“Rona had never married, not having found the right man, as they say. People had talked all right, the murmurings only dying down when she came to that age people thought sexless. ‘As if passion died,’ she scoffed. It died because the objects of beauty, the triggers of a woman's lust disappeared.”

—from “A Song for a Tattooed Man”
by Marewa Glover

“she was bones scattered like runes
     across the embers
of an ancient hearth and, a hundred years
     after falling
they sifted her mysteries (the Police were
     called of course
but quickly deduced hers was an older
     homicide).”

—from “Skulls & Cannibals”
by Witi Ihimaera

“We were all ashamed of our mother. Our mother always did things to shame us. Like putting red darns in our clothes, and cutting up old swimming togs to make two—girls’ togs from the top half for my sister, and boys’ togs from the bottom half for my brother. Peti and Raana both cried when Mum made them take the togs to school. Peti sat down on the road by our gate and yelled out she wasn’t going to school. She wasn’t going swimming. I didn't blame my sister because the togs were size 38 chest and Peti was only ten years old.”

—from “It Used to Be Green Once”
by Patricia Grace

“bone :  resting lizard stretched
along the grain :  bone
that once lamented and rejoiced
that once sensed the blood’s
currents and rhythm :  bone”

—from “For lms 145, a bone flute
at the British Museum” by
Ngahuia Te Awekotuku

Photograph by Piliamo‘o