Nikki-Lee Birdsey

Nikki-Lee Birdsey was born in Piha. She holds an MFA from the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop and a BA from New York University. She has over 30 publications of poetry and prose in the US, UK, Canada and New Zealand, and she is currently a PhD candidate at the International Institute of Modern Letters. Her first book Night As Day was published by VUP in 2019 and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in the U.S.

Notes on the Architecture of Echoes

The diary of listening in / listening back
not just to surveil but to know we’re being surveilled. Hey Siri.
I picked up voting papers today at the makeshift City Council Library.
The light, the sun came out, it shines thru the wall of windows,
patterning the square tiles like a puzzle.

The grey matter of the future. Headphones on: is that the sound of the artist?
Is that the sound of the world clicking + typing thru?
Hey Siri. Corporations + governments listen to us for free
and then sell what they hear
and can’t even take care of their people
that they make money off

I want my own sound-understanding team.
I want to forensic who’s listening in and reverse it.

I wish I could listen like machines do + use it for good,
to make something that helps make people strong
or like fix the highest homelessness rate in the world
which is in this country, with its big wealth and small, manageable population.

The micro + macro scale of things. Hear, speak, be heard. Hear, speak, be heard.
That idea that is a feeling, that there is something underneath sound.

What do we hear if we get closer? What are we really hearing?

I always thought of ears as shells as a child. So delicate. People don’t listen to children.

Hey Siri. What can I help you with?

It’s almost too much. The private message, the personality + intimacy. Too much to hear people’s private voices.
I hang up the phone on a wall—so physical it reminds me of my body.
It makes me feel
it makes me feel exposed, the touch, like I’m doing something.

It reaches my own device, activated by this sonic world.
Hey Siri, go ahead, I’m listening. I’m listening back.

Somehow an image is information that is less intimate now.

Beep. Beep.

The social conditions of itinerant lives. How are you today / it is almost too much.
How cruel to use your language against you and
how this has been happening for so long, for so long. I am ashamed of my country’s panacoustics.
I’m ashamed of my country.

I picked up my voting papers today. Hey Jacinda.
I think about how we can move across our borders easily, and feel good, feel woke,
feel not implicated.
I don’t understand how to feel woke when we broke so much.

I think of Manus Island. I think of Banaba Island, its soil, made of its people’s ancestors,
used to keep New Zealand’s farms alive
until that entire island died.
A moonscape.
I think of our racist refugee policy, amongst the worst in the world.
How this country gets away
with so much.

I’m sure the moon has a sound. We know the moon is cold.
I listen to the sound of someone’s life who cannot cross the border.
The sound’s static feels warm in the dark, galactic theatre.

I’m listening / I’m listening back.

Documentation