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Poetry Shelf Monday Poem: ‘Connection point’ by Emma Barnes

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Connection point

There are ways to connect the electricity within us, responsibly. Patterns can be prescribed by the regulating bodies and the sub-departments within. Specific failure switches can be installed to handle operator incapacity. You can hire a qualified professional to complete the work. The best way forward, for us, right now, is just to touch each other. You can generate static electricity if you perform a set of actions in the stipulated order. Other, harder to capture electrical effects may be present in some scenarios, depending on the connection point. I have noticed flutters, zaps and sometimes a pronounced pulsing. You may notice other types of electrical phenomena. You can note down anything you’re feeling on the notepad provided. Or just tap it out in Morse Code on my arm and I’ll document it later. Yes, it is an effective technique to softly run your tongue across my bottom lip a moment before you kiss me. Please note, other participants may not respond to this gesture in the same manner. Yes, I can feel the effect in other anatomical locations. Can you? I see. I see. Perhaps you should introduce a canine tooth to the equation. Maybe we will see an uptick in voltage.

Emma Barnes

Emma Barnes (Pākehā, they/them) lives in Aro Valley, Te Whanganui a Tara | Wellington. Their poetry has been published in journals including Landfall, Turbine | Kapohau, Cordite and Best New Zealand Poems (2008, 2010, 2021). They performed in Show Ponies in 2022 and 2023. They are the author of the poetry collections I Am in Bed with You (2021) and IF WE KNEW HOW TO WE WOULD (2025) as well as co-editor with Chris Tse of Out Here: An Anthology of Takatāpui and LGBTQIA+ Writers from Aotearoa (2021). They work in tech and spend a lot of time picking up heavy things and putting them back down again.

Poetry Shelf Monday Poem: Before Top Surgery by Holly Painter

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Before Top Surgery

I.

On the way to the hospital
I see breasts everywhere:

yellow-tagged dairy cows
professional lactaters;
sagging barns beside
red-topped grain silos;
murmurations of sparrows
blobbing and dispersing
over the Catskills foothills.

II.

We wait, masked and distanced,
in the mid-December soundscape
of Frank Sinatra and Mariah Carey,
tap at the Times crossword,
take turns visiting the gift shop,
scan the wall of last millennium’s donors,
share selfies the kids took yesterday.

III.

The sleep is in my arm now
and I’m sarcophagused
in toasty blankets.

The surgeon’s been in.
I stood like a Renaissance Jesus,
palms up, gown shrugged off
to my elbows as she marked up
my torso like a new play
for the offensive line.

When I wake, I will be
a mismatched children’s puzzle:
giraffe on the top, lion on the bottom
as if men and women were ever really
different species and not
variations on the same themes
of salty carbs and worrying
and walks around the block
just to see if anything’s different today:
the neighbor’s pinecone wreath
tiny icicles on the mailbox
dark-eyed junco at the feeder
fat with feathers
and the dream
of sunflowers.

Holly Painter

Holly Painter is the author of the poetry collections At last we listen closely: cryptic crossword poems (Black Spring, 2026), The pressure of all that light (Rebel Satori, 2022), My Pet Sounds Off: Translating the Beach Boys (Finishing Line, 2020),andExcerpts from a Natural History(Titus, 2015). Holly teaches in the English Department at the University of Vermont and also directs the Center for Research on Vermont.

Poetry Shelf Monday Poem: Crossing by Rhian Gallagher

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Crossing

We crossed too soon at Pearl Flat
and found ourselves lagged on a kind of island
backward looking into the future; it was dusk
when we made that mistake, not knowing
it was a mistake, pegging the tent to the river meadow

event cascading to event, all night
the rain outpaced our breathing; the morning woke
slumped under the glossy rock sheets, the waterfalls
bursting from their plaits

below in the mizzle, the rain raining, tussocks
siphoning the fall into their throats. Our mood
darkened like the front – our sodden coats,
the tent sagging like a body in pain

yet, would we ever again
spend so many hours
close-reading a river
with an almost intimacy
rehearsing our long diagonals
through tangles and water-weight
the glittery flutterings.

We made a mistake, such were our days
on Pearl Flat, then the river rose and swept
what-was-left of our plans away.
We don’t own anything the sky seem to say
even ourselves we don’t own
the weather comes – it’s out of our hands.

Rhian Gallagher

Rhian Gallagher grew up in Aotearoa New Zealand. She then lived in London for 18 years, returning to Aotearoa in 2006. Her first poetry collection Salt Water Creek (Enitharmon Press) was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for First Collection, 2003. Her second collection Shift (Auckland University Press) won the NZ Post Book Award 2012. Gallagher was the Robert Burns Fellow in 2018. Her latest collection Far-Flung (AUP) was long-listed for the Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry (Ockham Book Awards) 2021.

Poetry Shelf Monday Poem: All the world’s a stage, & all the poets have main character energy by Chris Tse

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All the world’s a stage, & all the poets have main character energy

Man taught a machine to write poetry with the bones
of bards past. Man forgot to tell the machine how to
worship the moon & let the intrusive thoughts win.
The machine will never understand how poetry is
gathered in the tight corners of poets’ obsessions—
or how being a poet is accepting the role of brazen
leader of the lovesick, keeping their congregation
fed & watered until the next Lorde album drops.
A machine will never understand the unbreakable
bond between main character energy & seasonal
affective disorder. A machine is a poor substitute
for poets who wield white space as a placeholder
for catharsis. You know their kind. The lost-in-
their-own-world poets who imagine every walk
to the dairy as a musical number. The vengeful
metaphor poets who get their driver’s licence
just to casually cruise past an ex’s house with
a kauri trunk hitched to their car. The chaotic
good poets who reject social mores by leaking
a group chat line by line as a thought experiment—
their hypothesis being: poetry is just gossip with
line breaks. Man trained a machine to analyse
the entirety of human creativity & surmised
that the point of poetry is sacred self-expression.
But we all know it’s not that deep. Spoiler alert:
it’s doing shots at karaoke during a transcendental
rendition of ‘You’re So Vain’. This is our way
of dealing with the world constantly falling apart
& knowing that our coping mechanism options are
limited. Be a sonnet. Be a loop. Be entered. Be exited.
Be ceremony. Be colloquial. Be a monologue
played for praise. Be audacious enough to break
the fourth wall. Life is a sitcom & you are the star;
everyone else is the studio audience lapping up
each punchline & plot twist. In this poem, you can
piss on the machine & it will tell you it’s raining.
Poor, wet machine. Looking without seeking.
History without experience. Voice without conviction.

Chris Tse

Chris Tse is the author of three poetry collections published by Auckland University Press and co-editor of Out Here: An Anthology of Takatāpui and LGBTQIA+ Writers from Aotearoa. He was New Zealand’s Poet Laureate from 2022-25. His fourth collection of poetry, Dance-Floor Romance, will be published by Auckland University Press in September 2026.

Poetry Shelf Monday Poem: Ruru call by Sue Fitchett

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Ruru call

My oldest friend is a memory.

Suzanne’s face I can still find among
hard copy photos I keep under the sun seat
but her voice   her voice fades
I didn’t or couldn’t record it
& only I can witness the time she says
to my mother at our bush-held home

I don’t like them there o’possums Mrs F.     

Midnight snuffling possums were too common
to bother me but the owl     the one we call
Morepork or Ruru   the owl is a call wanting a reply
a call into darkness towards the untouchable stars

answer me
answer me

& I listen
wait for another owl’s reply
if there’s no answering call
the owl calls again  over & over
& I listen
as silence seeps into me

& absence makes itself
known to me.

Sue Fitchett

Sue Fitchett is a conservationist, volunteer fire fighter & Waiheke Islander.  Authored Palaver lava queen (AUP: 2004), On the Wing (Steele Roberts: 2014) and Between (The Cuba Press 2025).  Co-author or editor of several poetry books & anthologies.  Work has appeared in various publications in Aotearoa/New Zealand & overseas & exhibited in art shows. Louis Johnson Bursar 2001-2002.

Poetry Shelf Monday Poem: All we have is the urupa by Hana Pera Aoake

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All we have is the urupa

My body became clay
Wefting into golden brown
Drying before becoming wet

I climb the slippery urupa
In leather healed boots
Stumbling through fog eyes

My body became a grave
Tugging at the weeds
Seeping onto the curved mound

I notice the shifts of the soil 
Returning down deeper into the whenua
Between the two tī kouka trees 

My body became a mokomoko
A tohu of things to come
Perhaps there was a makutu

I think of disease as being dis-ease
There is utu between all things
But i flood a river

My body became a whisper
Images of water without rhythm
A camera shutter that would not turn

Hana Pera Aoake

Hana Pera Aoake (Ngāti Mahuta, Ngāti Hinerangi, Waikato/Tainui) is an artist, writer and sweaty milf. They are the author of three books of poetry(ish) and have three more in the works including a collection of essays and manifestos, On how to be, which is being published by Discipline in Naarm later this year. Mostly they are a PhD student researching industrial poisoning and Māori labour histories in the eastern Bay of Plenty.

Poetry Shelf Monday Poem: car music by Amy Marguerite

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car music

i cried  
in front of my manager 
and it wasn’t  
comfortable  
it was  
the opposite 
of uncomfortable

just passed  
two goats  
headbutting  
by the expressway 
teaching each other 
common risk  
or self-preservation

i did not want  
a strand of new hair  
to tickle  
my old face! 
it was just a thought 
without a face 
to cry on 

i think i grieve 
differently 
like everybody else

i know exactly 
what i cannot mean 
at all times  
and that seems a bit holy  
and disgusting 
like marriage 
or drinking alone

i’ll unliken that  
to this 
then to now 
then sleep 
find myself  
living still  
on both sides of the bed

and when i look back 
on the new dream  
and feel so  
ahead 
i’m pulling tears  
from an ancient 
moment

breaking through  
in front of nothing  
like no god 
everywhere

Amy Marguerite

Amy Marguerite (she/her) is a poet and peer support worker living in Pukekohe. Amy’s debut collection over under fed was published by Auckland University Press in March 2025. Her essay on the new generation of Aotearoa poets features in Te Whāriki: Reading Ten New Poets from Aotearoa, published by Auckland University Press in October 2025.

Poetry Shelf Monday Poem: David Eggleton

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Myths of the Freedom Campers

Zombie tourists drive camper vans off highways,
and into ditches, and leave them there without a care.
They eat brains and spit out the remains.
In public car parks they ignore any official sign.
They hurry around on the wrong side of the road.
They don’t speak unless challenged in te reo,
and bump into you backwards, carrying selfie sticks;
and then they deliquesce into phophorescent slime,
all the while protesting they are having a good time.

Zombie tourists take scenic routes but feel every bump,
and they always get trapped behind a wide-load,
so their camper van ends up crawling like a sick toad.
They act like they don’t know the road code,
stuck in the middle of a whole lot of hogs:
bikers blatting along like a slow-moving bog,
who only stop for a mass take-out of burritos,
which are eated al fresco and à la mode,
off the roof of their low-rider support-vehicle.
And as the camper van pulls out, the bikers all growl:
may the circle be unbroken, bye-bye.

Zombie tourists look for Aotearoa the White Whale.
You won’t find that Whale in any guide-books,
but they believe they might trace it in carvings,
still sunk in raupo swamps, that glow in the dark.
And on either side of the Alps, there are stories,
small myths, always being crafted and left for others to find.
New Zealand’s scenery, they say, is so beautiful
it’s almost obscene, because the wealthy elite
have reserved it for a blow-out lunch, that will turn
into a saturnalia of livestock gobbled up by Cyclops
and his whole one-eyed clan, as they eat the ideals
of egalitarianism, and hose what’s left down the gurgler.

David Eggleton

 David Eggleton lives in Ōtepoti Dunedin and is a former New Zealand poet laureate. His Respirator: A Laureate Collection 2019 -2022 was published by Otago University Press in 2023. Lifting the Island: Poems was published in the United States by Red Hen Press in 2025.

Poetry Shelf Monday Poem: Memory is a feather by Michelle Elvy

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Memory is a feather

I close my eyes and see a flock of birds
                    – Jorge Luis Borges

fickle, uneasy, a lingering

    echo, this pattern of dark & light

       assured in its natural insistence, yet

          transient,  like the sounding of bells

            hovering, weightless on the wind

         evoking nothing, maybe a prayer

      resisting   haunting   waiting

Michelle Elvy

Borges: from ‘Argumentum Ornithologicum’, in Dreamtigers (1964)

This work is from ‘The Wild Edge’, an installation of poems, notes and photographs created during Michelle’s 2025 Auckland Regional Parks residency immersed in the wilderness of the Waitākere Ranges Regional Park. The exhibit reflects proximity to the sea, observations of landscapes and seascapes, and intersections of experience between humans and our environment. This new poem was in’The Wild Edge’ exhibit at Arataki. The exhibit ran through 31 March.

Michelle Elvy is a writer, editor and creative writing teacher in Ōtepoti Dunedin. She edits at Flash Frontier and At the Bay | I te Kokoru. Her books are the everrumble and the other side of better, and in 2025 she co-edited Te Moana o Reo | Ocean of Languages (The Cuba Press)and Poto: Iti te kupu, nui te kōrero| Short: The big book of small stories (Massey University Press). In 2025 she held the Riddell Residency in Oturehua and the Auckland Regional Parks Residency in Huia. website

Poetry Shelf Monday Poem: ‘Anselm 3D’ by Claire Beynon

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Wim Wenders on the 3D Artistry of Anselhm Kiefer -His new documentary

Anselm 3D

Anselm Kiefer was born in a bomb
shelter two weeks before the end
of WWII. Immediately, his mother

pressed plugs of softened wax
into her son’s newborn ears
to shield him from the enemy.

Above ground the broken
voices of another
unwinnable war.

At 78, an arc-welding wizard
unmasked against the fierce
toxicity of memory, Anselm

treads a tightrope between
burning straw and molten
lead. Paint pot, brush

or flaming torch in hand,
he cycles the twin hallways
of density and weightlessness.

His studio’s vast, a contained
yet infinite space, itself
a portrait of this man

in whom life’s disjunctions
(even when he does not speak)
are in perpetual conversation.

Trapped in the copper
lining of his eye, the reflection
of a winged palette, feathers

a-tremble, emblem of service
held up to the sky. A smear
of colour threatens, disappears

down the jagged path
into a forest of birches
where stiffened white

ballgowns stand stock-still
and silent among the trees.
Glass shards arrested

in fabric folds prevent
them/prevent us/prevent
Anselm from taking off

across the unscarred landscape
back to the bomb shelter
in Donaueschingen,

his mother’s lullaby above
the falling bombs a constant
that never leaves him.

Claire Beynon | Ōtepoti Dunedin

Anselm Kiefer | Das einzige Licht (2006) 

Claire Beynon is an artist and writer living in Ōtepoti Dunedin. Her poetry, flash fiction and short stories have been widely pub-lished and anthologised in Aotearoa and abroad. She has been a runner-up in the Sunday Star Times Short Story Competition and in 2002 was the winner of the NZ Poetry Society’s International Poetry award. In 2021 her poem ‘Today’s Sky’ was awarded the Takahē Monica Taylor Poetry Prize.  Claire combines the contemplative rhythms of writing and art-making with a range of interdisciplinary collaborations. Two summer research seasons in Antarctica continue to inform her work. Her most recent collection is For when words fail us: a small book of changes, The Cuba Press, 2024. Website