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Poetry Aotearoa Yearbook Student Poetry Competition 2026
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Poetry Aotearoa Yearbook Student Poetry Competition 2026 Judged by Tracey Slaughter
Contents Isla Kalderimis — First prize, Year 11 a shadow that moves when i blink 6 Claire An — Second prize, Year 11 STAY 7 Jolie Ye — Third prize, Year 11 regurgitation 12 Joshua Kalan — First prize, Year 12 You Won’t Anymore 13 Jessica McIntosh — Second prize, Year 12 Fairly Irrelevant to Modern Society? 15 Madison Michelle Heta — Third prize, Year 12 If anyone else watched them, 17 Johnson Wang — First prize, Year 13 Untitled with Static Orchard 20 Xavier Tapsell — Second prize, Year 13 Bury the lamb 23 Sabrina Liu — Third prize, Year 13 soil-lickers 25
Isla Kalderimis
a shadow that moves when i blink i am spinning in cold morning light. sun sunk between my shoulders; this has always felt a bit like breaking. dark eyes & a darker soul, but winter lives in my skin, smiles at me. we have made peace at last, at last. at last. i am something alien, something screaming and raw and painful and real. i am something alive.
worlds and universes collapsing under the weight of the mirror. i hide from the window and how the light glows on my thighs, my hips, my chest, my everything. i am dredging up bloody remains, i am fighting and i am losing. both animals in this fight, wrecks of each other. we’re splintering but still screaming that the breaking’s coming. the shattering’s arrived. we’re all fragments here; cracks still spreading up my shoulders. they make me something unholy, blasphemies, issuing from my broken lips. they make me something stained and cold. they make me imaginary (they coat me in honey). falling apart at the seams. i am tired yet quicksilver.
Author’s note: read left side, then right side, then read together. 6
Claire An
STAY Hysterical strength. A strange phrase. As if strength were a locked room and panic the forgotten key. They say a mother can lift a car when her child is trapped beneath it, as though desperation reaches into the machinery of the body and finds a hidden gear. Not new strength. Ancient strength. Strength that was always there, sleeping beneath caution, buried beneath the polite agreements between bone and gravity. The body knows something the mind forgets: limits are often negotiations, not walls. And I wonder if despair works the same way. Perhaps rock bottom is not the end of a person. Perhaps it is the place where comfort ends. 7
Where every familiar thing falls away— hope, certainty, the gentle lies we use to carry ourselves through ordinary days. And when comfort finally abandons you, something deeper wakes. Not courage. Something older. The stubborn instinct of existence itself. The wild animal hidden beneath language. The star that continues burning even after it has forgotten why. People think survival is a decision. Most of the time it isn’t. A drowning person does not construct a philosophy of breathing. A forest fire does not debate whether it should continue consuming oxygen. The ocean does not seek permission to make another wave. They simply continue. Because continuation is written into their nature. Maybe you are the same.
8
Maybe the part of you that wants to live exists below thought, below reason, below every argument your sadness has ever made. Maybe that is why depression feels so exhausting. Because it asks the soul to hold its breath against its own design. And still— you wake up. Again. And again. And again. You call it habit. I call it evidence. You think exhaustion means you are running out of strength. But exhaustion is what strength looks like after carrying impossible weight. The mountain does not apologise for erosion. The ocean does not apologise for storms. The heart does not apologise 9
for how hard it must beat to remain a heart. So when you think you cannot continue, do not search for reasons. Reasons are fragile things. Pain can tear through them like paper. Become desperate. Not desperate in the way a falling person reaches for anything. Desperate in the way a seed is desperate for spring. In the way darkness is desperate for dawn. In the way galaxies spend billions of years reaching toward shapes they will never touch. Become desperate for the life that has not happened yet. For the version of yourself waiting somewhere ahead in time, waving through the fog. Become desperate enough to believe that unfinished stories should not be abandoned halfway through the sentence. Because the truth is this: You keep searching the horizon for rescue while standing on a continent of untapped strength. 10
You pray for endurance while carrying it inside your ribs. You ask the universe for a sign while your own heartbeat has been repeating the same answer since the day you were born. Stay. Stay. Stay. The body can lift a car when love becomes heavier than fear. Who knows what the soul can lift when life becomes heavier than surrender?
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Jolie Ye
regurgitation mama, the bowl of rice you pass me is glazed in carnelian. you must have gripped it tight. your nails are blood-tipped crescents, you have ripped with your bare hands you split the skin of the map, the wounds of the border, you tore the sky and a mechanical womb spat you out mama, your hands burn with chlorine and ammonia, the fumes bleed into me, mama, they learn the texture of my skin, they seep from me, amniotic, i poison the air i imitate you when i cut the umbilical— does any pain compare to that of separation? i practise it, mama. i want to know how it feels to be severed too mama, how does it feel to be birthed anew and the cord ruptured— spat out into a craggy land, empty of ancestors i have never known we are naked gullets. you beg to be overstuffed, bursting, rupturing with opportunity i beg of you the same, forcing more into my full stomach; mama, i am greedy and you know it; i want to be split down the seams i see how your gorge seizes with your bitten-down screams. tilt my head, altricial. my maw aches for it. regurgitation.
12
Joshua Kalan
You Won’t Anymore I like when you feed me fruit and when you arrange it on a plate silently placing it on my desk as an apology to me but I’m scared when I tell you the truth, you won’t do it anymore. I like when you drive to the market sniffing out orange blossom jalebis and selecting only the sweetest ones for when I’m hungry but I’m scared when I tell you the truth, you won’t do it anymore I like when you pour chai letting it flow from the hot pan while straining out the elakka which you know I don’t like but I’m scared when I tell you the truth, you won’t do it anymore. when I one day have to explain it to you explain the ‘limp wrist’ ‘odd walk’ ‘high voice’ I’m scared really scared you won’t love me anymore but it’s ok. when we undoubtedly fight | when we block numbers | when we move away from each other i’ll do it myself
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I will learn to skin and slice fruit when I feel sorry for myself I will learn to pour chai and will strain out the elakka when I miss home I will learn to select only the sweetest jalebis at the market when I feel hungry because I know when I tell you the truth you won’t love me anymore
elakka: cardamom in Malayalam jalebi: an orange-blossom flavoured doughnut found in India 14
Jessica McIntosh
Fairly Irrelevant to Modern Society? Lacey and cream, your curtains cast a mosaic across your bedroom. I don’t dare breath in too sharply so as to not disrupt the silence. Tracing the shapes of the splotches on your celling, I cling anciently to your side, unmoving. like a cliff-face allows itself to erode with the tide, in this moment, I am a statue— A statue of the amber-musk and laundry stench which engulfs our untouchable, stagnant bodies, seeping into the gaps of where our legs aren’t touching, embedding itself in the bed sheets below. It’s like an infection of evidence which I worship just as I do the expiration date of royal deities and the sun at exactly 4:06. We are resting whales. vertically lying in the infinite space 15
between now and the car ride home. Propped above, like god on a podium, by the aerated mattress and our slight, unkillable touch, we are still in time. We are its passage.
16
Madison Michelle Heta
If anyone else watched them, they’d think nothing ever changed. Mum still stirring her tea like she’s coaxing sweetness back into the world, Dad still nodding along to stories he’s already heard a thousand times but pretends are new because that’s the kind of man he is And that’s the thing there was no earthquake, no slammed doors, no burning bridge to point at and say ‘there, that’s where it ended’ Just two people still gentle with each other in a way that confused the child-version of me who thought kindness meant keeping someone forever Back then I kept waiting for a villain to reveal themselves, for one of them to break character and storm off stage. But they stayed soft even while their marriage hardened into something that could no longer stretch around both of them It was the strangest magic trick, watching them smile
17
while telling me they couldn’t smile together anymore. Like watching the ocean say it loves the shore but can’t stay I remember sitting between them, studying their faces the way detectives study clues, trying to find the crack that made love leak out. But all I found was peace. And peace, I learned, can hurt just as much as chaos They can still share a room, still pass each other the salt, still laugh at the same joke with that quiet, familiar rhythm of people who once believed they were building forever. And maybe that’s what makes it worse, the fact that they don’t hate each other. That they still fit, just not in the way that matters Sometimes the softest endings are the hardest to hold. Because when two people break loudly you at least know where to place your sympathy, your confusion, your leftover hope. But when love ends politely you’re left staring at two open hands 18
and no reason big enough to blame And even now, when I see them together, not together, but near, I still feel that old question hovering over the table like steam: ‘If you can still be this gentle, this peaceful, this almost-family . . . then why didn’t you stay?’ But some answers aren’t loud enough for children to hear, so they grow up and learn the quiet truth: sometimes people leave not because they can’t stay, but because staying would’ve made them disappear from themselves And I guess that’s the kind of love I’m still learning to understand, the kind that can be kind and still end
19
Johnson Wang
Untitled with Static Orchard NOTICE: all unattended names will be turned into weather. I was issued as a receipt for salt, moths and one red train. The clerk wrote *maybe* where sex should be. The clerk wrote **OPEN HERE** over the chest. Under no fixed season. Under no reliable mother tongue. I began as a roomful of cut fruit and sirens. I remember the kitchen / no I remember the bruise-coloured radio / no, the sink full of teaspoons holding little moons of dishwater, how grief kept trying on aprons, how longing was a dog scratching at the wrong century, how you said *stay* and the word split into stair and stare and starling. Since then I have been several small emergencies: a hot window, a church-bell receipt, an orchard learning the alphabet of smoke. **PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT:** the city prefers paperwork to blood. Please queue between the lilacs and the police tape. Please keep all fury visible. 20
I kept mine in the molars. I kept mine under the tongue like contraband weather. **EVERY TIME THEY SAID CALM DOWN** the wallpaper grew another mouth. I bit through three horizons and a wedding plate. Somewhere a lift kept opening on the same hospital floor. I wanted to tell the truth about love but the page left only hinge ash pulse orchard [ ] open open open and no one agreed whether this was prayer or damage. In the museum of nearly-forgotten afternoons the dust wore gold shoes. My grandmother’s laugh — or somebody’s train ticket— fluttered out of a recipe book and became six birds. I followed them past the petrol station, past the vending machine glowing like a saint with bad advice, into a field where the night was compiling itself. Stars hung there like teeth in a glass of milk. For one impossible minute I was every child I had misplaced. For one impossible minute the dead phoned back as rain on tin.
21
// choose a dwelling for the unfinished self: a mouth of weather on borrowed light inhabited by friends, enemies and one impossible deer // rerun until the heart misprints: if name == name: break it if grief == river: enter else: become static So I become static. Then orchard. Then train-smoke. Then windowlatch. Then the hand that waves from inside the fire. Then the fire, asking softly to be carried. Then a tenderness so random it feels invented by lightning. Then morning, dragging its blue dress through the wreckage. Then me— not healed, not whole, but singing from all my cut-open houses.
22
Xavier Tapsell
Bury the lamb You can split your leg open on the farm, red mud drinking the bone, but not your heart in the front seat. We bury the lamb early. Call it strength. Call it being a good bloke. Crying is for funerals only— black suit, wet eyes, engine already running. talking about the dark? That’s for girls, For soft boys, For those who never learned the code. So we keep driving. radio chewing the dark, window cracked a finger’s width so the smoke can bleed out but the truth stays buckled in the back. No one cries in the ute. cabin thick with yesterday’s piss and takeaways, beer cans rolling like loose knuckles, ashtray a small graveyard of quiet screams. We nod. We smile. She’ll be right, mate. 23
While the dark rides heavy in the tray like a small boy we can’t drop off, no matter how many times we pull over. We bury the lamb early and call the silence holy. Until the ute starts smelling like a hearse, And another good bloke simply doesn’t make it home.
24
Sabrina Liu
soil-lickers so we licked soil every night. we laid together, a crochet of quiet starfish washed ashore & letting the moon bleach our weary bodies sore. the skyscrapers rose in the distance like high-heeled giants & high-rise apartments divvied up the skyline it was a negotiation, a simple give & take here was my dress & blood & name, & here was my citizenship. we gave more than we took, chopsticked citizens, aching for the soil that parched our mouths, choking with the delicate fish bones lodged in our throats. tongues quick as the yellow river, teething on a new wanting beyond our silted hands, eating a language not our own. my grandmother was not meant to tame vowels nor wrangle the slippery eel of grammar— she was meant to knead the dumpling dough to completion steaming baozi on circular tables to meet hungry eyes at new year gatherings where hongbao stuffed candied hands each child with a name she could understand my grandfather was entombed in a country he could not buy shoes in his feet two fisted oranges & sockless in his grave the tombstone chiseled with a name he stumbled as he wrote, every letter a translation. he found t was a crooked 七 & i a rotated 一 these little surprises forging a window of home 25
since he never reached the door, at his funeral i wore red & prayed: one day when we lick the soil dry & the ocean bed is left parched with dust, we’ll lay together & you’ll teach me how to write my forgotten name.
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Massey University Press Private Bag 102904, North Shore Mail Centre, Auckland 0745, New Zealand Showcasing the winners of the Poetry Aotearoa Yearbook student poetry competition 2026 Compiled to celebrate Phantom Billstickers National Poetry Day 2026 With thanks to Te Whare Wānanga o Waikato the University of Waikato Text © copyright individual contributors, 2026 All rights reserved. Except as provided by the Copyright Act 1994, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the copyright owners.
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