The Distant Sounds of the Paintball War by Erik Kennedy

They’re firing

as if the whole world

is made of ammunition

or at least Ferrymead is

Their arguments

sound like a shaken box

of punctuation marks

A synaesthete might describe the gunshots

as carnation pink

I intellectualise violence

because I know I benefit

from it

The confused team is

being taught difficult lessons by

the angry team

They crawl over and under obstacles

like map lines

I take my anti-anxiety meds

to feel a little more anti-anxious

I see a suited figure fall

before I can hear the cry

I’m hit

____________

Erik Kennedy is the author of the poetry collections Sick Power Trip (2025), Another

Beautiful Day Indoors (2022), and There’s No Place Like the Internet in Springtime (2018),

all with Te Herenga Waka University Press, he co-edited No Other Place to Stand, a

book of climate change poetry from New Zealand and the Pacific (Auckland University

Press, 2022). He lives in Ōtautahi Christchurch in Aotearoa New Zealand.