Sick as Poetry was written by Hana Pera Aoake and Jordana Bragg for our partners at Salient publication for the Women’s Issue, 2016. The text layout was designed by Ella Bates-Hermans, which you can view in high resolution version here.
Publication layout courtesy of Salient.
Sick as Poetry
I remember this feeling of wanting to suffocate my body.
His eyes were leering at me watching my breasts grow
You learn when ur young that u perform all the emotional and domestic labour
Competing against other women
Learning and unlearning
Gearing towards marriage and erasing ur māoriness and ur queerness to be desired and used by men who are just ‘nice guys’.
Hide in the whiteness to be desired
White skin, brown bones, brown soul
Trauma melted into your bones
The very young girl
Lily Rose Depp on Instagram
Idealised body
Projected fantasy
Fetishized other
Feeling exhausted watching other women fight for the attention of men
seeking validation in being desired.
Someone u love having sex with u when ur too drunk and high to say anything
Being told by ur entire friend group that ‘blurred lines don’t exist’.
Having your identity erased over and over again
White passing pania of the reef
Queer invisibility
Pania of the digital reef
Oppression olympics
Blood dissipating in the water.
Pain like knives vibrating in your womb.
Blood everywhere.
Having a miscarriage when u didn’t even realise u were pregnant.
Thinking about the Tatu video for all the things she said at age 13 then masturbating then crying
Carrying a knife from age 11
Keys between my knuckles
In my togs bending over while blood gushed out of my body
The horror of your alien body
Cyborgization procedure by 2021
A weight pulling my body down
Oxygen slowly disappearing from my body
Let’s not do this tonight
9.20am 20/06 tell me I’m beautiful
2.58pm 23/6 Let’s not do this on facebook
Link attached Five Ways to Make a Woman Feel Really Loved
Small talk in all small thing
Five ways to say how wasteful
How tasteless
Days on end like this
You smell like sex and my ex boyfriend and potpourri and you look
like you smell like spearmint
Sorry I romantically idealised you
within an inch of my life last night
Find any letter box you seem to like
I like the metal ones that catch rain
like they’re oily, for instance,
Kate Winslet in Heavenly Creatures
what I really want to read is the clickbait
who was he wearing who was he dating
when he wrote that
Really is something
If I could be a rock in a pond or the pond
I guess I would have to be the pond, well, because I’m afraid of open bodies of water and if I was the rock I would be terrified,
but if I was the pond, seems natural to me to be afraid of yourself
Room To Move is a Two sided Thing
My most recent google search for
the definition of auto erotic asphyxiation
Mt Hikurangi is the only place I might feel clean and even then I’m never there
I have never been
My first girlfriend and I first kissed
in a tiny tin shed in the dark
in Palmerston North in the home
and garden section
in the warehouse, my mum waited
in the car, I hated the heat of it
And she handed it back to me handle to me, blade to herself
Excitable and entitled teens
Raupo taranga, rengarenga, putaputaweta all beautiful things I’ve apologised to
for falling into drunk
5:56pm 8/10 no lol
5:58pm 8/10 i mean, no, 0 libido
Front cover of Women’s Issue, Courtesy of Salient.
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