Erik Kennedy
Summer 2025 | Poetry
The House at the Base of the Power Pylon
Is not full of people with cancer,
but it is full of people whose thoughts play
in the slightly sharp G of the mains hum.
The garden is full of the pylon, and the shadow
of the pylon, and the sign warning you to keep off
the pylon. The sign shows a person surging
into a red superhumanity from the invigorating leccy,
jittering and flying, probably frying in G.
The landlord speaks at 50 Hz. The house is worth
twenty percent less than it would be worth
elsewhere, but they don’t build mansions under pylons
in the first place, only bungalows that look like
outbuildings at Arctic missile-tracking stations—
okay for keeping out drizzle, but not getting a write-up
in Aliva magazine’s ‘20 Tiny Houses with Hygge’ issue.
It’s unfair, but we want houses to complete us,
to be the places where we store our ambitions at night,
and not to be places where the balloons from
Diane across the road’s sixtieth get stuck thirty feet up,
like when you were a kid and your ball got stuck
up a tree, but imagine it’s a tree that hates you.
Erik Kennedy is the author of three poetry collections, most recently Sick Power Trip (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2025), and he co-edited No Other Place to Stand, a book of climate change poetry from New Zealand and the Pacific (Auckland University Press, 2022). His poems, stories, and criticism have been published in places like berlin lit, FENCE, Los Angeles Review of Books, Poetry, Poetry Ireland Review, Threepenny Review, the TLS, and Western Humanities Review. Originally from New Jersey, he lives in Ōtautahi Christchurch in Aotearoa New Zealand.