Bio
Gail Zing is an Aotearoa New Zealand author of three collections of poetry, including Some Bird, selected for Best NZ Books 2024 by The NZ Listener. Winner of both Caselberg and NZPS International Poetry Competitions and placed and shortlisted for many others including the 2025 Fish Poetry Prize, her work has been published in Poetry Aotearoa, Cordite Poetry Review, Poems for the Planet, Stone Circle Review, Landfall and many others. She is a creative-writing teacher and editor, and in 2025 received a residency at Robert Lord House in Dunedin. https://www.theseventhletter.nz/
Gail Zing
I will remember
If you ask me where I am
on budget day, I am looking in the river,
watching the lowly-paid cleaner/
midwive/nurse/teacher aide/
do the work women do
/have done/did do/might do, this class
issue whooooosh
she goes,
right down the river
along with the cows, along with the butter
and the grass and the sky, the white room
full of people laughing, creaming
their heads off, everything is hollow
or too full, the wind is bitter
but speaks the truth,
if you ask me where I was.