Shells

i) shell like a cicada

males woo with severed arms

the argonauts

red krill pulsate

dancing pixels, waving paddles

those pellucid homes

evasive calcite ships

plume of cephalopod

traversing water columns

clinging chains of salps

a tentacle dances on her mantle

iii) flared lip

there

a massive

conch shell graveyard imagine crunch

ing those porcelain lips departed sisters

of hulls white meat pulled like string

skim over maiden middens the exposed midriffs of virgin islands crack

open pink chests to the dead

Lily Holloway is a 22-year-old English Honours student and Teaching Assistant at the University of Auckland. You can find her most recent work in Starling, Scum, The Pantograph Punch, Aniko Press and other miscellaneous literary places (including her website,lilyholloway.co.nz/cv). In 2020 she was honoured to receive the Shimon Weinroth Prize in Poetry, the Kendrick Smithyman Scholarship for Poetry and second place in the Charles Brasch Young Writers’ Essay Competition.

next>

<back

ii) underwater

i dream of whales

those great black tongues

swooping under archways

& over tarmac

in a submerged cbd

a skyscraper

made out of a single sheet of polished paua

watch a carrier crab use a tiny urchin as a shield

a mardi gras hat, an offering

there are shipworms longer than your arm

buried in the mud & encased in shell

found in sulfurous lagoons

bacteria live in their gills &

scientists thwuck it out

and have you considered the soft-shell crab?

Contents