Paula Harris

Welcome home

for Mahinārangi Tocker

Welcome yourself home
greet your plants
kiss your walls
lie naked on the floor

Bang your pots and pans
loudly
skip through all the rooms
singing nonsense words
jump on the furniture
and wave at the world
outside your windows

And then curl up
safe in the knowledge
that you're
home

First published in a fine line, NZ Poetry Society journal - Featured Poet (2014)

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.