Issue 35: Chris Holdaway

from AVENUE

       “There is an evening coming

       Across the fields, one never seen before

       That lights no lamps.” —Larkin

Beneath the clock hands of exiled birds; no one knows quite how to gather the sails. Buoyed by the burning desire to treat city limits with the clarity of water’s edge—O indolent tides of front yards. Some say there’s a gulf in every doorway; the wreck of every roof pitching into black sea. Behold the shortages cantilevered out over transcendental cliffs. Every morning drops detached dwellings like anchors measuring longitude by the lanes holding back time; whistling the comings and goings of islands and waitstaff which are one and one and the same. Time to reconstruct the world by shipping manifest. Nothing so real as light reaching across harbour water darkly; never so alive as beneath a lit-up bridge.

Every moment a

voyage to witness

transit of fruit fly

across white tile.

Return to the horizon in pieces,—dawn breaking like gulls tearing inland; epileptic flit of sunlight through forest remnant in a city as a forest remnant—restricted area etcetera. Not to take the step out of the root but to retain a sacred relationship to firewood. The day is discovered like a species reclassified; the sound of lost birds crosses a swing bridge worth the tallest tower and returns as if by post to suspended wetlands. An aerial divides the sky;—as much another world as weathervane or winter branch—saluting blue scattered by the battlements of clouds. The traffic will turn to wind in the end.

The cranes threaten

to string up a harp

but remain gallows.

Chris Holdaway is a poet, publisher, and translator from Aotearoa New Zealand; author of Gorse Poems (Titus Books, 2022); director of arts publisher Compound Press; MFA in poetry and translation from the University of Notre Dame; recent poems, essays, and translations in publications such as Acumen, Cordite, Landfall, Public Seminar, Shearsman Magazine, and others.

Copyright © 2026 by Chris Holdaway, all rights reserved. This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of Copyright law. Archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the notification of the journal and consent of the author.