One-Star Reviews of the Pink and White Terraces
after Aimee Nezhukumatathil
I don’t like this shade of pink.
This shade of pink isn’t very flattering to me.
The pink’s a bit girly, isn’t it?
I thought there’d be pokies. I thought there’d be a casino. I thought there’d be showgirls. There’s so much potential here that they’re missing out on.
Total tourist trap! What do they think we are?
Very dangerous for children, due to the lack of fencing around the water at the Pink Terrace. Health & Safety would have a ball at this place! Don’t take your children, their lives will be much better if they don’t have to deal with such things.
So many native people in the village. Is that really necessary? What do they add to it? I didn’t like the way they dressed.
I could’ve made terraces that were better than this. They seem poorly designed.
It was so cold at night. So cold. So very cold.
Volcano erupted while I was there, destroyed terraces, killed me. What a waste of money. Very disappointed.
First published in takahē 95 (2019)
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.