after dropping the fridge on andrew's toe while we were moving house
later that night
he cringed in pain
and i said
- does it hurt
and he said
- yes
so i said
- go to the doctor
and he said
- no, it'll be okay
the next night
he cringed in pain
and i said
- does it hurt
and he said
- yes
so i said
- go to the doctor
and he said
- no, it'll be okay
a month later
he cringed in pain
and i said
- does it hurt
and he said
- yes
so i said
- go to the doctor
and he said
- no, it'll be okay
three months later
he cringed in pain
and i said
- does it still hurt
and he said
- yes
so i said
- go to the doctor
and he said
- no, it'll be okay
after two more months
he cringed in pain
and i said
- does it still hurt
and he said
- yes
so i said
- go to the doctor
and he said
- no, it'll be okay
nine months after i dropped
the fridge on andrew's toe
while we were moving house
he hadn't said anything
in a while
so i kicked him in the toe
and said
- how's your foot feeling?
and he said
- fine. why?
First published in Poetry New Zealand (2003)
About Paula
Paula Harris lives in Aotearoa/New Zealand, where she writes and sleeps a lot, because that's what depression makes you do. She won the 2018 Janet B. McCabe Poetry Prize and the 2017 Lilian Ida Smith Award, and was a semi-finalist for the 2020 92Y Discovery Poetry Prize. She was the recipient of a Vermont Studio Center writing residency in 2018.
Her poetry has been published in various journals, including Passages North, Barren, New Ohio Review, SWWIM, Gulf Coast, The Spinoff, Poetry New Zealand Yearbook and Aotearotica. Her essays have been published in The Sun, Passages North, The Spinoff and Headlands: New Stories of Anxiety (Victoria University Press).
She is extremely fond of dark chocolate, shoes and hoarding fabric.