by​ James Norcliffe

She wanted to make sparrow song the soundtrack of her life. Her way back was ever thwarted by burnt bridges but she was determined to make a virtue of this. She decided to set fire to her photographs, built a bonfire under the apricot tree and fed each photograph into it, one by one. And then she set the apricot tree alight, figuring she had no more use for fruit. She wrote no letters, on the off chance there might be a reply; she made no phone calls in case the phone was answered. She breakfasted alone on the patio in order to hear the sound of the last sparrow, until the day she dropped her spoon, spilt her coffee, and alarmed, the sparrow flew away.

New Zealand poet James Norcliffe has published eleven collections of poetry including Shadow Play (2013), Dark Days at the Oxygen Café (VUP, 2016), Deadpan (Otago University Press, 2019) and Letter to Oumuamua (Otago University Press, 2023). Recent work has appeared in Landfall, The Asheville Poetry Review, Best Small Fictions 2023, Gargoyle, Rhino and Flash Fiction International. In 2022 he was awarded the New Zealand Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement in poetry.