Live Encounters Aotearoa New Zealand Poets & Writers March 2026
Playing with words, poems by Andy Fey.
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 hope-
restoration as hope, enacted.
Every stitch and screw rebelling
Against a throwaway world.
© Andy Fey
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.