Chris pauses to enjoy the flowering cherry trees near his office, while a small Japanese man stands in front of them saying “beautiful beautiful beautiful beautiful beautiful” over and over again; Chris sends me a photo of the trees in bloom, but not of the small Japanese man.
Head over to https://www.twinpiesliterary.com/volume-one/chris-pauses-to-enjoy-the-flowering-cherry-trees-near-his-office-while-a-small-japanese-man-stands to read this poem!
First published in Twin Pies Literary (2020)
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.