Live Encounters Aotearoa New Zealand Poets & Writers March 2026

New Zealand Poets & Writers March 2026

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Live Encounters is a not-for-profit free online magazine that was founded in 2009 in Bali, Indonesia. It showcases some of the best writing from around the world. Poets, writers, academics, civil & human/animal rights activists, academics, environmentalists, social workers, photographers and more have contributed their time and knowledge for the benefit of the readers of:

Live Encounters Magazine (2010), Live Encounters Poetry & Writing (2016), Live Encounters Young Poets & Writers (2019) and now, Live Encounters Books (August 2020).

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Contributors

Gillian Roach - Guest Editorial

Lincoln Jaques

Alexandra Balm

Alexandra Fraser

Andy Fey

Anita Arlov

Barbs Peterson

David Eggleton

Denise Teresa O’Hagan

Edna Heled

Erik Kennedy

Gail Ingram

Jack Ross

Jeffrey Paparoa Holman

Jeremy Roberts

Josiah Morgan

Kaiata Kaitao

Kate Kelly

Kit Willett

Lauren Roche

Michael Giacon

Mike Johnson

Mike Kilpatrick

Montana Sefilino

Piers Davies

Piet Nieuwland

Richard von Sturmer

Siobhan Harvey

Sophia Wilson

Susan Glamuzina

Tim Wilson

Trisha Hanifin

New Zealand Poets & Writers March 2026

Gillian Roach is a Ahuriri Napier poet who won the New Voices — Emerging Poets Competition in 2018 and was runner-up in the Kathleen Grattan Prize for a Sequence of Poems in 2018 and 2019. Her poetry has been widely published, including in Landfall, takahē and Poetry Aotearoa Yearbook. Gillian is a founding member of the Isthmus poets, and has published three collaborative poetry collections with them over the past 9 years. She completed a Master of Creative Writing degree at AUT in 2016, and has also written novels and short stories.

The poem that finds you

I’ve been trying to ‘listen differently’ over the past few months, prompted by a chance remark on Instagram – getting my news from poems today. An idea magpied, like a shiny leaf, from the torrent of news, memes, jokes, and opinions that surges through my awareness daily. Some quick digging led me to the William Carlos Williams poem the comment referenced, it is difficult / to get the news from poems / yet men die miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there. A well-known and often quoted poem, which like so many, I hadn’t come across before.

I’ve always been an avid news consumer, but my sources have changed lately. I’m less likely to pick up a physical newspaper or listen to traditional radio. I read a lot online and enjoy greater access to international news and podcasts. But traditional news, with its fast turn-around and repetitive cycles can feel unsatisfying and voyeuristic. The tyranny of the algorithm means stories (and advertising) are pushed on us, based on what we reveal by our preferences. Slowly our worlds shrink as we receive more of the same.

So, what might change if I turned to my ‘poetry feed’ as an alternative news source, and looked to ‘get the news’ from poems? What might I find in poems, that I could conceivably die miserably without?

The lines flow from the hand unbidden / and the hidden source is the watchful heart

Derek Mahon, Everything is going to be alright

I recently travelled the new Te Ahu a Turanga – Manawatu Highway between Woodville and Palmerston North with my husband and his parents. It’s a trip we’ve all made many times, on the journey between Napier and Wellington, although never quite in this configuration. My husband drove, where once he might have wrestled in the back seat with his brother, or day-dreamed about being singled out from the crowd to sub on for Manchester United. The Glums, as they are known in our family lexicon, counted off familiar landmarks and passed around the fruit jubes. It was the first time they had been on the new road, and they were keen to see where it connected with the existing highway, and how much time it knocked off the trip.

The narrow Manawatu River gorge route was closed permanently in 2017 after a bad slip made the road impassable and, for eight years, drivers used the Saddle Road, a winding route across the Tararua ranges and through a wind farm with splendid views of the region. The new highway, completed in 2025, also takes you over the Tararuas via a more direct route, up close and personal with the graceful, monumental windmills, and flanked by walkers and cyclists using the purpose-built lanes either side. Faster, but less picture-skew, as we all agreed.

A bee zooms, deep amid the warm young grasses. / Startled, the rose / Laughs Robin Hyde, Embrace

In a recent email newsletter from US poet and writer Devin Kelly, he explored Jonathan Aprea’s poem Dial. The first line of Dial reads, Most people make the same piece of art, over / and over, which Kelly says might seem like a rather limiting proposition, but after that the poem ‘takes every turn towards surprise’.

Kelly believes artists revisit the same kind of work, because we are essentially our lives and nothing more. “…we return, again and again, to our obsessions and our wonderings and our feelings and our lives, and we filter our attempt at creation through those lenses.” However, “even in the midst of that sameness, we have the opportunity to approach and wander and stumble and move through the dark in order to revisit that sameness with a bit of difference.”

This might involve offering our attention to different things. Choosing to listen differently. Not to mention the element of surprise in what we encounter. “We cannot predict what will emerge out of the darkness,” he writes.

my sorrowful ones / twice we were told / final boarding call Sophia Wilson, Every Last Drop

“Road trip with the Glums,” someone posted on our family group chat with an eyeraise emoji. “Safe travels and enjoy the charcuterie in the back seat.”

To pass the time on our roadie, we listened to a couple of episodes of Desert Island Discs, a BBC radio programme the 80-year-olds in our car have been tuning in to for more than fifty years. First up was Michael Sheen, whose Welsh lilt and stories of growing up in Port Talbot were particularly relateable to my Welsh father-in-law. We were entertained by Sheen’s father’s late-life career as a Jack Nicholson impersonator. And his grandmother had been a lion-tamer! From a craft perspective, I enjoyed Sheen’s description of the way he steps into character for a role as being akin to a human mixing deck, dialling up and down aspects of his personality and attributes to reflect the person he is playing, recognising always that he himself forms the base material.

The second episode featured Kate Winslet, who holds a special place in New Zealanders’ hearts for her role in the Peter Jackson movie Heavenly Creatures. Winslet came across as forthright and reflective, particularly about her brutal treatment by the British press over her appearance. One of her song choices was Matchstalk Men and Matchstalk Cats and Dogs, which set The Glums singing along, although my husband and I had never heard it before. I loved Winslet’s comment that the children singing on Matchstalk Men had somehow given her permission to sing and dance along too. When the episode ended, I played the song in full and was delighted to find it is about the Manchester artist Lowry, who stayed committed to his unique style despite a poor reception from the critics at the start of his career. Winslet’s refusal to conform to the artificial beauty standards which are held up as the standard for women in the film industry showed a similar commitment to her values.

If for us she arose, / Somewhere, in the pitched deep of our grief, /Crouches our power Amanda Gorman, For Renee Nicole Good

continued overleaf...

As I helped Mark Ulyseas gather poets together for this special New Zealand edition of Live Encounters, I wondered what news would emerge from our poems. Would any local headlines from the New Zealand summer feature? Destructive storms, the tragic loss of life in a landslide at Mount Maunganui, health portal data breaches? Or would someone have picked up on the international headlines, such as the killing of young poet and mother of three, Renee Good, on the 7th January by an ICE agent in Minnesota, USA? Good was part of our wider creative community and the rapid poetic response after her death reached me almost instantly, half a world away.

The impulse to react to current events in the moment is understandable, that whitehot response to shock and disbelief. In 2023, I took part in a reading for National Poetry Day and when selecting the work to read, I realised all my recent poems were, in fact, pandemic poems. Yet I had texted my daughter when Auckland was locked down due to Covid 19, that I was ‘over’ all the Covid poems. There were so many and, read in the moment, it felt like they simply added to the overwhelming media noise. I had added to the noise. While my poems were not consciously written as a response to immediate current events, they couldn’t help but be steeped in the atmosphere of that time.

Language must choose its moment to be in the world

Mike Oliver Johnson, the right moment

It is far easier to access poetry now than it has ever been. I’m connected to poems in a myriad of ways – through social media, blogs, podcasts, radio programmes and, of course, traditional journals, books and live events. In the current media environment, it’s simple and almost instantaneous to share poetry and the actual news informs many poems, whether the immediate flash-fried response or a more slowcooked version.

However, the poem that finds you on any given day will more than likely be unrelated to current events. The poem that finds you might show or tell, zoom in or out. It could be from 200 or 2000 years ago and still shed light or colour or nuance for the reader. Modern or ancient, a poem can encompass universal fears or joys.

I have been getting my news from poems these past few weeks and my news has been richer, funnier, quirkier and more human as a result. Poems are agile and democratic. They slip through in many guises. In songs or on peanut butter labels. In bathroom stalls and on bedroom walls. They laugh in the face of algorithms and filters, vigorously sharing voices and ideas others might silence.

“He painted Salford’s smokey tops / On cardboard boxes from the shops” Brian and Michael, Matchstalk Men and Matchstalk Cats and Dogs

As we listened to Desert Island Discs on our road trip with the Glums, the poems sneaked in. The earworm of the Matchstalk Men. Michael Sheen’s lilting description of his father turning down a gig to impersonate Jack Nicholson, because Jack would be there. “It’s his night, Michael.”

What ‘news’ were they bringing? Small hugs of familiarity and connection. A little girl and her sister, entranced by the children singing on a record, and set free to dance up a storm. A middle-aged man affectionately skewering his Dad’s glorious pomposity, in what was clearly a well-rehearsed family anecdote. These two acclaimed actors were firmly planted in the base material of their own lives. It was just the dials and faders of the human mixing desk they pushed up and down.

You work with what you have, was my news for that day, while staying open to any new magic. While the direction of travel may be the same, there are always new roads. In my own work, road trips, family dynamics, and transitions are subjects I return to often. Fair territory for poetry and, in combination, a chowder the consistency of emulsion paint, as thick as they serve at Café 88 in Woodville.

Black Ice, Napier-Taupo Rd

1.

These bags of blood these blisters my cargo talking of love and its opposite indifference I’d explore this further but I’m alert for ice laid down in transparent sheets almost undetectable interleaved with wet road

Cars and trucks ahead behind coordinate in neutral tones hushed by snow — follow the line of the car in front will the tyres to stick maintain the delusion of safety the heated car our cotton clothes

2.

My kid plays metal an instrumental jazz-like intense with rapid time shifts — no demon-screaming at my request — seeks comment on its virtuosity as grey rain congeals and jerks in syncopated frenzy off the windscreen

How apt Norwegian Metal for an arctic scene Te Pohue iced like an errant Nordic village yet I long for something sly deadpan an antidote

3.

I’ve never liked the Mohaka bridge the detachment required suspension of doubt for a successful transition

4. Does it matter the song played was Brazilian? My original connection propels this poem a minute’s research shows Norwegian Black metal shunned as Satanic misanthropic a dark currency marbled within the story of good children fluffy snow

A familiar bond on hitting the salted tarmac slides to a fine edge susceptible to ice as bridges and doubly so

Energy Thief

The act of getting on a bus breaks you down, the girl says. We’ve all contorted, squeezing down the aisle and into our seats. Now we reassemble.

I know from her pale, quarter-moon face, she’ll elicit my sad rejection tale somewhere before Palmerston North. She’s that hungry. I tug my frayed skirt over my thighs, jam my formerly desired shiny knees hard against the woven magazine pocket.

Student? She picks up my notebook, flips through. Angles towards me, borrowing my light. Writer?

Sure. Every assumption, I will say yes. Let her feast on imagination. I am not together right now.

Drive to the conditions

Your folks bounce up and down in the back seat of the Hyundai as you hit the uneven surface of Aokautere Rd and your mum says, Ouf, he always wanted to be a rally driver. I don’t think you hear, or what you hear is That’s my boy.

You drive fast when they’re in the car too, something I’ve only discovered now we drive your parents.

I used to think you were in such a hurry. Remember how you skimmed the curves of the Manawatu river on the old route through the gorge? On a clear day we could see the architecture holding up the next bit of road, or I could from out over the side above the water.

Lincoln Jaques is a Tāmaki Makaurau based writer. His poetry, fiction, travel essays and book reviews have appeared in collections in Aotearoa and internationally, including Landfall, Live Encounters, The Spinoff Friday Poem, Poetry Aotearoa Yearbook, Mayhem and takahē. He was shortlisted for the 2023 inaugural I Te Kokoru At The Bay hybrid manuscript awards and was the Runner-Up in the 2022 International Writers’ Workshop Kathleen Grattan Prize for a Sequence of Poems. He has been selected for the international 2025 Best Small Fictions anthology from Alternating Current Press.

Out Walking

Remember those haze-fire nights

The light from the full moon stinging

Our eyes the reflection of stars

Staining our eyelids full of tears when we were young not like now

When our skin has turned from yellow-gold

To nicotine stains our sadness at growing

Old but at least we are together still here

Under the exposed moon shedding on hills

Making us scared of tree-shapes and ghost rocks

Laughing together feeling a braille mortality

Knowing all is illusory and each year is another layer

Removed by a drunken archaeologist with a blunt Trowel the burden of those decades like a child

On a metronome swing being pushed by an invisible Force waiting for us to fall which Will no doubt be soon.

Discovering Bukowski in Graham Brazier’s Living Room

We were still young. Poetry was yet to awaken itself within me, like a lotus bloom from the pile of deep shit that was my life, in those days.

The only thing keeping me going was the books I read at the time. The Stranger. Down and Out in Paris and London. The few friends that hadn’t self-harmed into penal colonies or hanged themselves

or been killed in drunken car jams. When we eventually came out from the haze of those personal growth years there was one friend, she worked in the music industry, making sure the touring groups got their smack and the groupies were hidden in rear doors, she housesat

Graham Brazier’s villa in Mt Eden, still a colonial wasteland at the time, late nineties, the rock’n’roll paradise strangled all the heyday of kiwi pub bands. She invited me over (me not realising it was Graham Brazier’s house). I sat in his loungeroom, on a settee where he sat, on the polished floorboards, his memorabilia hanging from the walls, leaning in the dusty corners, photographs of him with the famous. We drank and my friend smoked cigarettes (inside Graham Brazier’s house!) as she told me stories about Graham Brazier’s notorious drinking and drug taking and all this time his songs were playing on the stereo.

He was an avid book collector, Graham Brazier. He grew up with his mother on Dominion Road where she owned a bookstore. They lived above. My friend recently sent me a photo she had of her and Graham Brazier standing in his mother’s shop, locked in an embrace, the Penguin First Editions piled up on the shelf. In the loungeroom where I now sat, I looked at his impressive library.

And there, I plucked down, The Last Night of the Earth Poems, thinking, what New Age shite is all this? (It was the nineties). The book dropped open on a short poem about a luger, about someone placing the luger to their temple, about the sound of birds being frightened by the click of the safety catch. And I was stunned. All of our lives were like a safety catch clicking off, waiting for the silence that followed, hoping it would be filled in.

Graham, I never met you. But I sat on your settee in your beautiful house in Mt Eden, and you will never know it but you introduced me to Bukowski on that fateful night. I remember driving home, listening to the songlist of your life: Latin Lover and Blue Lady and Billy Bold. And Bukowski tucked into the back of my mind.

You saved me.

Setting Moon

for Pauline Thompson, 1942-2012

The last time I saw her, I stopped on the way, bought Birds of Paradise from a florist on the main road near her house. Traffic reflected in plate-glass seemed to melt and move, although that may have been my tears.

I knew her not as my generation, but through her daughter, we were close friends once, having survived the embattled high school years together. We’d lost touch. Then I heard Pauline wanted to see me.

The Birds of Paradise sat in the back seat aching to fly through the open window. When I arrived she was crippled in pain. I searched the room for her tablets. The house she now lived in was different but her artworks froze us together in time. The same style I always remembered: her Pitcairn Island paintings, The Suzanne Aubert series. Transforming colour in the world. I thought back then

to her studio, where I was sometimes invited (discovering later that this was a rare privilege). She’d discuss with me art, poetry, literature it took many years to rediscover what I was a part of, in those days, in that top room like a Paris Salon, with our own Gertrude Stein learning more than I ever would in a classroom staring at half-finished canvases, while the dream of being a writer was discoloured by the uncollected consciousness of blue collar disapproval.

In that last visit, I’m not sure she really knew me. I placed the Birds of Paradise in a vase I found under the kitchen sink. We sat watching the late afternoon soaps until her Carer came, a small nervous woman who eyed me suspiciously. That time haunts me still, as I got up, said goodbye the waters rushing at the plate-glass windows, shadows smothering our breathing, the pain increasing within her, walking out past the miniatures opening to expansive narratives of her full life, knowing we’d soon lose another.

Alexandra writes poems and short stories. She received several awards and fellowships, including the Kate Edger Postdoctoral Award from the University of Auckland (2016). Her work was published in Aotearoa New Zealand and overseas. Her latest projects include translating her poetry volume Transformation (Scripta Manent, 2023) into Romanian and completing her novel in progress, A Secret History of the Metamodern. She lives in South Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand, where she teaches at a local high school.

Hurray. Ode to joy and other potentialities

Motto: This is supposed to be a paradigm of presence why does then absence haunt my days?

Hurray to the poem that hasn’t been written. Hurray to the song that hasn’t been sung. Hurray to the thinking not yet articulated Hurray to the work that hasn’t been wrought.

Hurray to the child who has never been chided Hurray to the parent who has known no pain.

Hurray to the morning that’s yet to be broken. Hurray to the world that’s still to be born.

*

You’ve promised me a world with no hate, nor misconceptions. You dreamt of a self – bright, without complaints.

You lifted the veil off for just a brief moment, and left me to yearn for for years afterwards

Alexandra Fraser lives in Tāmaki Makaurau, Aotearoa NZ. She has been writing poetry for over 20 years and has been published in magazines and anthologies both in NZ and overseas. She has also published two collections of poetry. Her poetry usually focusses on connections, because in a world full of power-driven disconnections and cruelties, people still connect with love for one another. That is our human strength and our survival mechanism and worth giving words to.

We didn’t sign up for this

Leaves have fallen the winter is long grey-threaded skies and days brood over hours on screen pixilated faux-families roots lie quiescent in rain-soaked ground waiting to wake with the rising mercury

a winged messenger of the gods carrying cherry blossom wine-red magnolia buds bursting the crackle of a happy fortune cookie but decayed fallen branches despair gone rancid the footsteps that are not heard for that we will not answer the door will not sign for the package will not take it inside cut through the wrappings made of old news the print-outs of lost poems frayed faded ribbons holding the darknesses together

rather we will look from our window observing out-of-season daffodils dead birds and the crying time

Salama

Salama Mama ino vaovao? - what’s new?

Your letter fragments drop into my day

Yesterday we made timber boxing for concrete columns

I slice the rind of two lemons into fine strips sift flour break eggs

We’ve been mixing lots of concrete back and forth buckets of sand aggregate water

Push paragraphs around cut and paste change words check invisibles

Today I built scaffolding from eucalyptus logs

Meet the architect add a window choose the doors

Here we have bucket showers from well-water

Shop forget re-usable bags remember wine go to yoga

Had a lovely afternoon in the shade hacksawing rebar to measured lengths

Hand-stands elude me my ardha chandrasana satisfies

We went for a walk to find chameleons rested under a lychee tree were given bananas and a live chook

I walk by the mangroves remember us there together?

Before the sun rose the landscape looked like a Colin McCahon painting

I miss you

Now the world is wet very too wet to work

I pick basil the last of the beans

We dug trenches around our tents the toilets had flooded fly maggots had crawled out

Tidy the pot plants bromeliads remind me of you spiky tough beautiful

A special dinner we had zebu kebabs fried cassava balls and salad green vegetables at last

The paper is thick cream almost waxy not scented no hint of your Gucci

Or the slightest whiff of concrete dust just faint hint of lemon from my fingers

A lullaby of chirruping fruit bats crickets

You have used a fountain pen wrapped your voice in ink

Parcelled and stamped it so my eyes can be my ears

I hear your soft excited lilt stroke your words

It’s beautiful here

Andy Fey (he/they) is a queer, disabled Pākehā working in the tertiary education sector, with professional and research interests in access, inclusion and belonging. Andy is an activist and educator, using poetry and zines as a mechanism to connect with people.

Playing with words

The poet plays with words like dolls

Popping their heads off

Giving them atrocious haircuts

Sometimes (scandalous!) making them kiss

Their notebooks are a cluttered playbox

Stanzas packed naked and promiscuous among dismantled couplets

Unsettling in their careless intimacy

Acceptable in abstract

Disquieting in practice

Neither play nor creation

Bear scrutiny without discomfort

Right to repair

House on the ridge

Population: three sewing machines, one overlocker, two craftspeople

The Educator takes on Aspects

Spider

Tailorbird

Weaver ant

Nests in a tangle of yarn

Fabricates wonders

Shirts savaged by the carpet sharks

Mended visibly, joyfully, holes transformed into sunbursts, insects, splashes of whimsy hit critical mass and become invisible again “I thought you bought it like that”

Packages shipped from faraway lands

Spill their treasures

Arcane glyphs, slabs of rock we tricked into thinking, clever mechanical devices

The Engineer shucks JoyCons from their shells

Reveals the meat precision surgery on the circulatory system

Amputating a faulty component

Grafting in an upgrade

Better than brand new

“If you can fix it, you can keep it” precedes a procession of the resurrected: Laptops frankensteined into function; A chimera of a bicycle, a medley of disparate donors furnish components, frame and rims and saddle in mismatched marriage; An ailing espresso machine, silver, hulking, flayed and strewn about the kitchen, Lines cleared and coils polished, reborn Hissing and spitting greetings each morning (Rescues tend to be lovebugs)

Perhaps a sense of kinship Draws us to repair broken things Rather than discard them.

Defiance too-

My needle, his toolbox, our labour Against the pressure to consume, Drain dry, abandon the husks. Restoration of hoperestoration as hope, enacted. Every stitch and screw rebelling Against a throwaway world.

Anita Arlov is the child of Croatian parents displaced after WW2. She lives in Tamaki Makaurau/Auckland. She writes poems and very short prose, hosts workshops and occasionally judges short form fiction. Anita grew up enjoying the cadence of language but didn’t begin writing till mid-life in response to the Canterbury earthquake in 2011. Anita has won the Divine Muses Poetry Competition, the NZ Flash Fiction Competition and has placed second in the Bath Flash Fiction Competition. She is widely anthologised, including Bonsai: Best small stories from Aotearoa/New Zealand; Broadsheet; New Flash Fiction Review; takahē magazine; Best Small Fictions and Best Microfiction. She convened a team that ran the NZ Poetry Conference & Festival, a successful three-day celebration of all things poetry including vispo, wordcore, sung poems, cine-poetics and workshops, involving 200 poets and arts activists. For ten years she managed popular spoken word event Inside Out Open Mic for Writers. In 2022 she was selected an Ockham Collective Arts Resident. “I like to conflate arresting facts with fiction, memory and emotion. Once I get a fix on a tone, I dive in and commit to getting out alive.” – Anita

This branch

a tree pulls me up in a friend’s living room a blossom tree branch seven feet high in a clear jar of water he placed it last winter after the big storm snapped it like a song a local version of the master release

I should praise him for his care no florist’s fanfare no toot-toot parade as moving it lifts like faith

all the spent riot ─ the dried flowers from spring –he’s kept too swept close to the jar a pink hem a Cubist completion yes, it blossomed well in just water now look: a summer mass of green

Electric Language

I couldn’t sleep for the voices calling me I had to go Andes foothills were druggily stunning like clapotis waves haze fogged me like a sulky guardian angel step by step all sixteen hundred steps up the chiselled cordillera the mesa hit me like a hot kiss from a skeleton lover I had been here before condors flying galleons dipped and soared I couldn’t sleep for the voices when night fell

shadows hung like marionettes mist was an ice hug I belonged here the moon was a clench a torch song diva mountain peaks took shape reefing the citadel like a hoop of purple priests why do we hammer and sunder? I couldn’t sleep for the voices dawn struck like a gold axe blue hummingbirds appeared neon as flint sparks their wings beat a fluid buzz like static like language one smelt of lanolin counting weft another crackled like a fire one was poxy white with ash one was humming peeling papaya one groaned bent double one was silent wed to a shovel I couldn’t sleep for the voices

Finny

Pick your way.

Tangled through seaweed and dinosaur driftwood are loops of flat blue strap: that waterproof package twine made from fibreglass. Ghost gear tossed back by ocean to land on sand ─ silica ─ its origin.

What shift what threat propelled the first fish to swap ocean so elastic in those eons for open air?

To haul themselves along on bony lobe fins, buccal pumping holing up

─ our ancestor Finny and her whanau ─ in marshes valleys caves? Next minute: legs. Lungs. Warm blood. Teats.

Motion. It thrums in our bones like swamp rock. We strain to unlock the next level. Make gains butterfly-scale. Bear loss like an iceberg calving. Life is dance life is armament life is arms out on loop. We orbit. We ambit.

The Māori know. Rangi the sky and Papa the earth opened their eyes to cling in darkness. Their children imagining light undid them, birthing the world.

When will it be that we friable humans abandon land for ocean? Or fire up into outer space the seminal aspiration?

It’s a trip hazard. What if I coil it from elbow to thumb-valley like yarn take it home what then? I’m growing fearful of the burning final issue.

Barbs Peterson lives in the suburb of Māngere Bridge, on the cusp of South Auckland, where much of her writing is inspired by the village community and scenic surroundings. She has been published in several Auckland Writers anthologies as well as “Ramble On: A celebration of walking in New Zealand” by Z.R. Southcombe, and is a regular face at Poetry Live nights. Her writing aims to encompass an introspective journey through the experiences of loss, love, heartbreak, joy, bleakness, magic and hope.

Interlude

I don’t know what to say. So I hold the illusion of a hand and I tell you about the weather, that it’s going to rain hard so you can assure me you’ll drive safely. I know I won’t get the hints you’ll send me in the shape of a winking star or the gilded contours of the moon. I stroke your ghost-face, pale as paper, soft as a feather. I remind you to eat. I remind you of the days we swung our legs fast and careless over the rotting plank bridge because just for one second we felt immortal; the rushing water below an eternity waiting to engulf us, the future, dust-mites carrying important secrets between the warped pages of old books. I squeeze your phantom fingers; hold them to my fears. I show you pictures reminding you of a happier world, a place that wanted you to live forever. I don’t know what to say. My heart fluttering like a bird my lips touch your listening ear breathing words through translucent skin Goodbye; floating out the window now, into thin air; I’ll see you tomorrow.

There Is No Cure For Feeling Too Much

Somewhere, in an attic you can hear a baby crying but they’re telling you don’t listen, just sleep.

As if the cries wouldn’t haunt your dreams. As if you wouldn’t sleepwalk, searching following the wailing like a starving waif hypnotised by the scent of food. The warning light on your dashboard is the problem, they tell you. Take these pills and it will stop. Put this blindfold on.

The baby cries on and on, and you’ll keep searching, searching through cluttered rooms ignoring a radio voice that tells you to keep calm and carry on. You can feel her sucking on her fist, you can see the blister form on your own delicate skin and they’re blocking the attic stairs now; as the screams get louder, they’re telling you the problem is having eyes and ears, and a soul.

You Say The Utopia Will Never Come

Meet the new year same as the old year. We can’t go a day without bleeding, somehow; the bright new lambs wool already stained with loss and chaos and alarm. How do we still gaze at a star with hope, when it is somehow, centuries old, has seen so much, has died, and still (and STILL) carries on shining? This fresh, hot cup of coffee sat forgotten, neglected, went cold. Still wringing out the storms from summer we hang the latest tragedy out to dry. The utopia may never come but morning will, again and again meeting the sorrows of yesterday with a firm, faithful handshake.

David Eggleton lives in Ōtepoti Dunedin and was the Aotearoa New Zealand Poet Laureate between August 2019 and August 2022. He is a former Editor of Landfall and Landfall Review Online as well as the Phantom Billstickers Cafe Reader. His The Wilder Years: Selected Poems, was published by Otago University Press in 2021 and his collection Respirator: A Laureate Collection 2019 -2022 was published by Otago University Press in March 2023. He is a co-editor of Katūīvei: Contemporary Pasifika Poetry from Aotearoa New Zealand, published by Massey University Press in 2024. His poetry collection Lifting the Island was published by Red Hen Press in Los Angeles, California in September 2025.

Sounder

Leviathan breached from shrouded waves seeks albatross worlds and mislaid moons. Epiphanies of parrots skim through treetops.

Hoisted up out of the water to blow a guffaw, whale bulwark goes slapping and wallowing against plastered sky above submarine chasms.

A wall slides past, on extended gliding flukes, pursuing the force of a waterboarding mouth, and the big shadowy tongue speaking volumes.

Bioluminous swizzles bloom in spectral blue. Lightning forks strike plankton phosphorescence lifting on a coastal surge of seahorse currents.

The ocean coils are so fluent they drag tree trunks in their rip far out, then run up a cliff face, to flip and crash back, swamping beach pebbles.

The bob of a fur seal’s dark head snouts from bull kelp to ride surf’s whip-crack in. Sharp winds churn gobbets of foam on sand.

Uncanny Weather

Heaven’s heights resound to waiata. Cicadas lasso noon’s heat-haze. A tūī trills like a manic doorbell.

The carpetbagger who parachuted in is got at with slingshot and pitchfork. From the rest-home, bring the coffin.

Social exquisites debunk fake Gothic. The city of car sales pops the lock. Swimming pools fill with vape smoke.

Fiordland walkers are guided by voices. Existence goes on in tight-knit places. Some take to kayaking mountain rapids.

Some run for redemption towards the hills. Some lunge for oxygen on an icy peak. A mud-pool wrestler twangs the elastic.

Rugby’s won on the wobbly fields of Chur. Enter the same old losers and winners, to explain it all with a chart of the weather.

Kīlauea, Hawai’i

When the akua, Pele, is blowing hot, garlands of fire garnish her coasts. Her magma hisses dragon-like, her red eye-holes blaze flower-bright. Snow is sprinkled above rainforest, a canopy crown of white blossom. Great scroll-works of fern shelter chandeliers of orchids, beside lava folds that shine in the wind and sun. Springs wink and burst with prismatic bubbles. The volcano smoulders with ashy breath. Pupualenalena the Dog-spirit whines from a rock, and ghosts gleam from smoking fissures. Magma bulges as a black satin mass, a solid river, a surface weathered and bumpy but smooth. Break it open, and you see where taffy lava has hardened into layers; it splinters, brittle, full of air bubbles. Now along verges of cracked asphalt roads around where Kīlauea slumbers, hanging wisps of dried lava flutter in the wind to tell the whole island is alive; and when it stirs again, and fire surges through vents to plunge into the boiling sea, sending up multiple plumes of steam, there will be wave-slaps from other islands; there will be whales, swimming for dear life.

Denise Teresa O’Hagan has a Master of Creative Writing from AUT, a Botany Degree and several postgrads in various subjects. She writes both poetry and fiction and has had poems published in Fresh Ink, NZ Poetry Society’s Anthology, ‘a fine line’, takahē, Tarot, Fast Fibres, The Blue Nib and Live Encounters Poetry. She is currently working on several novels in historical and contemporary fiction. She enjoys learning and practicing languages including Spanish, French, Portugues and Italian as well as travelling to places rich in history and culture. Much of her travel has inspired her writing.

The Pissing Evil

Adeline bolted upright in bed then fell back onto her firm mattress. Nightmares and near bedwetting had descended onto her like a plague. Her iron bed frame creaked. Saturday morning had dawned, and the sun’s weak determined rays clawed at the heavy velvet drapes. She buried her cheek in the plush duck down pillow and groaned, ignoring her bladder that demanded she get up. The gold brocade eiderdown slipped off as she curled up against the morning chill. The pale blue of her floral bedroom wallpaper and minute white roses that formed a chain under the ornate architraves appeared in the dim hue. Charlotte Kerr-Taylor her best friend at the new Morningside School popped into her head. She smiled and rolled over, staring at the plaster ceiling, its intricate white patterns like an elaborate wedding cake.

The first proper school in the district had opened last summer, 10 January 1870, a date she’d never forget. Adeline was thrilled to now have the opportunity to sit in a classroom, with slate and chalk as opposed to having Miss Wainwright, the governess, take the long daily trek from her tiny flat above the Graham and Company Drapery in Queen Street to teach her arithmetic, French and spelling in the parlour. Excitement tingled inside her at the thought of getting up early every day to ride in the buggy down Whau Rd amongst the stone fences and the rolling hills full of sheep and cows, to School Road in Kingsland. The Mount Albert Highway District Board of Trustees had been in favour of opening an official school. She had heard her parents discuss the matter, that for the many newly arrived farmers in the district, an education for their children was high on their moral code of priorities, even for girls.

Up until now, most of the children of the district had received instruction from Reverend Alexander French at the Cabbage Tree Swamp School in the Methodist Chapel. Adeline pulled up the eiderdown. She hadn’t had the misfortune to attend but she’d heard that the planks they laid across rocks for seats were entirely uncomfortable, not to mention the harsh nature of the teaching instruction. She shivered.

continued overleaf...

© Denise Teresa O’Hagan

The dark velvet curtains, backlit from the dawn light, glowed. She jumped out of bed as the need to use the lavatory took on an urgency and tiptoed barefoot to the water closet. Warm smells and bustle streamed into the passage from the scullery as the cook prepared breakfast. Adeline crept past the kitchen and down the hall to the small room on the back porch, her white calico nightdress flowing out behind. Her need to go privy had come with greater frequency of late and had become most annoying. Must stop drinking so much water, she thought as she lowered herself onto the wooden seat. Her mind wandered. They had arrived at the homestead on the hill in the country town of Mt Albert just five short years ago. She had been eight when they took that dreadful journey across the sea. The memories of torturous furls of white water and swells on a disease-ridden ship with ailing passengers floundering all over the deck, made her shrink. She had sought the fresh air on deck to the stinking berths below, where the wind and birds blew free.

She tore a square of newsprint off the wire hook. She’d used the chamber pot three times last night. She frowned at the ridiculous frequency. Standing, she yanked on the metal chain. As the water gurgled down the pipes, she ignored the thirst that welled up in her parched throat.

She scuttled back to her bedroom. She’d have to watch out, or Mama would start to notice and ask questions, and she hated more than anything being grilled about her whys and wherefores. Staying invisible was by far the safer option.

Soon the family would sit down to breakfast. She could smell the freshly made pikelets. Her mouth watered at the thought of them with fresh cream and homemade strawberry jam. She’d sit quietly and listen while Mama and Papa discussed the day’s schedule and the current news, how the gold boom was waning and how the new Premier William Fox was faring. Nobody paid any heed to well behaved children at the dinner table. Mama always said children should be seen and not heard.

The ink well on her wooden desk shimmered moodily in the dim light of the classroom. Adeline slouched on her elbows as sleepiness caught her unawares.

Smack. The leather strap snapped onto the edge of the desk behind her and Adeline’s bottom left the seat, sending her ink pen clattering across the polished kauri floor.

‘Wake up Miss Adeline Battley!’

The stern features of Miss French appeared at Adeline’s side as the teacher strutted from behind down the aisle. She eyed Adeline, her brows crossed disapprovingly.

Adeline sat stiff as a washboard. Her wide eyeballs followed the teacher’s movements, while her insides cramped in fright.

‘Insolence comes in many forms and falling asleep in class rates highly on that list, my dear.’ Miss French leaned her palms flat on Adeline’s desk, her face so close Adeline could smell stiff starch and musty mothballs.

‘Yes, Miss.’ Adeline said, eyes facing forward.

‘Petulance and laziness are sins of the devil. There will be none of that nonsense in my class, do you hear?’ With a sudden jerk, Miss French swivelled around, her heavy skirts swishing. She strode to the front of the class, the strap dangling down at her side.

Adeline exhaled. She glanced at the strap. She had not had the misfortune to experience the offensive object and hoped she never would. Though she had seen it in action often enough. Jonathan had made a mistake with his addition yesterday and the tan leather had come out like an extension of Miss French’s arm to mete out his punishment. Being a perfectionist, the shame of such wrath would not only wound Adeline’s hand but also her pride. The maligned children hid their red-welted hands in their pockets or under their woollen blazers, their quivering lips less stiff than their aspirations to stay strong.

continued overleaf...

She stared at a shard of light on the wall and began to wonder if going to school was such a good idea after all. Their ex-governess, the spinster Miss Wainwright, also formal and proper, had always arrived in her floor length navy calico dress, buttoned all the way up to the neck, with her hair pulled back into a bun so tight it would bring tears to one’s eyes. But Miss Wainwright had been as soft as the housemaid’s feather duster.

Adeline would sit in the window seat of the parlour and read Charles Dickens while the sun streamed in on them. Miss Wainwright would remind her to pull up her socks and mind her “ps and qs”, and recite her je suis, tu es, il est, nous sommes, vous êtes, ils sont until Joseph brought the cow in for milking, but she would never indulge in anything more violent than the shooing of a fly.

Adeline stared at the blackboard, her back stiff, hesitant to move an inch. But with all the stress and anxiety, a dizziness overwhelmed her. Then nausea filled her throat, the taste of vinegar strong in her mouth. Panicking, she took deep breaths to abate the sensations. She didn’t want to draw further attention to herself.

The room began to spin, like the globe on the axis in geography lessons. She put her head in her hands. Then without warning and before she could prevent it, she had thrown up on the slate atop her desk. The ink well filled to overflowing and dripped onto the floor. She grimaced at the sight as she wiped her chin with the back of her hand and looked up to see every eye in the room fixed on her, their mouths open behind sniggering hands. A red-hot flush swept through her like a volcanic eruption; she fainted and fell off her chair onto the hard wooden floor.

A damp flannel wiped across her brow. She reached out her arms, her eyes slits. Then she saw Charlotte and Miss French leaning over her.

Adeline tried to prop herself up on one elbow, but wooziness made her fall back onto the hard pillow of the sick bay.

‘There, there, Adeline. Lay back, no point in pushing the cart too hard. You have taken quite a spin,’ said Miss French leaning closer, her brow crossed, the gentle tone of her voice quite unfamiliar.

‘Your mother is on the way,’ said Charlotte. She glared at Adeline, her wide eyes sending a warning that she’d be wise to stay quiet and do as she was told.

Adeline lay back. What on earth was all this about? Dizziness, a hounding thirst, needing to use the lavatory all the time and as her mother had pointed out, her dresses were quite hanging off her of late. And yet she was always hungry and ate everything that was put in front of her. She sighed. And this devastating display of fainting and vomiting in class, it would just not do. She would get quite the reputation as the sickly child. She sneaked a quick peek at Charlotte out of the corner of her eye.

‘Shhhh, shhhh,’ Charlotte patted her hand, her face full of sympathy.

Adeline squinted, puzzled. Why was she being shushed? Then, horrified, she saw what the fuss was about. At that moment, Adeline knew something must be terribly wrong with her. She jerked upright. Urine was dripping off the starched sheet onto the floor, and Adeline had not even been aware that she had relieved herself. ‘Dear God, whatever is the matter with me?’ she said, her hands covering her face.

continued overleaf...

The whitewashed walls of the hospital room zoomed in and out. Adeline tried to focus but nothing stayed fixed like the tintype images in frames on top of the piano at home. She spied her mother propped in a chair next to the bed, her burgundy gown cascading around her. Surely, she must be angry for Adeline’s failings. She wanted to say sorry for this imprudent invasion into their lives but couldn’t muster up an apology, even though this misfortune must be her fault. She’d been taught one should never blame anyone else for one’s failings under any circumstances.

Adeline’s forehead creased like the neatly folded top sheet as she searched Mama’s face for an inkling of mercy. But her frame stayed as stiff as the maid’s ironing board. A nervous giggle escaped from Adeline’s constrained throat. Fortunately, it emerged as a squeaky cough, quite permitted when confined to a hospital bed in broad daylight.

Mama stood to full height and began fluffing her pillows and pulling up the covers, as if she was the matron. Adeline blinked, taken aback with the attention.

‘You’re going to be fine,’ she said, not looking at Adeline. ‘Doctors aren’t always right by any means, don’t know what they’re talking about, just talking gibberish…diabetes mellitus…what’s that anyway, some fandangle disease? The pissing evil. No cure…my goodness, what do they know? Not to mention the talk of sweet urine. What next! I’ll get Richard in here and he’ll tell them what oh, and before you know it, they’ll be treating you for the flu and sending you home like any good doctor would for hard working God-fearing citizens.’

Adeline blinked, unaccustomed to all this attention, let alone such a display of emotion from her mother. More curious still was when Mama reached under the covers and held her hand. The unfamiliar soft warmth made Adeline tingle inside, the experience rather pleasant. She didn’t know what to make of it all. Her glazed eyes searched her mother’s softened face. Then blackness descended over her again, as if someone had blown out the candle.

continued overleaf...

Edna Heled is an artist, art therapist, counsellor and travel journalist living in Auckland. She studied Film & TV, Visual Arts, Art Therapy (MA) and Psychology (BA Hons). In the last ten years she has been writing in different forms including short stories, poetry, flash, travel articles and non-fiction. She is published in NZ, Australia, USA, UK and more.

Mama-War

A female wolf with multiple teats breastfeeding myriad babies fostering infants with sweet maternal juice saturated with righteousness splattered with sprinkles of courage and bravery a ravenous wolf nourished by eager sucks of tender newborn lips to produce eternal springs of tar-milk granting permission to horror commanding the halos enhancing fortitude promises that every war-murderer each man who marches to battle to prowl for enemies with prey-seeking jaws to sow terror in cold blood to kill the other to make a stranger unknown woman a grieving bereaved mother will forever remain

The Heroic Son apple of his mother’s eye

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, and he co-edited No Other Place to Stand, a book of climate change poetry from Aotearoa and the Pacific (Auckland University Press, 2022). His poems, stories, and criticism have been published in places like Anthropocene, berlin lit, Cordite, FENCE, Los Angeles Review of Books, PN Review, Poetry, The Poetry Review, Rabbit, Threepenny Review, and the TLS, as well as across New Zealand. He is the poetry editor of takahē and an adjunct fellow in English at the University of Canterbury. Originally from New Jersey, he lives in Ōtautahi Christchurch.

The New Townhouses

The new townhouses hit 50 degrees inside on 20 degree days. That’s hot enough to talk about frying an egg on the floor while actually getting heatstroke. What would you do with an egg you fried on the floor anyway? A forlorn floor egg with its memories of dust and dead skin? The heatstroke is the more interesting problem. The heatstroke is where the personal meets the political, where thermoregulation and building regulations are brought into the same space and not let out—the issues are kept in by big, unopenable floor-to-ceiling windows that look clean and premium in the rendering and really let you take advantage of the late light that saturates this locale in summer. If you threw a brick through the big window you’d be enacting individual change and not system change, and you’re the kind of person who, when presented with the facts, goes away to superintend their life and then, in the middle of lunch or a conversation, up and says: right, how many bricks and how many windows.

A Summer So Hot It Makes You Suspicious of Everything

I was one of those children who was never afraid of monsters, just things like fire and war. What did I know about fire? Only what I had read— that it consumes everything. What did I know about war? Again, only what I had read— that it steals everything. And what did I know about monsters? I had heard from them before in their own words, and I wasn’t impressed.

Gail Ingram (tangata Tiriti, she, her) writes from the Port Hills of Ōtautahi Christchurch Aotearoa New Zealand and is author of three collections of poetry. Her latest, anthology (n.) a collection of flowers (Pūkeko Publications 2024) weaves poetry and botanical and mountain art. Her second collection Some Bird (Sudden Valley Press 2023) was selected for best books 2024 by The New Zealand Listener. Contents Under Pressure (Pūkeko Publications 2019) is set in the aftermath of the Christchurch earthquakes. Her work has been widely published in local and international journals and anthologies, such as Poetry New Zealand, Landfall, Atlanta Review, The Spinoff, Cordite Poetry Review and Barren Magazine. Awards include winning the Caselberg (2019) and New Zealand Poetry Society (2016) international poetry prizes and being placed or shortlisted for many others including the 2025 Fish Poetry Prize. She has edited for NZ Poetry Society’s flagship magazine a fine line, Flash Frontier: An Adventure in Short Fiction and takahē. She teaches at Write On School for Young Writers, holds a Master of Creative Writing (Distinction) and, in 2025, received a residency at Robert Lord House in Dunedin.

A song for Tinā

we knew it was coming, her daughter under the rubble, under the chest, stopping the [song]

trauma both slows and speeds the heart, a woman flees her job, can’t open her mouth in [song]

the girl at the bus stop is fair, that Canterbury fair; no matter blood looks darker on skin, gets under the [song]

male teacher pushes student, a caricature of a bully –it undermines the effect; racism pricks the [song]

hissing woven into the fabric – it is Christchurch, synonym for ‘racism’ – same old [song]

Tinā is bigger than the myth, bigger than a shooter, the earthquake dislodged us; Mother solid as blood of a city, brown as the earth moves; it is well with my soul, this melody for multitudes, a song for a new faia’oga*

*faia’oga (Samoan) - teacher

On the first day of term

stroking the spine / of the land / with my walking shoes / on a hollow day / trying to focus on the furred earth / its lichen / its branches / on my route / my mind busy as sticks / clickety-clack distracted by nothing / as good as wood / at the core but ‘furries’ / manufactured American furies / in my feed this morning / politicians as usual / distract the masses / an evil waste / of good public time / in halls / once hallowed ... / come on / switch off / switch on / note the fresh faces / looking up / looking outwards / to think / to write / to show me pictures / engaged in characters called Hope and Rhythm / their pointed-ears reality / a wish / really / for change / they ‘ve seen fantasy / crime / science fiction / horror the same as me /

Comfort shopping

I found these sheets in green leaf oh crap they’re cheap! our old ones are holey but I’ve been putting off the shop for the cost I carry them to the counter with glee everyone gets a bargain when it’s New Zealand-owned— goodie they have their own bag of the same soft fabric and cardboard bulk in the unwrapping I see they’re thinner than I thought on his bed but g they look so good I’m thinking jungle or jasmine vine no wrinkles no ironing but my stomach drops already I feel the petroleum problem under our limbs when we sleep it’s warm alright (and cheap) the small particles of plastic trickling through the wash plinkety plink into the river my family’s been trying to restore with days of planting under the pines sucking the goodness from earth g the plastic accumulating in our bird brains a bottle-cap size according to all sources floating in the grey matter so what leaves of all the books at the library might tell me what to do now – throw up this non-vegetable mass, snuggle deeper?

Jack Ross is the author of seven poetry collections, four novels, and five books of short fiction, most recently Haunts (2024). He was the managing editor of Poetry New Zealand (now Poetry Aotearoa) from 2014-2020, and has edited numerous other books, anthologies, and literary journals. He retired from his job teaching creative writing at Massey University in 2022, and lives with his wife, crafter and artwriter Bronwyn Lloyd, in an old Art Deco house in Auckland, New Zealand. He blogs at http://mairangibay.blogspot.com/.

Why I write

I have no idea how to write a book without violence in it states the aptly-named

Stephen Hunter author of Point of Impact I’m glad to say that’s not my problem in my case writing a book without a self-questioning nameless protagonist hard to distinguish from the author intent on working out some personal trauma

is almost unthinkable as usual Orwell puts it most succinctly

his four motives for writing were 1/ egotism

2/ an abstract

love of words & language

3/ desire to feel less alone

4/ political purposes

continued overleaf...

one once potent in me has now fallen off almost to nil

as has three to tell you the truth I don’t really want most people reading my books but I do enjoy solving the conceptual problem

of how to put things so clearly that nobody thinks you’re even ‘writing’ at all as for four I hardly think about it but perhaps it’s behind that stubborn sense of duty that keeps me scribbling although at times

there seem more reasons to stop

Social media manners

Something about the algorithms inspires us to send birthday best wishes not only to those we know well and would like to be with but also those whose feed we’ve somehow chanced upon the etiquette

used to confuse me I didn’t know whether to thank people or whether that would embarrass them never such innocence again now I take care

to acknowledge each one throw in some folksy reference

add exclamation marks because if I just stuck to those who sent birthday cards

the tally would be too depressingly slim it’s a bit more complex when it comes to complete strangers whom I’ve never met at least to my knowledge those I just like

I can’t quite bring myself to thank them by name you have to retain some sense of life offscreen of the actual bar or classroom or venue

where we used to hang out

Tekeli-li

I suppose that it’s part of the paradox of being a collector of anything

say you mention a book and the person you’re talking to asks to borrow it?

in the interests of the free dissemination of knowledge you pretty much have to say yes then you forget just who it was you lent it to or they forget who they borrowed it from

unless you’re organised that is and write it down in your diary then start the long countdown

after a month or two you can issue the first reminder oh did I borrow that from you?

no I haven’t finished it yet – give it back! I want to shout

on one occasion I actually bought a new copy and gave it to a colleague of mine to stop her asking to borrow my book again for the umpteenth time most times the animosity starts quickly I deserve it so much more

so how could you think it belongs to you? or else it must have been somebody else who took it

in the case of my Penguin paperback of Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym after many denials

and claims it had already been returned it eventually came back with a dented back

and a haunted look as if it had seen something akin to the scoriac rivers that roll that groan as they roll down Mount Yaanek in the realms of the boreal pole

Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!

Jeffrey Paparoa Holman writes poetry, short fiction, history and memoir. He has published seven volumes of poetry; Best of Both Worlds (history, 2010); The Lost Pilot (memoir, 2013); Now When it Rains (memoir, 2017). As Big As A Father (Steele Roberts, 2002) was shortlisted in the Montana Book Awards, Poetry, 2003. Best of Both Worlds: the story of Elsdon Best and Tutakangahau (2010) was shortlisted in the Ernest Scott Prize, History (2011, Australia). His most recent work, a family history, Lily, Oh Lily –Searching for a Nazi ghost, is published by Canterbury University Press.

Unlived life for Saige

You never hated death, before. You hate him, now. No apology, no repentance turns back this. No floods of grief that dam the eyes can raise her. If only you were Him, in that black book, the one you loved to hate, if only, Him. Anything but this, the knife that knows just where you hide, and why. Let me assume she loved you, knew you well. She’ll want to tell you, this is not the worst - that the unlived life is hell, the coldest death.

Aerial odes

For Adele, Damian and Esme Mora. 10.1.26 Tamaki Makaurau, Auckland, 1950 -1954. My spirit flew to me, and made me wings, when I was deep inside my mother’s earth. I was the child of flying things, surging into the moment, birth. Like a squab I nestled at her breast, squawking with open gob to get my fill: me first, me first, me first, the hunger squalled. Into the air and onto earth, my heartbeat stalled, a feathered will, climbing blind, nursed in the aerial world.

Birds of paradise

A rainbow in a tree was my first bird. All I could hear was colour, singing songscrayons, paints and eggshells, all at once. I stumbled home with my tropical hoard, jumbled nonsense in excited lungs, to jabber at Mum of the happenstance. “I saw a bird, a bird, it was gold and red! It had two silver, silver wings! It flew inside me, Mum! It’s true!” & radiance came to nest at the end of my bed.

Jeremy Roberts is a resident of Napier, New Zealand-Aotearoa, where he lives with his wife and daughter. He MC’s at Napier Live Poets, interviews poets on Radio Hawke’s Bay, and is poetry editor for the VINES journal. His work has been published widely –including NZ Listener, Landfall, Takahē, JAAM, Poetry NZ, and Phantom Billstickers. Jeremy has performed and recorded poems with musicians in Aotearoa, Austin, Saigon, and Jakarta. He regularly makes poem videos and these can be viewed on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@jnrpoet. Jeremy’s first poetry collection was ‘Idiot Dawn’ (poems 1981-87). ‘Cards on the Table’ was published in 2015 and ‘The Dark Cracks of Kemang: The Bajaj Boys In Indonesia’ was published in 2022, by IP Australia. He was awarded the Earl of Seacliff poetry prize in 2019. For further links, visit: https://www.read-nz.org/writer/roberts-jeremy/

Firebug

Have you ever set fire to spider silk?

We were under my friend’s house with stolen matches, eight years old, watching silver webs ignite, spiders curl into little legless balls of carbon. Look at them go!

Perhaps, we were scorching anxieties not yet known. No doubt, we were excited by tales of Napalm in Vietnam, where my friend’s uncle was fighting. We didn’t like spiders.

Next – the backyard bush.

Early one autumn morning, we draped newspapers over branches and lit them up.

“To keep the dog warm” – we told each other. After the flames died, time for brekkie!

An adult spotted smoking embers just before the whole damn bush was lost.

“I’ve had to bring your son home in disgrace,” my friend’s mother declared.

But I wasn’t done with fire.

Not long after, Dad left home.

In an erased memory later recounted by Mum, I took everything my father had given me to the garden incinerator and burned the lot.

The magic of suddenness

In a world of triggers, that which is trapped deep inside, may come out into the world, crying and screaming like a baby –stopping you in yr tracks.

That was never my bag. I was good at locking things down, happy enough without paroxysms of purgation, content with small agitations.

Rain on the final day of summer touched my face – put me in my place. (Where was that, exactly? – I wondered.)

Burning firewood on the first day of autumn bewitched me – and something stirred. (What were we talking – ignition or transition?)

How wonderful to grasp at things barely understood, knowing that suddenly it all changes.

Bags of data on two legs

‘They’ll be finding bits of him for days’ – cop said, Nov’ 18, 1982, outside Whanganui Computer Centre. Remnants of his chest – with tattooed ‘This Punk won’t see 23’, found in debris. The only victim. Why?

First comprehensive list of New Zealand citizens’ info’: cars, guns, criminal convictions …

Data surveillance of a nation.

‘We have maintained a silence closely resembling stupidity’*–he’d spray-painted on a toilet wall nearby.

Already told his girlfriend he was going to die … making a political statement.

Big Brother monitoring?

Bugger that.

Final steps, final breath … 2 kg of gelignite …

“He wouldn’t hurt a fly” – a friend reminisced.

Today –

We are all bags of government data on two legs. Bags of data for ‘big tech’, too. Should we have cared as much as Neil Roberts?

* Neil Roberts borrowed this statement from the Revolutionary Proclamation of the Junta Tuitiva, La Paz, South America, July 16, 1809.

Josiah Morgan (Kāi Tahu, Ngāti Maniapoto) is an interdisciplinary artist based in Ōtautahi who has been described as “one of Aotearoa’s finest young writers.” His latest book is i’m still growing, released by Dead Bird Books in 2024. His other books were all released in the United States, including his hybrid text The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which was performed as a six-hour-long performance artwork in Auckland Pride 2024 and set to be reprinted by Index Press (Washington State University) in 2026. Also in 2026, his work Black Window is set to release as the featured chapbook in Poetry Aotearoa Yearbook 2026. He believes in magic and the power of words to transform.

Panicking Upward

More often having too much of something stored away somewhere for safekeeping where it might wait for a year or two until the decision. Does this spark joy?

What are the measurements of your house? Never liked being watered much. Strange thoughts reflect but things. The tide will rise, the tide will fall.

Then don’t let the boat rock you. You have to have enough to be the kind of person who likes to keep things around. Been burning

the candle at both ends or anything at any time, fluid. It’s easy to light a fire without kindling. You just have to believe it’ll start. Does this fit within

the measurements of your house? How much does the room cost and how much room is there? For example an object might wait a year or two to find out

if it may be preferable in Tāmaki if the present is unwrapped if it’s stuck in this poem or…

Staying Put

today a man flirted with leaving each time the bus stopped so he could light up without judgement when he finally exited he found himself boxed in in lieu of other options insofar as what to do he took off his suit jacket and waved it around a bit

I mean to I say neither saw him light nor smoke the cigarette between his lips

Untitled

The voice ventriloquises. The feeling rises.

There it is! In shards, tripping up, dialling through static, tripped up! There’s an invisible index to this world. What else is time?

As a statue grows its patina the inside speaks what the outside suffers. The web’s the spider’s laboured sculpture we destroy like oxygen. Before long the body signifies all. The tide will rise, the tide will fall.

Don’t forget some things need neglect.

Kaiata Kaitao is a young, proud, Cook Islands Māori creative currently studying in her first year at Victoria University of Wellington. She has been previously published in Toitoi and Te Rōpū Toikupu o Aotearoa’s 2023 Anthology. She also appeared as a guest poet at the inaugural Hawkes Bay CREATE Symposium, Matariki Mahuika, the 2025 Ahuriri All in for Arts Breakfast, and multiple of the Nevertheless Trust’s Rhythm and Brownie Nights. When not writing, she is an avid public speaker, having advocated for both women’s rights and the importance of supporting the written arts at both the 69th Commission on the Status of Women at the United Nations in New York City and the 2025 Aotearoa Youth Parliament.

Sister-in-Salt

For Iris Pouao, my sister in salt.

In my first and last memory of you we’re toe-tracing surfacing ripples thickly wrapped in neon nylon the size of prized apples, and bobbing like them too.

Already, the fluidity was settling into our marrow circling our irises reminding us of our duty to inundate to waterlog to draw the world’s channels to chin-height.

Daughters of the deep, we were hitting every party round the water’s edge quacking about in extra-small flippers

These days, my sodium intake’s down to tongue-tracing around stingy, shatterproof rims sodium stifling my breath as the bar’s bassline attempts CPR

overleaf...

And you linger on the skin of all those you left behind etched into wounds so deep they’re more fillet than flesh.

That day, my mother gently tore away a fraying thread from my togs and I held my tongue until she next dipped me under

The next thread, I’ll stitch around the curve of our hips weaving memories together until we’re embroidered into a tivaevae of our own

When the rain’s at its hardest, I’ll sashay down Courtenay Place let the salt soak into my curls and calves and together we’ll tuck away one last shot for the road.

Kate Kelly has always loved language. She believes that the written word can be powerful. English is not her birth language, which is Irish, which she is yet to learn. She feels lucky to have learnt English, in all its hypocrisy. Communication with others is a gift.

Why do you think?

Why do you think that I need you? Whatever. Why do you think this? I see the way you look at me. I hear you. I do.

“Are you sure you don’t want to have sex?” Under your breath. I heard that.

Are you aware that there are security cameras in the lift as you brush past with that smile on your face?

Arsehole do you think that your 6 children and your wife would be proud of you?

All I have to do is wave at the ceiling Push the green button on my radio. They will come. Unlike me in your presence. Master Control will come. Unlike me.

Untitled

Tupuna, Tupuna, Tupuna

Atua, Atua, Atua

I learnt a lot in the prison.

To listen to the Taonga

Taonga being the Prisoners

Taonga being the stories, I was told, by strangers. One who appeared out of nowhere, Then disappeared.

A Rangatira hung for murder not committed Buried upright so he would not rest.

He will never see a Christmas

He is with his Tupuna

Other’s dug up in the 80’s

With a Tohunga pointing at the ground

Then Karakia in the Bay of Plenty for reburial.

Now – the Prisoners will not see the Sun they will have to call on their Tupuna

For many, only survival is imperative

Chicken and Tupuna on the day

On Rangitoto see the roads, built by Mt. Eden Prisoners by hand.

Scoria, 5 degrees hotter than Auckland city

The playground of day trippers at summertime.

Ham and Christmas perhaps?

Tupuna, Tupuna, Tupuna

Atua, Atua, Atua

What does Tapu mean these days?

Loss Series #4

So you threw yourself out of your window I really wish you’d gotten on a plane and come and seen us. We could have made you cups of tea We could have given you hugs and taken you to the beach. The NZ beaches are just as nice as Cornwall you know. So you threw yourself You loved sport as a Woman and as a child. Nothing like a bit of tennis on the lawn So you threw I wish.

Kit Willett (he/they) is a bisexual poet, English teacher, and executive editor of the Aotearoa poetry journal Tarot. His debut poetry collection, Dying of the Light, was published by Wipf and Stock imprint Resource Publications in 2022.

The sun may set

The sun may set on your morning coffee, slip behind frosted peaks, casting shadows on the empty page. Perhaps the washing is left unfolded, the bed is still unmade, but at least the cyclamen has been admired, the lemons tasted, and isn’t that the point?

A

review of the secrets I know

I’m surprised that, of all the poets in all the world, none has stopped to look up at the full moon and remark on its mystery as it pierces a single hole in the cloud. But I am alone on the stage of this street, and the moon has chosen me to stand in its single spotlight. Perhaps one day, the moon will share its secret with another, more worthy writer, and it will stop begging to be noticed.

Perhaps then I could pay attention to the leaves I saw yesterday afternoon in the cathedral canopy with the light refracting through their mosaic stained glass panels and the birds resting in the branches behind, or the sunrise, waiting patiently each morning for me to reach the vantage point and probably getting quite annoyed on weekends when I sleep in.

I am 64, and the author of Bent Not Broken, Life on the Line, Mila and the Bone Man, and Julia Eichardt; A Life of Grit and Grace. In 2019, following a debilitating spinal cord injury, I retired as a medical doctor and had to reimagine my working life. This opened up the opportunity for me to pursue my other love: writing. In 2020, I completed the Northtec Diploma in Advanced Applied Writing. In 2021, I graduated from AUT with a Master’s in Creative Writing. My partner Graham and I share our Tūtūkākā home with Bill, the half Manx cat, and Lucy Jordan, a significantly entitled and over-capitalised Bichon Frise. I am currently working on four new MSS, three of them historical fiction. I am not a trained historian, but I enjoy spending hours immersed in and imagining the past.

This short piece refers to the practice of Senbazuru. The folding of 1000 origami cranes traditionally confers a blessing of health, longevity or peace. I have recently gifted a close relative 1000 cranes, folded with loving mindfulness as she journeys with cancer.

1000 origami cranes for healing

1 - 500

Make the first hundred from printouts of your secret internet searches. Symptoms are always worse in the dead of night, as is the fear that your body has betrayed you. Fold the papers into the prescribed shape. Your first birds may be misshapen, but you’ll soon be able to make them without thinking.

Make the second hundred from the words you’ll use to talk to your GP. You’ll be cautious but clear enough. You practise the words in front of the mirror. ‘I think I might have cancer’. Words you hoped never to say.

The material for the third hundred will come from blood test, ultrasound and X-ray forms. You are now in the system. You’ll need patience. A new language awaits you. Make lists of the words, and fold them into tiny, coloured birds.

The fourth one hundred are messages from friends and family. There will be cards, emails, voice messages, thoughts and prayers. Most will not blame you for your predicament, but they will offer advice. ‘If you’d just stop eating meat. Drink lemon juice and water instead of gin. Take ivermectin. My hairdresser’s cousin’s boyfriend cured himself of everything on a carnivore diet.’

Fold all unsolicited advice alongside your reactions, crease the edges tightly, and let your nimble fingers turn them into tiny promise birds. Everyone means well, even though you sometimes wish they’d zip it.

continued overleaf...

By the time you get to five hundred origami cranes, any treatment will have started. Make your next hundred from the pages of the novels you tried to distract yourself with while your body was filled with chemotherapy drugs. Maybe weave in a few strands of merino unravelled from the cap you wear to cover your thinning locks. It would not be wrong to make a few from flypapers. Hang them in your doorways, just to see if they will trap Death in the act of entering.

Your 500th bird!

Halfway there.

Your achievement is astounding. Rest here a while. Catch your breath. Watch the jewel-bright clouds outside your western window. Moisturise your skin. Let a volunteer read to you. Do something that goes totally against all advice. Enjoy your fierce rebellion.

The second 500.

The sixth one hundred marks a turning point. Fashion these from the Lotto tickets that never had the right numbers. It’s all about the numbers. White counts, tumour markers, and doses given. Don’t worry about the traitorous Lotto fairy. More money will not help you. The very rich also die, just in higher thread-count bed sheets.

The seventh one hundred origami cranes should be bright and cheerful. No words, no numbers, just joyful patterns. Rainbows, flowers, clouds, the deep bruising sea. Your fingers are not so nimble now. Neuropathy makes them clumsy and weak, so the folds you make must be deliberate and contemplative. Use bigger paper if you need to. No one else is measuring this one activity of yours.

The eighth hundred is fashioned from lists of instructions. Just in case. Who will care for your dog if you don’t recover? Who will call your father on his birthday? Who gets the task of sorting through your spare room? How many of your possessions will the Hospice shop want? Add these cranes to the piles you have accumulated. Let their colours revive you a little. See how much you have conquered.

The ninth one hundred. Last will and testament – in case. Do not resuscitate order –yes or no? Thoughts about the afterlife. Examinations of faith. Write out your fears. Scrutinise the words. Fold them, crease them, turn them into winged messengers.

Keep the box of cranes by your bed or chair. Take comfort from them.

The last one hundred is folded from old airline tickets, floor-stub receipts from the downtown ferry terminal, and photocopies of your passport and birth certificate. They come from brochures about the place you want to travel to if your treatment is successful. The place you could live in, eternally. You’ve gathered the documents for your last big journey. Carefully, methodically folded. Each crane has its beak aligned perfectly with its tail. Write an encouraging word on each wing.

Stop at 999. Take a breath. This is the threshold. The very last crane could be a gift for the Ferryman. Just in case. While you cannot bribe Charon, you can certainly make his day. He likes Tim Tams, I hear.

The biscuit wrapper will feel impossible to fold but keep at it. It will be your final gift.

Michael Giacon is a central city Tāmaki Auckland poet. His work has appeared in a wide range of journals and he published his first volume, undressing in slow motion, in May 2024. He’s a Samesame but Different Writers’ Festival board member where he presents the PRIDE Poetry Speakeasy and Open Mic.

Buddies

If love is not forever, then what is love? We give it the span of a week or two six or so months an hour, arms flung across our hearts against belief but if love is not forever what is?

If my heart were not so cold I’d cry and fill the empty Valentine with at least the shadow of passion. What is love if not forever?

We meet in secret society to spook the haunt of happiness volunteer a life on earth limbo too droll hell just awful On the first of our rounds through a vague enough day of domestic bliss one that would says to one that might I love you.

Some of the buddies feel warm others swear vows on mute lips I break our code to sink in a vale of doubt that’s lost its echo calling me for inspiration.

Afraid to fear it’s no surprise I notice your eyes dark with shaded love and lost in a day without a date if you’re attractive there’s something pale in the black hole of me warmed honestly.

To be honest I’ll pronounce myself dead to the inner circle when we meet next week on the ladder of love To believe is true always if love is not forever what is love?

The bottom line

The note says your brother has advanced macular degeneration. Is that correct? a sudden wave breaks through me opening me up closing me down

Can you read the bottom line?

I can’t anyhow and not at all through tears

Could I have a tissue please?

I update the information correct the correct I’m sorry, I’ll add ‘Deceased’.

When you’re ready we can try the bottom line again.

The Weight

A morning call unusual as when we do speak it’s always of an evening, always. Out and about, he got an enthusiastic greeting from someone he didn’t recognise, a lawyer he’d worked with for 21 years. Not the first time it’s happened.

He’s been watching the TV programme where people with dementia run a restaurant that makes mistakes. Things made sense.

Blood tests ‘largely normal’ Dr said in txt then Dr taken ill so won’t see her til Thurs after cognitive tests tomorrow then today/tomorrow cognitive person has a bereavement in family so no appts this wk have to rebook for next wk.

I’ve taken to making mental lists of names sometimes I write them on my kitchen whiteboard: Chico Groucho Gummo Harpo Zeppo - alphabetical the characters in The Big Bang Theory - S&A/L&P/R/and... (from the internet H&B) for Robert Palmer think Robert Plant/Led Zeppelin and then there’s The Band, five of themRobbie Robertson, Levon Helm, Richard... , Garth Hudson and...

I can sing every line of ‘The Weight’, though.

I’m doing that now.

Mike Johnson is the award winning author of forty books, poetry, novels and non-fiction. In 2002 he received The University of Auckland’s Literary Fellowship, having been Literary Fellow at Canterbury University in 1987. His first novel, Lear, the Shakespeare Company Plays Lear at Babylon was short listed for the New Zealand Book Awards in 1986. His novel Dumb Show, published by Longacre Press, won the Buckland Memorial Literary Award for fiction in 1997, and and he won the Frances Kean Award for his short story, ‘Magic Strings’ in 1999. His first book of poetry, The Palanquin Ropes, (1983) was co-winner of the John Cowie Reed Memorial Competition. His most recent book of poetry is Love in the Age of Unreason, and his most recent novel is Speechless, both published by Lasavia Publishing. He taught Creative Writing at The University of Auckland and AUT University and is now retired. He lives on Waiheke Island.

Lorca – the untimely death of a poet

‘Then I realized I had been murdered. They looked for me in cafes, cemeteries and churches .... but they did not find me. They never found me?

No. They never found me.’

From “The Fable and Round of the Three Friends”, Poet in New York (1929), García Lorca

on the nineteenth of August 1936 fascist militia took Federico Garcia Lorca put him up against the rough stone walls of an old barn and shot him to death

he was thirty-four years old

he had committed two crimes he was a socialist and he was gay a double truth, like two horns on the devil’s head

he was too much for them their fear was great, these killers who lived their lie in the shadow of his veracity, lived their lie in the shadow of his words which blazed on their foreheads and went on blazing long after the poet had bled into the dust

continued overleaf...

afraid of the theatre of weeping and of laughter shouting and despair of ‘the eternal norms of the human heart’ afraid of their own shadows and the shadows of their mothers afraid of one manacled to the stars afraid of their dreams as they dragged his corpse off to an anonymous grave (his remains would never be found) while the fascists banned Lorca’s works afraid they might set cities alight with joy and dancing his words crawled out through a sea of bones and the stinking flesh, through the ecstasy of worms the mass graves of the slaughtered into the light of day to bubble free lit with the essence of darkness

naked and unashamed

Lake Rotopounamu

it wears its beauty lightly in the overcast windless air quiet, almost unassuming the lake itself seems to be floating the giant rimu all around seem to be floating

I have to ask, what’s holding it up what’s holding it in place what sustains it why doesn’t it fall? a nonsensical question yet the feeling persists it carries itself with all the weightless serenity of contemplation to the north a break in the weather a silent glimmering off to the west, a line of rust-brown reeds lights up

Passing through –

For Harry Renford Parke

children play tag among the headstones their laughter flies up caught in the throat of tui

* as memories are lowered into the earth someone throws a flower someone rides a tear someone pockets a smile memories play tag among the headstones dates get lost to time an ocean dreams up the land the land surrenders to the ocean

* voices murmur kanuka tosses its flame skyward somebody prays somebody talks backward into their mouths somebody walks over your blooms

* after the eulogy, the silence nobody knows how to escape it it follows the mourners though the city of stones it follows everybody like a nobody in bare feet it makes holes in their words it makes for awkward elbows it forgets the words to the song it forgets how to sing

*

after the silence, children wonder I knew them well, somebody says others have their doubts whoever knows anybody? everybody thinks

* death is no more than a gesture a funeral the bouquet everybody huddles together looks somewhere else words are hidden inside themselves

*

I’ve only so much to give, the earth says I have to turn all this rock into blood I have to make the blood run uphill I have to set the sky beating I have to turn the bird into an egg

*

I didn’t think it would turn out this way there’s always a light at the end of the street there’s always a seed in the dust a candle that never goes out an aria that catches the throat

*

I see this dwindling speck of blue hear the thump of lilies on wood feel the jostle of stones taste escaping heat smell yesterday’s breath

* the sky pilot pulls a blessing out of the air the body remembers all that has been forgotten far off singing is suddenly very near everybody dances to the moon’s drumbeat

*

it’s not yours or mine or his or hers or theirs or ours it resides in everyday abstractions in the bits between the bits the thoughts between the thoughts the shadows between the shadows the left-handed stars the understated passions the invisible breath between breaths

* everything that begins ends one foretells the other the mourners turn their feet towards the world shuffle in procession

*

the first laugh is a heedless thing the children drape themselves in years nobody reproves them the solemn becomes ordinary a dog mourns for its bone

*

tea & sandwiches normalise the world everybody finds their own way back they step into the flesh they step into the world they have everyday thoughts slosh a little brandy in the cup wonder when their turn will come

Mike Kilpatrick is a former scientist and journalist, who turned to poetry writing later in life after realising it wasn’t as scary as he remembered it being from English classes at school in Scotland. He now works as a communications professional and annoys those in his life by trying to reply with haiku or senryu in any conversation.

Coming Home, Alone

I march into my sloping driveway as the rain smashes Upon hot summer concrete. The cracked earth And brown grasses greedily swallow water as bubbles Of petrichor explode, a sweet-smelling congratulations For my exhausting run. Sweat from my forehead blinds, The stinging salt reminiscent of oh so many tears.

Before I’m distracted by the laundry list of problems Waiting behind the cool grey door, the kereru Standing to attention on its nikau palm rampart Offers up one if its juicy red berries. It floats along The gushing water towards the overflowing gutter. Saluting the brave bird’s kindness, I soldier on.

As the berry circles the drain, I start up slippery steps Knowing someone is waiting for me, but no-one Is present. Moving from our own worlds seemed idyllic In those heady moments of love. Before the battles Commenced. Hindsight is a bitch. White flags wave, I venture across no man’s land. Loneliness persists.

Disappearing

She was a tiny ball of energy, a tight grey perm Forever making soup, challenging me to games

When I was a wee boy, it was ‘Stop the Bus’

Played with pennies from a bright yellow jar

With cards smelling of stale smoke from a pipe

Sitting on the fireplace, Saturday afternoons

Grandad shouting at wrestling on television

I remember the night I met your grandad

Leaning on his bike up on South Street

A lovely warm evening, tall and handsome

He was waiting for me and Mame to pass

He wanted a word, at the end of the close

The one the runs up the side of Boots

She was a tiny ball of energy, a tight grey perm

Introducing me to Uncle George, he bets me

A pound I can’t solve his sliding puzzle games

A pound? Victory, Sherbert Fountains galore

She celebrates with a tiny glass of sherry

I remember the night I met your grandad I think it was on South Street, up from Boots

Did he have his bike? He was leaning on it

At the end of the close, I was with Mame

And he asked me out as we walked past

She was a tiny ball of energy, a tight grey perm

Always wanting to feed me up, even if I was full

A refusal always blamed on me being in love

Though I’d just finished soup and her gateau

I remember the night I met your grandad

He was waiting for me and... Mame? Somewhere up on South Street I think He asked me out as we walked past

She was tiny with a tight grey perm I hugged as hard as her fragile bones

Would let me, I never wanted it to end

Have I told you how I met your grandad?

He waited for me as I was out with Mame

Somewhere up town, not sure where

She was tiny with a tight grey perm

Why didn’t I spend more time with her?

Do you know how I met your grandad? I can’t quite find it in there any more

She was tiny

I don’t remember how I met your grandad

She was

Fade To Black

How I longed to be invisible

While all could see the black dog

Dragging me down living streets

Sickness dripping from pores

Threatening to infect those

Surrounding me as they wait

To see if I’ll pull back or let go

The gaping pit in my stomach

Left unfulfilled by binges

Trying to satisfy desperation

Clothes always getting tighter

And I’m more visible than ever

Struggling to keep up the pace

The black dog dashing onwards

Doctors prescribing rainbow pills

Some bringing sleep like death

But when I try to kick the habit

I’m left bleary-eyed, zombified

Withdrawal worse than disease

How close to the edge of the cliff

Was I dragged on my worst day?

I didn’t need to fly that morning

But I’m wondering if wings Will unfurl when I need them

To flap and chase away words

Which cut through pallid skin

“Cheer up, it could be worse,

At least you’re alive.” Barely

Then one day I’m disappearing

A snarling hound’s grip easing

Muscles moving, not groaning

I’m demanding human touch

Side-effects of drugs fading

From a chrysalis I’m emerging

The man in the mirror familiar

I sometimes see the black dog In the corner of my eye, growling Far enough away I don’t panic

The mocking hound of depression Has taken it’s leave, temporarily I have my wish, I’m all but invisible While those who need me, see me

Montana Sefilino is a Samoan poet based in Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand. She is the author of Crossing, her debut poetry collection, released in August 2024. Her work explores themes of nature, healing, self-love, motherhood, faith, culture, migration, and identity.

Prayer for the shower

Coming in from the heat, I exhaled into the quiet walls, the day hanging heavy on my shoulders, its weight settling into my bones, my feet, leaden as wet sand. The shower walls held me, a bed I could lean my tired body against; and it asked for nothing.

I slipped beneath the water’s curtain, Silver rain fell like prayer onto my skin, baptizing, hugging, kissing washing the world away. A different kind of heat wrapped around me, a forgiving cloak.

My body drew in breath, deep and aching and unfinished thoughts, weary words dissolved in the foam. Steam pulled me home, my shoulders dropped my breath slowed, warm water unknotted my muscles and bone.

I closed my eyes and sang praise to the warm water.

You are Home

Who Am I?

you want to know who I am?

I am the hopes and the sacrifices of my parents, I am the child’s pocketed one dollar coin, no silver spoon, only bare hands

I smell of koko samoa, taste like umu on Sunday fresh baked bananas and palusami, warm, grounding, alive.

I was not born into silence, I am unnoticed, I grew like moss on stone, green as seaweed, stinging like a centipede, of the same earth that bears this island, where the ocean sings without words and the wind knows my name.

I am a hibiscus in full bloom barefoot in grass, valiant and unbent, my worth is not counted in dollars. it is carried in breath and skeleton, in prayers answered forward.

I am — palm leaves whispering at dawn, chickens crowing sharp and early, ancestors leaning close to see what they could not finish. when I look in the mirror through unborrowed eyes, the land looks back and says: You are home.

Mercies

clean sheets | cool against bare feet | rain tapping on the window | a soft lavalava wrapping around your waist | someone saving you a seat | a child’s laughter blooming in the hallway | an inside joke lining your chest in gold | frangipani scents slipping through the doorway

you are believed, you are held in his eyes | you are forgiven, you let the weight slip away

turning the page | finishing a task | slow mornings easing into the day | sleep curling around you | candles smouldering in quiet corners | handwritten notes feeling like hugs | your lover saying take your time

mama’s flounder swimming in coconut cream | my parents hugsandkisses, their warm, silent language | the smell of freshly baked taro| a compliment from a stranger | the cool breeze brushing your skin on a hot day |coconut buns puffing up proud, sweet and golden | sunlight warming your face after a squall

moonlight over the lagoon | writing your thoughts | a bath melting tension like honey |someone holding the door for you | Tiresa remembering your birthday | sitting barefoot on warm sand

getting through a hard day | you made it

and all of it

these tiny mercies| carry you forward |one step at a time

Piers Davies was born in Sydney, Australia but has lived most of his life in Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand and is a Law of the Sea specialist. He is a long-time writer and reciter of poetry. His poems have appeared in journals and anthologies in New Zealand, Australia, U.K, France, Switzerland, South Africa, Poland, U.S.A., and India. Four books/chapbooks have been published. He is involved in the administration of Titirangi Poets and is the co-editor of Titirangi Poets Ezines and anthologies. He was the scriptwriter of feature films (Homesdale and The Cars that Ate Paris (Australia) and Skin Deep (New Zealand) ), short films and documentaries. He was sometime Poet Laureate of Haringey, London.

Night Images

I

A phoenix arising from its nest of red and yellow balloons sings with delight its wispy call echoes through the hall of mirrors

2

ZIP line rushing down reveals exotic rabbit holes each an alternative world seductive but unreal.

3

Acres of soft coral shimmer on the seabed their steroid limbs gilded and translucent.

4

A whirlpool of kaleidoscopic colours spinning in a jet black sea.

5

A tree burns in the verdant forest flames surging upwards consuming and being consumed a beacon of light in the darkness subsiding to a charcoal crust.

6

The blue flamingo strutting in the vermilion lake croons its last song to the gallery of grotesques.

Piet Nieuwland lives in Whangarei, Aotearoa New Zealand. His poems and flash fiction appear in print and online journals in Australia, USA, India, Aotearoa, Antarctica and elsewhere. His latest books, As light into water, and We enter the, are published by Cyberwit and his next one Anticipation is due out this year. He is managing editor of Fast Fibres Poetry, an annual anthology from Te Tai Tokerau Northland. He participates in visual art exhibitions, live poetry performances, writes book reviews and occasionally judges poetry competitions. He once worked as a conservation strategist for Te Papa Atawhai. www.pietnieuwland.com

An affirmation

To the raven black haired pale cheeked romantic woman who knew the softness of men and the sadness of rain:

When the clefs and notes jumped from their strings as Nijinsky into the air and pianists flourished their keys in cascades to the applause of cumulus bouncing from the dark polished lids

To the joy in her eyes in the motionless abundance of afternoon with the garden soil dark like her clotted blood nourishing plots of beans, sweet orange and fig

To a diffuse memory of possibilities a sleeping manifesto of bodies under a light emitting diode with the silken water weaving and weaving the language of fire, scorched syllables, roasted vowels mutations of white mist

To the nickel sea beaten level, by its generosity flattened blue, glistening, before the next tipping point that strafes across the bruised landscapes and black mountains strewn with hollow knots of grief their rivers of a thousand eyes and ridgelines of arms, raised

Down the long slow curve

With the grace of a heron landing the women swim in invisible rivers shrouded by a silent laughter of mist and cavalcades of eyes

At the white limit of night, a wild flood of lilies and colorless flowers of soft air play with the crystals of enigmatic candelabra

On thighs of a summery epicenter and hypothesis of belly incandescent lips and phosphorescent breasts the immaculate symmetry of your you slips into a downpour of gush like euphoria’s of muezzin

Umbilicus of sand

Under a sky wrapped in feverish clouds the air is wet with the weight of dreams as a woman with a red violin Vivaldi’s the black swans of summer a cataract of leaves fills the nocturnal estuaries and a train loaded with burden of the world shuttles through

Richard von Sturmer is a New Zealand writer. He was born on Auckland’s North Shore in 1957. His recent works are the acclaimed memoir, This Explains Everything (Atuanui Press, 2016), Postcard Stories (Titus Books, 2019), and Resonating Distances (Titus Books, 2022). In 2020 he was the University of Waikato’s writer-in-residence. His book Walking with Rocks, Dreaming with Rivers: My Year in the Waikato (Titus Books, 2023) was written during his residency. In 2025 his new collection of poetry, Slender Volumes (Spoor Books, 2024), was shortlisted for the Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry at the 2025 Ockham Book Awards.

On Going

1.

What face will you wear when they come for you?

I’ll wear the face I wore on stage when my heart was ablaze with the energy of being exactly at the right place. Yes, that’s the face I’ll wear when they come for me.

2.

Infinita tristeza infinite sadness is a bridge I cross to the ruined cities. Infinita tristeza humbled with my head lowered humbled and painfully human. Infinita tristeza is a bridge I cross.

continued overleaf...

3.

Somebody made the handbasin. Somebody made the window. Somebody made the doorhandle. Somebody made the bathtub the taps and the bathplug. It’s amazing how people make things. Somebody made the armchair. Somebody made the carpet and the floorboards underneath and the pipes that run through the house invisible until they rattle. It’s amazing how people make things. Not to mention the electric wiring and the power pole outside the water meter embedded in the lawn and the stormwater drain that overflows in a deluge. It’s amazing how people make things and how they can be unmade.

4.

I sit on a bench and watch people passing by. It’s almost certain that I will never see a single one of them again. I can observe only a fraction of the population of this city let alone this country or the world. And with their arms swinging and legs moving through the afternoon light each person is simply a ghost of time just as I am a ghost of time.

Siobhan Harvey ninth book, a memoir, What We Remember, What We Forget will be published later in the year. She’s longlisted for 2026 Heroines Women’s Writing Prize (US) and has won 2023 Landfall Essay Prize. She was awarded 2021 Janet Frame Literary Trust Award for Poetry, 2020 NZSA Peter & Dianne Beatson Fellowship. 2019 Kathleen Grattan Award for a Sequence of Poems, and 2016 US Write Well Award (US).

Belonging

for Bob Orr in mutual admiration of Akhmatova

It’s not the mud on our boots, the dust and ashes we flatten beneath our feet, our hopes squandered nor our dreams.

It’s not our inheritance, the burning heat, the invocation we offer our gods, our songs surrendered nor our children.

It’s a language, cadent to us who hear it as the thrum of a city, an instrument, our heart. The life of a lexicon we hold precious as a butterfly, yet sets free our tongue, our poetry always chasing after it, wanting to attain it, here, there or anywhere, we who find belonging exists only in our words.

A Widow’s Quilt

She stitches together her life with the one who’s now gone.

There’s a heaviness to this act of surrendering to age, normally.

Deteriorating eye. Irregular heart. The cruelty of a body bearing its’ suffering. Normally, the past would have surfaced in pieces of trousseau, wedding and maternity dresses, aprons and hand-me-downs

mothballed. A lost time, lost life, though, the possibility of this deserted her when he deserted her. So now, this is different. A quilt

she arranges from choice, a body representing its identity and love for another in various milestones: a first kiss; a first Pride parade;

a civil union; a rainbow badge; portraits of icons: Anne Lister, Josephine Baker, Sylvia Rivera … Her thread completes its’ work, draws the night in like a net raising its catch. The moon is full as the quilt enfolds her in its warmth. The clock ticks on as she closes eyes, dreams her heart at one with her wife.

Sophia Wilson is currently based on Maungatua outside Ōtepoti Dunedin. An arts graduate and former health worker, she is the author of Sea Skins, a poetry collection published by Flying Island Books in 2023. (@bluetree_poet, https://sophiakwilson.wordpress.com/)

Steeped

in the frame of inseparable selves

what is ‘I’?

if not the space between dark sheets of memory laid down inside night’s tented skull — a stained and sagging hippocampus its overwrought mattress sprung for fight or flight

a spectre scraping coal across the pane, again — eviscerated hills, dry riverbeds, silently marching trees forests working themselves loose as mouthfuls of ash — the blooded jaws of burning bungalows

what is ‘I’?

if not desperation beating at a cage’s ribs the yearning for ‘safe’ — a square of afternoon sun on carpet

before the wolf enters before the walls close in

before the inevitable casting out to concrete plinths and bitumen

continued overleaf...

what is ‘I’?

if not the figure haunting a mountain pass fleeing rubble, a vertiginous letting go at the borders / barricades / bombs ghost bones rising from earth again and again the shifting mirage, refuge —

seasons of heat and betrayal, a child’s feet planted at the margins, before dismantlement turns over turmoil, a continuum of dark clods shed cells of hope ¬¬— curtains opening and closing, again

what is ‘I’?

if not dust collecting on a ceiling fan a hypnotic rotation of blades, or butcher’s knife the resinous remains of flies resolidified clumps / clots flung across white linen slippery narratives loosed from their moorings

weeping wombs, weathered casements the leaden history beneath acrylic sheen fragile filaments, a goitre of heavy metals in the gloaming — light pooling, before revenant darkness here and again at the cornices of white matter nothing is as durable as it seems violence rubbing up the cavities of us gaping floors opening to territories beneath myriad repetitions

what is ‘I’?

if not an ink slab collapsing at the stop dry rot, and rats

damaged air bordering the point at which a doorknob becomes the safest part of a room exit to a severed sea, fake pond, immaculate lawn

a clutch of eggs incubating beneath tangled, dark bush gentle rain descending through blossoms, again undone by guttural cries —

drakes vying for supremacy aggressive, and territorial

the exhausted duck trapped in airless occupation between bodies and turbulence

it’s hard to tell whether she is resisting surrendering or drowning

Narcissus Poeticus / Poet’s flower

momentarily unfurls

genuine beauty despite the odds

I could make a list of everyone I’ve failed or everyone I haven’t because in this war

everyone is comorbidly guilty and innocent

consuming at the mercy of public safety, another bench

arrayed with narcissus narke, nukes, narcotics

Who doesn’t crave easy care? — or to be that beautiful plant

herbe a la vierge ‘virgin’s weed’

sulphur yellow delicate white while simultaneously delicious red strumpet with nothing to lose at least nothing we acknowledge while the perfume lasts

Pagan Particulars

floors inlaid with deathly orbs / truths we cannot bear

the seasons are inscrutable and daylight sick with moths rust, and official blood sacrifice

our bones strike new notes — sharply defined caskets ornament capitalism’s illimitable surfeit

improbable, fragile universe! fire in hand, land — war’s teratogenic wilderness

devour each other, we gaunt vengeance are the impossible tasks of peacemakers

hyperbolic stones set in silver seas spill too late to be heard skies ripen, searing we bear the sun like a badge

deposed the magic wooden bowl and walking staff, cursed the plants

random chains and tyrants ghosts and shadows haunt our great divide

such dramatic histories — bovine keepers, soured milk and slaughterhouses

when all I want is to be a willow cabin at your gate

Susan Glamuzina’s an author, artist and poet who feels at home when there’s sand between her toes and her thoughts are in the clouds. Susan’s been published nationally and internationally online, in print, journals and anthologies. Susan was runner up at POETRY AT THE BEACH 2022. Susielee.co.nz

Not yet

He lies there at the edge of living and not breathing and not being and … not

I can’t handle the heartbreak of watching him like this I can’t handle the heartbreak of letting him go I can’t handle anything so we put our lives on hold and wait wait wait for the call we don’t want the call we know is coming but we will never ever be prepared for

Zipped

I’m on one side keeping to me he’s on his side being just he slowly sliding up the pull tab lever zips we two up connecting us together shoved tight our teeth woven gripping tight fate chosen

Haiku

inked dreams pages wait for readers to devour

Requiem

We were in a room lined with taxidermy tiger, eagle and Moose heads, all shot. The Moose had been strengthened to hold SAS guys who, after drinks, would ride her, meters above the floor.

We sipped our grief, having just farewelled one of their own, eulogised by his son via YouTube from Covid-stricken New Jersey.

Military posture prevailed. Details from secret missions were omitted and inferred. That time they were found in the jungle, drunk on Gurkha rum. Or crashing the Auster, while transporting Santa.

‘Nessun dorma...’ sang an opera star, ‘Let no-one sleep’. A plane buzzed us, lost, just before the 21-gun salute. The last Post played inconclusively.

Leaving the military, he went and stayed sober, spent the last 17 years of his working life counselling alcoholics, addicts and prisoners in places like Tokoroa.

In the mess, over cups of tea and flammenwerfer-ed savories, Andy recognized me, and we discussed Kiwi bodies failing to return from the Malayan insurgency. Above us, the Moose wept at an era’s passing, also its masculinity.

Few cocktails are stronger than absence or nostalgia. We need more, always more.

Driving back from the base I phoned a deputy-principal who decades ago scolded, ‘You know what you’re against, one day you’ll have to decide what you’re for.’

He wasn’t home.

Introduction to My As-Yet Unpublished Poetry Collection

Initially these poems were pitched to the agencies as a Facebook page with 240K likes. How likeable, really?

They knew it, themselves, waiting to be born: gap-toothed, self-possessed, forlorn. Their features aren’t Instagram symmetrical, their besetting tendency? Semi-hysterical. Big conversations play in their heads but they end up doing the gag about the four-foot pianist.

A Polaroid of my soul, ejected from your Land camera. Bullied on X, their peers think they’re dicks. Rarely asked out…And when they are, they say stuff like, ‘No Eros without Theos.’

Before leaving the house, they ventured three outfits, which remain crumpled on the mouldy Axminster. Fat-backed, slope-shouldered, varicose veiny; nude and proud and sullen; humming Tower of Song by Leonard Cohen:

Poems with more moles than body hair.

Poems nursing hurts, and a warming splinter of Lindauer. Poems dying for someone (anyone) to sidle over, be a bit true or even a friend.

You are?!

Um… may I borrow that red pen?

Twelve Signs You’re A Dad

12. Shopping bags (or baby) in your left hand. Car keys in your left pocket. Zero hands free. Your ringtone? A toddler bawling. They call constantly.

11. Lying on the trampoline, panting, choleric. ‘Play, Dad!’ they say, ‘play!’ The sky whirls. Once upon a time, you were unique, isolate, fey. Now?

10. The left lapel of each suit jacket (even the corduroy one) bears sepia drool in the same spot, the bullseye where tiny incisors stiletto and inhale. Night…

9. …arrives at noon. You and your darling are up all hours, refugees petitioning The Embassy of Sleep, slipping notes into bottles, watching them bob on the seas of 2.38 a.m.

8. Your Dad pants: too tight. A carving knife gouging a new belt hole, scars the bench. Your wife: ‘Why didn’t you use the bread board?’

7. Naked, you look ridiculous. You scrutinize it, seeking peace with incompleteness.

6. You used the bread board because you used to be a spy, a gun-runner; bootleggers were friends. You know what Infacol does, and Omaprezole. You’re still a star… in the Netflix series Jason Bourne Goes To Countdown.

5. Spot-cleaning, you can’t resist the Chux multicloth, flicking your tongue into iridescence. Your children are ice creams melting selfishness.

4. It goes everywhere: over your wife, the stairs, the leather couch obtained on Black Friday from Target, the igloo where you used to crouch.

3. A bedside lullaby: ‘Don’t turn out like me.’

2. But, they are…

Trisha Hanifin lives in Auckland and writes novels, short stories, flash fiction and poetry. Her work has been published in a range of literary journals and anthologies, including Bonsai: Best small stories from Aotearoa New Zealand, Landfall, Headland, Fresh Ink, Flash Frontier, and the 2021 New Zealand Poetry Society Anthology. In 2019, the unpublished manuscript of her speculative fiction novel, The Time Lizard’s Archaeologist, was runner-up in the Ashton Wylie Mind Body Spirit award. The Time Lizard’s Archaeologist was published by Cloud Ink Press in 2021. Apart from continuing to write poetry, her current writing project is a crime novel set in New Zealand in 1951 during the infamous Waterfront lockout – the longest industrial dispute in New Zealand history.

The limping dance of ghosts

We watch a film on the life of Samuel Beckett each scene no matter how dark lit from within like a Rembrandt painting every utterance a linguistic caress (and our father’s ghost shuffles between us)

Afterwards we walk through a courtyard white stones and orange flowers, and under a tree on the grass verge an old chair and foot stool it could’ve been an image from the film an invitation to sit and ease a burden (and our father’s ghost limps between us)

Under the last of the cherry blossom in the park we talk of our father and brothers she says, those stories they tell they don’t respect his suffering but to me it seems so much is gallows humour; they got the worst of him (and our father’s ghost stumbles between us)

Each of us carries the weight differently but none of us ever lets him go.

Turangawaewae*

The sadness is upon me and everything I’d planned must retreat to shadow and wait for light to return

Meanwhile, in my mind I’m on my way south driving through Burkes Pass where, as a child, my mother planted trees on the roadside with her father, then travelling on, past Pukaki’s turquoise waters to Aoraki my heart seeking the freedom highway Woody Guthrie sang about, where all roads are held in common and we the people have liberty to walk them at will

On this journey the sound of our marching feet recalls the memory of our mothers’ heartbeat and together we sing the old songs and all roads lead home.

*Te reo: turanga standing place; waewae feet –a place to stand; a home place; a place of belonging.

Ogham lines *

Every poem is an act of remembering and resistance every line an arrow to the heart of the unspoken

And the young rise up like flames for our warmth and illumination

Be like waves rise and break and rise again

Carve words on the broken bones of the world.

*Ogham – pronounced om – an ancient Irish alphabet consisting of lines and strokes often carved on stones and trees used, among other things, to mark territory and record the names of the dead.