value for money
"New polymer notes, which have a life expectancy four times that of paper notes, can be recycled to make plastic household products."
- The Dominion, January 7 2000
i want a $9900 dish brush
and a $510000 bucket,
a $7800 spatula
and a $2300 biscuit container.
i want to fill my cupboards
with millions of dollars of
tupperware storage.
i want to put my shampoo
on a $45980 shower shelf,
and clean my teeth with a
$2200 toothbrush
i will picnic like royalty
with my $34870 plastic cutlery
and recycle them all
at the end
First published in JAAM 13 (2000)
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.