Salt Green River
Marama Salsano (IIML, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand)
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The night you died you read to me as always, feathers bunched behind your back, believing perhaps the saltiness in your breath might somehow crystallise between the pages of Mr. Dickens.
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Outside, the walnut tree you planted bobbed white in the moonlight and a morepork, a ruru, thrashed its wings against your leadlight flowers. Downy wisps fell from its belly like salt onto wattles below.
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Mum brought you dinner. The plate slid from her hand and somersaulted to the floor. Mint sauce trickled between the floorboards and smeared the kete you wove for me last year.
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The village arrived and you and I were crammed, breathless, between bodies and wails and bodies and wails. Hymns rose towards rimu beams and trickled down the walls to our feet.
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I inhaled the greenstone lines carved into your chin; etched with each channel, curve, stream and stone of the Waipaoa river. My ancestor, my Ruru.
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As the village footsteps died out, liquid beads pop-pop-popped over A Tale of Two Cities, and flowed like warm breath across my skin.
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Marama Salsano completed a business degree in 2004 then turned her hand to writing. In 2010 she completed the MA in Creative Writing programme at the International Institute of Modern Letters at Victoria University. She was a finalist in the 2009 Pikihuia Awards and subsequently had her first piece of fiction published in Huia Short Stories 8. Marama is of Te-Aitanga-a-Mahaki and Tuhoe descent and lives in Gisborne, New Zealand.
