Pleased to have my poem The Hierarchy appear in this stonking anthology, out now from Luncheon Sausage Books.
Back on the road
Reykjavik!
Very happy to be included in this Reykjavík City of Literature project. A real buzz.
The text exhibition Read the World at the Reykjavík City Hall honours Iceland‘s centenary as a sovereign nation. The texts are chosen by nineteen UNESCO Cities of Literature around the world, one text from each city, representing an author from or with connections to the city.
A chance encounter
I entered the Given Words competition again this year, and although not placed, the organizers are kind enough to publish the entries anyway. Here is my effort, which fits the Spanish–New Zealand connection of this unique event.
A chance encounter
In 1983 I stood on a platform in Spain,
where trains are late or early.
The dust was full of summer and the plenitude of life.
There were shiny green leaves, and snow–white buildings,
and I was ten, nested in a bubble of family
without feeling lost amongst the difference.
With my pencil I churned out technical drawings
of Spanish trains: blue curvaceous TERs,
and TALGOs, silver-sleek with crimson trim.
That afternoon, a wine-soaked English voice
rang from the window of a departing carriage:
God bless all you mad Kiwi bastards!
Standing next to us at this decrepit junction
was the mad Kiwi bastard in question,
a seedy character with a five day beard,
sunburned and heavy jawed, who talked
with the candour of someone far from home,
cast into the company of his own kind.
I recognized his marginal quality.
There was something about a marriage.
My mother said later, he was running away.
Ōtepoti Micro Fiction Challenge 2018
A successful entry into this small but perfectly formed event organized by Iona Winter.
Poetry competition entry 2018: School Day
School Day
The clang of the bell, an antique gong
ringing amongst standards and apps,
casts doors open with clamour and rush.
Mothers, and fathers, pat and hug,
shy pride disguised in bluff greeting.
Kids silly with giggles, others pensive,
fill the fields with contest for a ball,
dextrous lemurs swarming jungle gyms.
Clouds dissolve to the north,
heat flows from an unmasked sun
in a pledge of nascent summer.
The weekend awaits, but for a short interlude
the streets babble rich with voices,
as denizens trundle homewards,
keen to loosen straps and laces,
to snack, loaf, inhabit the back section.
© Victor Billot
Street Talk
New Zealand Books, Winter 2018
Alternative titles for an imaginary airport bookstore
A new poem published in Takahe 92 and available online
How to read your future doom in cloud tops
Curdle it: Culinary delights of the Sahel Goat Keepers
99 ways to expand your intestines
Mike Irwin: a life of ineffable normality
Pond scum at heart: how our biological origins as primitive algae gets in the way of loving relationships
The Void
Climb: use pointless bureaucratic junkets to secure your place in the economic food chain
Rich wankers posing on third world mountainsides
Depression: how it defeated me
Light ‘n’ peppy
Light ‘n’ peppy 2,3 and 4
Mike Irwin: the ordinary years
You must be joking: ecological tips for frequent flyers about to release another tonne of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere
Failure
Mild Disapproval: the modern liberal’s guide to polite concern
An illustrated compendium of celebrity urinals
Great Plane Disasters
The internet: my late night search for the meaning of life with Google
Authentic insincerity
The Screaming Toddler: the shocking truth of how your parenting skills and inadequate birthday presents are ruining the next generation
Stranger on the shore: the annotated lyrics of Acker Bilk
Mike Irwin: the next long decade
Dull walls colouring book for adults
Tits
My stinking great pile of loot: life lessons from a toad like CEO
Home crafts for the next bubonic pandemic
How to scrape toast
Three jobs and a pot of instant noodles: magic methods to save a home deposit in 20 years!
The inner potato
The Dummies Guide to Colonic Irrigation
New Zealand’s top dishwashing anecdotes
Bare my soul, the three word love poems of Baletcka Moparovia
My lone battle against Daylight Saving
Paperclip Ninja
Oinked: love and life on an industrial pig farm
Transgender marsupials of history
Watching paint dry: the wisdom of Mike Irwin
Technobutt: the astonishing future of AI toilets
The Plastific Ocean
The Plastific Ocean made it over the line for third prize in the Seaweek / World Oceans Day Poetry Competition 2018, organized by the National Aquarium in Napier.
The Plastific Ocean
News item: When researchers travelled to tiny, uninhabited Henderson Island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, they were astonished to find an estimated 38 million pieces of trash washed up on the beaches
38 million floating clumps washed up from the deep
from plastigomerate that drifts in ocean going fleets.
Polyflotsam decorates the reef on Polynesian atolls
and polyjetsam floats in the blue between the melting poles.
A hermit crab is helmeted by a Pepsi cap,
and Robinson Crusoe is sealed up in bubblewrap.
A ghost net traps a turtle swimming in microdebris soup,
as anoxic toxic brine curdles in the North Pacific loop.
Gruesome anglerfish cower amongst the sinking trash,
plastic rings for seabirds are a deadly strangling sash.
There are balls and bags and tangled tesseracts of sellotape,
while in the roaring forties shoals of biros round the Cape.
If one evening you beachcomb on the littered shore,
do not hold a shell to your ear to listen to the waves dull roar.
Hear instead the whisper from a polystyrene coffee cup:
get your act together, because time is nearly up.
Joint exhibition to celebrate ‘Landfall’
Landfall’s position as New Zealand’s pre-eminent literary and art journal is being celebrated in a unique way by the Otago Arts Society.
https://www.odt.co.nz/entertainment/arts/joint-exhibition-celebrate-landfall
The Hierarchy (Minarets Mix)
The Friday Poem: ‘The Hierarchy’ by Victor Billot
Republished on the Spinoff:
Some poems from the Ockham NZ poetry finalists: Sue Wootton’s ‘Wild’
Wild
Measure my wild. Down to my last leaf,
my furled, my desiccated. This deciduousness,
this bloom. Calculate my xylem levels.
My spore count, fungal, scarlet
in a bluebell glade. Whoosh,
where the foliage closes on a great cat.
Test me: how many tigers in my jungle,
how many lions at roam? Map my rivers,
deltas, estuaries. Mollusc, whelk, worm.
Monitor my silt. Do I have spoonbills,
high-stepping and watchful over the darting fish?
Rainfall on pines. Dappled sunlight
in my dells. Under moss, the fallen log, under
the log the hibernating hedgehog. Late my dates,
or soon? Return of the albatross, godwits
gathering. What clouds me, shifts,
but: indigo thunder-stack, pink wisp. Count the mice.
What will survive me, O my cockroaches, O my lice?
Scaffold me with metal, cage me in glass, tube me,
needle me, fill me, flush me. Saline solution:
the ocean. Oxygen therapy: the…
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