Susan Adams is one of the poets featured in Te Purere/The Exodus: The Anthology of Expatriate New Zealand Poets, Edited by Vaughan Rapatahana and John Gallas, Cold Hub Press, 2025, which will have it’s Sydney launch on Saturday, 6 Dec from 3pm – 5pm at the Stanley Street Gallery, 1/52-54 Stanley St, Darlinghurst NSW 2010. This is a Poetry Sydney event. Tickets are $15 and are available from https://events.humanitix.com/sydney-launch-te-purere-the-exodus

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The Donation

I stare at ten red fingernails spread on arm boards

fine blonde hair too real for the pillow

eyes roam monitors, oxygen level,

heart beat pulse, return to red, back to clock,

move behind the unwind of minutes

She’s 16, fell from her horse

will never know the wind again,

draped in sterile sheets

arms are free strapped in a ‘v’

little red arrows pointing

Hung in this strung space

each second cuts silence

Time is patient, but, never-the-less.

How long will it take

too long, for thoughts to haunt ideas,

the inevitable has already been crossed

if the earth spun any faster

it could not change this outcome

I’m gloved, untouchable,

even my breath is masked

had I held one manicured hand,

would it have mattered

At last, the needles are dropping

I pick up the scalpel. She’s run out of everything

this girl has already left. Vital signs are not her own

machines waiting for switches to be thrown

Her falter took fifty minutes. Now is the speed.

We swoop. Taloned crows on offal. Place organs into ice,

surrendered for survival of strangers

The family have lost a child,

ours is a task more brutal than grief.

There is no debriefing.

What I take home, follows.

**

Escape the Beloved Country

The foetal curve

is a question mark

we revert to

not a haven for a life

lying curled on our dark side

Cry the national anthems

Hiding from the outside,

the inside of ourselves

escape is not a plan

in this State of drugged control

There are no light switches

in this suck-thumb-bare-room

loose skin is a soap polished shroud

the wall a full stop at the bend

Breathe me alive

brand me to struggle

make me scream with honest air

let me out

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Susan Adams was born in Wellington, New Zealand. She has performed and taught ballet internationally, worked as Nursing Consultant/Educator and following her PhD as a Research Scientist. Having come late to poetry she has nonetheless been published across nine countries in three languages. Her book Beside Rivers was runner up in the prestigious Anne Elder Prize.