Poem of the Week | February 02, 2026

Rebecca Hawkes is a queer painter-poet from Aotearoa New Zealand. Her first book was Meat Lovers (AUP), finalist for the Lambda Literary Awards in the US and winner of a Laurel Prize in the UK. She edits NZ poetry journal Sweet Mammalian and coedited the No Other Place to Stand: An Anthology of Climate Change Poetry from Aotearoa New Zealand. Rebecca recently completed an MFA in yearning (and, to a lesser extent, poetry) at the University of Michigan in the US, where her poems have won prizes from Palette Poetry, Salt Hill, the Hopwood Awards, and the Academy of American Poets, while her manuscripts have been finalists with Alice James Books, Green Linden, and YesYes Books. Her new work has found homes in places like The Threepenny Review, The Georgia Review, and Sixth Finch. Her illuminated-manuscript chapbook HIDE is forthcoming from Ngā Pukapuka Pekapeka in Aotearoa, and her next full-length collection Fool’s Spring will be published by YesYes Books and Auckland University Press in 2026. 

“It’s Not the Heat (It’s the Humidity)” by Rebecca Hawkes is our Poem of the Week.

It’s Not the Heat (It’s the Humidity)  

Maximum petrichor. Wet bulb euphemism.
All those months the closest I came
to getting laid was cycling really fast
over a busted patch of tarmac. This and
a small knife taken to the first flush
of golden oysters. Midas-meal, gilt prints
dotting rotten logs. My comforts
thusly decadent. Poetic method
derivative of a livestreamed peregrine
falcon nest. The new mate who doesn’t take
to mothering. Raises her chicks
only to eat them one by one, regurgitating
each into the mouth of the largest.
In my cold cul-de-sac, frost and thaw
took all winter to crack the road
in fragments. Dark floes: asphalt glaciers
calving. Where dogs licked blue salt
from their paws, fresh tar laid in the fissures
invents a script for summer’s stickiness.
Commitments to queer community
keep me embroiled in the polycules
of amateur mushroom foragers.
Their ready-made sets of devastated friends.
Weaponized therapists reestablishing
the broken cycle to maintain relevance.
My bike’s back tire bursts, chained up
under the prolapsed sun while I take in
the public library’s air conditioning.
Worship at the thermostat. A prickled crown
of perspiration marks the helmet on my brow.
At the spires of the kind of church I prefer
not to enter, a carved saint’s outstretched hand
is radiant with bird-deterring spikes. A defiant choir
of beaks begs skyward from the nests set at his feet.
Wildfire smoke, which knows no borders,
casts rumors there will be no further seasons.

Author’s Note

When you announce that you are moving to Michigan, everyone’s full of advice about how to handle the winters. Nobody mentions the muggy summer, mosquitoes probing through your clothes, so sweaty it’s better to bike everywhere instead of walking just to work up some figment of a cooling breeze along the way. And boy, is Ann Arbor a small place to have exes, especially among the queer mushroom foraging community or, say, hypothetically, a poetry MFA . . . but there’s a loveliness as people move around each other in new configurations, kaleidoscope-style. This is a kind of “walking poem” from a seasonal cyclist. It roams about the woods and other cathedrals I haunted, borrowing snippets from conversations around the turning wheel of belovedness, pattern-seeking for circles of growth and decay, be they mycological, social, avian, or atmospheric. Lines from faltering drafts of other poems fell into place here via the cannibal method the poem describes (itself an anecdote recited by a friend) in an associative collaging that came together truer than I could’ve hoped. It’s a love poem to Ann Arbor—the honest love that is in no small measure based on half-joking complaint, as well as gladness for the many sanctuaries I found in that town.