women in fruit-toned polyester slacks
and lethal permanent waves were the dinosaurs,
surfing volcanic coffee-pots
while Black Forest cuckoos clocked;
like being bitten with false teeth
in places that didn’t show
caused you to bleed any less, inside;
like pokers weren’t strikers, fingers in your holes,
like Valium was candy and the mothers lived
behind closed eyelids,
like they weren’t squatting
in the shadow of Parihaka
and calling it home,
like scorched earth nourishes
anything intending
to feast on its ashes,
like swallowing stories is less toxic
than spewing them up,
like intergenerational shame
is soluble in alcohol,
like I was born
in a bowling alley’s pin-setting machine
and have just been deposited back in my place
between the end of The Chase and the 1News teaser
battered like a hotdog,
watching TV on the couch
at my mum’s,
like someone else’s daughter.
Bukowski Made Me Do It
Bukowski made me do it, made me drink and let you lead me to an inner city playground while the clubs were throwing up. While the wasted were converging on the swings and roundabouts, you were tearing at my clothes in the u-bend of the slide. Over your shoulder, through a little window in the fibreglass, a cropped view of the illuminated ferry bisecting the harbour rose and fell, completely isolated from its surroundings.
I have no desire to be: the ‘William Tell Overture’, two wives and a child in the oven, Anne Sexton in the garage, stones in pockets, Harry Horse’s chihuahua.
I’d prefer to be: the lucky apple on the floor, the maternal plate of bread and milk, the wise window left ajar, the walking stick on the riverbank, Little Rabbit.
I will never speak of this again, even if the ghost of Ted Hughes demands it, even if he threatens a heart attack on cancer’s doorstep (it’s too late to save him and he was a bastard anyway). This is not a coroner’s report for that. This is the drinks menu, and the dealer’s pager. This is the money shot and the aftermath. This is ambulances waking babies at daybreak. This is me outrunning dawn’s accusations along the waterfront, high-heels in my hands.