sharing the good stuff
my mother always told me
i had to save my good stuff
keep it for another day
so my prettiest colouring books
went uncoloured
my toys sat on their shelf
her best dresses stayed in plastic
her engagement ring hidden
in its box
what my mother never learned
was that if you save your good stuff for too long
one day there'll be no one to share it with you
First published in Spin 32 (1998)
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.