This New Zealand by Pat Foran
I didn’t see the loneliest tree in the world reaching out to me that morning, remember the conceptual popsicle stand the color of then that afternoon or hear the lo-fi moon static-crackling on my radio that night, but I felt them the day of my Dad’s funeral mass.
I felt the reaching. The then. The crackling.
Felt them.
I’d never lost a father.
Was feeling it.
New territory, this death.
A new song, this funeral mass.
A new land.
New Zealand, say.
A new land to navigate.
A new place to feel. To feel in.
In this New Zealand, I felt that one-of-a-kind kaikōmako tree, the rarest of living organisms, hanging in there all by its lonesome on an island 40 miles off the northern coast.
I’m sorry I didn’t see you reaching out I’m sorry I didn’t gracefully receive you please know I’m here for you please know, I said to the tree through a tin-cup-and-string telephone wire. Know I’m here.
I know you are, the tree said, talk-singing through the wire’s whine. I’m here for you, too.
In this New Zealand, I felt that then-colored popsicle stand floating where the southwestern Pacific Ocean and Tasman Sea meet, floating in concept and in kind, and reconsidering the notion of now.
What is the color of will as in will be? Something between off-present and off-fuchsia? I don’t remember, I said via carrier pigeon.
Could be, the stand said via semaphore, offering me a Do Unto Others Popsicle the color of a mid-summer Milwaukee morning sky and the flavor of always.
In this New Zealand, I felt the fidelity-for-shit moon, and I heard, felt and heard, a little night music: a pirate radio station broadcasting from a ghost ship drifting in the Hauraki Gulf.
I heard ghost harmonies of now and then, of when and how.
I heard songs about beginnings and endings.
Songs about never and ever.
About possibility.
I heard my Dad singing The Four Freshmen’s “Their Hearts Were Full of Spring.”
I heard The Motels singing “Suddenly Last Summer.”
I heard The Beatles singing “Sure to Fall.”
I heard The Bangles singing “A Hazy Shade of Winter.”
I heard The Business of Death singing “The Business of Death.”
In the lullaby of this lonely New Zealand night, I heard the lap of the ghost ship’s oars and the major-chord music in the moorings off the coastal scrub.
I heard the beating and beating of unheld hearts, the beats bouncing off the shimmer of the gulf.
I saw the seasons of Dad’s soul.
Remembered how he was there for those in need. How he gracefully gave and received.
Heard what he said and didn’t say.
Felt what he did.
Felt what he meant.
What he meant.
Felt.
Felt what he meant when he sang about violet-filled hills and spring-full hearts, singing not in a whisper but a wish. Like the slow-no-wake of the willful, no-place-like-home wind.
Author's Note:
Re: self-care, I don’t know that I consciously practice it. But when I do, something (intuition? the art of imaginary motorcycle maintenance? the coolest of cats?) compels me to practice it. To get out there (out there as in outside, under an upside-down-egg-carton sky or ‘neath the pale moonlight … out there as in trancing-out-into-Alpha out there .. or out there as in out with the handful of beings who make me feel better about being alive) when I feel as in feel I need to. When I feel. That’s also when I write: when I feel.
Pat Foran has never been to New Zealand, but he kind of likes the music. His work has appeared in various journals. His (mostly) flash fiction collection Songs from the Blimp Ruins was published in 2026 by Silverbacked Punk Press. Find him at neutralspaces.co/patforan/, Bluesky at @pdforan.bsky.social and Instagram at @pdforan.
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