Paula Harris

Hobart - July 2020

my lover and I lose our bodies and become parts of speech

noun /
yes

pronoun /
the thought of his mouth

adjective /
fuck yes

adverb /
repeatedly

preposition /
on top

verb /
I affection, you affection
he affections, we affection
they affection

interjection /
kissing with eyes closed

conjunction /
please

First published in Hobart (2020)

Paula Harris

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.