Modernity is in trouble. Ask my hedge fund manager – he’s been
telling lies on my behalf for over a decade. It happened
slowly, spatially, that paradigm swap and that
parallel reality we all stumbled into. Like a leisurely
fall into a hole, or an unintended stroll
into the tombs of unnamed soldiers. Jesus’
followers didn’t just wake up one morning to find
he was dead. He’d been quietly dying
countless times in the place where water became
single elements and men told stories
with their backs to the flame. I pushed my gravy boat
out into the Dead Sea and spurned my believers shore-
bound, hiding behind their rabbit-proof fences, found strange
new lands of upside-down waterwheels and cataracts
spurting their vitriol skywards. In that place I saw a judge
initial his writ upon a woman’s breast, a man
with blood beneath his fingers and a train
that kept circumnavigating the same tired knoll. I pulled up my
10-point presentation and they listened, for a time, in the place
of walking forests and fig trees haunting thorns. Then I lost out
to games of rummy and poker played with bones
of endangered birds. Games to pass
the minutes that passed like hours in the days
that truth was dead. I left with my integrity
dishonoured like a cheque that bounced off
the continental shelf, when I realised the New World
had died between the weight of the over-full grocery bag
and the moment the mechanised check-out operator
spat my change out onto my leg.
_
Jo-Ella Sarich lives in Petone, New Zealand and has practised as a lawyer for a number of years. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The New Verse News, Tuck Magazine, The Galway Review, Anti-Heroin Chic, takahē magazine and the Poetry New Zealand Yearbook 2017.
