Magnolia Wilson

National Anxiety

The party is very loud and mostly the view is just of a hundred pairs
of highly glittered or neon shoes, wide angled along a gummy hardwood floor.

So much coloured and stomping and endless stomping.

Late in the night, when bodies finally hang like deflated Lilos over couches,
you, in someone else’s room where the walls are only dirty white sheets,
have rough sex with Richie McCaw.

He is much more aggressive than you’d imagined. His TV persona –
a giant jelly-baby implanted with a ‘sporting platitudes’ chip,
isn’t quite as sweet as …

A short time after ripping off your black undies and going down, he
surfaces, furiously, to inform you that your Brazilian isn’t up to par …

you might want to rethink your strategy, work on your game, if you
know what he means, for the national good, of course.

 

 

By Magnolia Wilson

is from Fern Flat, a valley in the far north of New Zealand. She has just finished an arts residency in Salvador, Brazil funded through Unesco and the Instituto Sacatar. She is currently in the mountains of Chapada Diamantina.