Live Encounters Aotearoa New Zealand Poets & Writers March 2026
Electric Language, poems by Anita Arlov.
Electric Language
Pablo Neruda at Machu Picchu
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
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
Finny
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.
© Anita Arlov
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