Salt Lick
Rebecca Hawkes
I went back and forth on love like cows coming and going
to their corner of the paddock. I squatted in the chewed-down grass
and grew smaller under every tongue that found me. Wanting
to eat the world and be consumed by it, I left my gated garden expecting
another, larger garden. Gums numb from gnawing the homeland’s heart-
shaped leaves, I hoped to puff on ghost pipes from an older understory.
Those anemic shoots of moon the signs of a season which never existed
on my islands. Prelapsarian archipelago with annual autumns, sure, but no
incarnadine Fall. At home, the gorse bloomed constantly to keep the kissing ripe
and treacherous. One of my sweethearts gifted me a sprig. Intermittently
forgotten in a pocket, it pricked teensy stigmata though my jeans.
Clothes clung to me differently then. Everyone and the ocean
knew the shape of my body. Reading all this, you could picture me
unduly beautiful. It is important that you know I wasn’t terribly
pretty, but at the time you could tell I liked being alive. I made myself
the winking margarita rim and then the surreptitious lick mid-sentence.
I was both the crystal pillar and the one not turning to look back – walking
past the ragged edge of the aurora, cracking like a seedpod on summer air.
Rebecca Hawkes is a painter-poet raised on a beef and lamb farm in New Zealand. She is the author of the poetry collection Meat Lovers (Auckland University Press) and the chapbooks Softcore Coldsores (AUP New Poets 5) and Hardcore Pastorals (Cordite). She edits poetry journal Sweet Mammalian and holds an MFA in yearning from the University of Michigan. Her new chapbook HIDE, an illuminated manuscript of narrative verse, is coming in 2026 with Ngā Pukapuka Pekapeka in Aotearoa, and her next full-length collection Fool's Spring is forthcoming from Yes Yes Books and AUP in 2027.