(re)finding inspiration
I spent months and
months
and
months
not writing anything,
and then
you
came back into my life
just long enough
to provide me with the
exact
balance
of happiness
and misery
that makes the words
flow
so quickly
and smoothly
that I feel sane
again.
thanks.
bastard.
First published in Manawatū Standard (2012)
Also published in
a fine line, NZ Poetry Society journal - Featured Poet (2014)
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.