Paula Harris: I contemplate creepy behaviour, which led me to thinking about back when I danced Argentine tango and the older white dude who told me that he wanted to ride me like a filly across the Pampas, the same older white dude who once deeply inhaled while burying his face in Lorelle’s hair – which was an entirely deliberate action, given that Lorelle is over a foot taller than him – and told her how amazing her hair smelt, and I don’t want to be that kind of creepy

I contemplate creepy behaviour, which led me to thinking about back when I danced Argentine tango and the older white dude who told me that he wanted to ride me like a filly across the Pampas, the same older white dude who once deeply inhaled while burying his face in Lorelle’s hair – which was an entirely deliberate action, given that Lorelle is over a foot taller than him – and told her how amazing her hair smelt, and I don’t want to be that kind of creepy

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First published in Figure 1 (2022)

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.