Today’s choice
Previous poems
James Norcliffe
Sarsaparilla Road
travels through swamps
and reeds, over a black
water creek and a narrow bridge,
past the swift river with all
of its snags and eddies,
through the winding gorge
of slippery-back slopes,
scarps of limestone
and galloping gorse
to where children parked
in cars wait and wait under
a deepening sky, pink clouds,
sarsaparilla and raspberry,
a bribe sweet and bitter
in their mouths, and
still sweet, when they
fall asleep, the hotel lights
yellow in the darkness.
NZ poet James Norcliffe has published eleven collections of poetry including Shadow Play 2013, Dark Days at the Oxygen Café (VUP) 2016., Deadpan (Otago University Press, 2019) and Letter to Oumuamua (Otago University Press, 2023). His Selected Poems: A Day Like No Other will be published early next year. In 2022 he was awarded the NZ Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement in poetry.
Ali Murphy
Mean sister We are stuck in our own words, not hearing each other. Sixty-somethings, we may as well be six, throwing sticks down the beck or poking dolls eyes out of their sockets, scribbling on their perfect faces. We are well rehearsed, know our cues,...
Bruach Mhor
I heard a calm, clear voice.
But not with my ears. Not my outward ears.
It wasn’t madness…
Moira Garland
tall as the absentee house.
How the girl moored her hands and heart charmed by riven bark…
Maureen Jivani
I dream I’m at the hospital
massaging your feet, your tiny feet
that I have freed from their tight
white stockings…
Jayant Kashyap
We are in the bath, your hands
around my back, mine around yours—
everything covered in a fog.
Jane Holland
When fog falls over Rough Tor,
the world creaks
on the end of a string…
Emma Lee
Snow’s Reset The roofs blend with the snow-laden clouds, borders softened so it’s only memory that differentiates my space from my neighbour’s. The wet smell confuses pets whose footprints meander over territorial edges, leave crazed patterns like...
Lisa Rossetti
Toughened Bark it takes a hefty blow sometimes to split you open a sharpened blade to split through years of tough old bark in the deeper channels feel how sap and resin thicken sap to carry nourishment keeping the woodiness supple resin to...
Maggie Mackay
A thirty-year-old woman walks into
the wee sma’ hours of a December
night. Snow is light
on her hair and the back
garden shrubs. It thickens. The sky
turns white. She stands still.