Poetry

Alice MerryI leave myself in the bull-filled room  i. ...The bull fills the room.......................................................................throws ...its horns.............wide...................................................................handfuls of barnacle.................tapering............into slick ivory points.................medieval    ...chessmen  spearing..................................................................the paintwork .........................................................................................................the bull ...is slick dense...

Joan BrossaEl saltamartí / The Tumbler Joan Brossa creates distilled excitement. He is both wise and wild. His poems are surreal and matter-of-fact, playful and...

The following piece was published in our February/March 2021 issue of the magazine. Rosamund TaylorThe ProofTasting her still, I'd walk home in smog, frost, past burnt-out...

Laurie BolgerGirl, Hotel Mirror  In a hotel mirror, a woman is snogging her own face. News reporters gather, shout things like: what about other peoples faces? Without looking away she...

The following piece is published as part of our TLM Young Writers series, a dedicated section of The London Magazine's website which showcases the...

There are times when I remember / all of them fondly enough for them / to be here once more, all around / this house, which is far away from / where they were around, and at this hour, / far away again from my childhood fears. / Now I can just think of them. And / what is thinking except the mind’s / imaginings, the heart speaking to itself / in the darkness of default, fearing alien / ears, the world’s participation in the shame / of being touched in front of others? [...]

The rosy almost-heartwood of larch, / which sounds like lark, which sounds like singing, / which sounds like the wood could open its rosy throat / and pour forth the song of boats / sighing in the harbour, / swimming onto slipways, knocking against pontoons / The grainy planks of teak, / which sounds like talk, which sounds like the boatbuilders / as they ease about the wooded space, handling compass planes, / talking of cleats and chines and carvels, making tea [...]

Andrew Wynn OwenThe Scientist Before the time of skiing on Europa,               Enceladus still a far-flung starry dream, When humankind had...

Bez, post-Victorian Boz, Viz incarnate / and Viceroy of the sinew, what is the name / for light that detracts from the stars? / Urban pollutants de-lux distant galaxies / as we walk after / parties through school fields, / via car parks, past vacant vats & waste lots [...]

My Father was a boxer. He taught me how to box when I was nine. This commonality, and the need to impress him, informed a great deal. When Charles Bukowski at an event asked me to ‘take it outside’ over a girl, I said okay. I was 21 and shy. Everyone at the party kept telling him [...]

The London Magazine has long been a champion of emerging writers and independent publishers, stretching back to the 1950s and 60s, when young writers...

The London Magazine has long been a champion of emerging writers and independent publishers, stretching back to the 1950s and 60s, when young writers...

The following poem is taken from the anthology Tales of Two Londons: Stories from a Fractured City, ed. Claire Armitstead, Arcadia Books, London, 2019.Ferdous...

Layla Benitez-JamesTrapeze A rabbit might be taken away from a butcher by two different people and prepared separately; I mean, the structural integrity of my...

Iain TwiddyCoot It didn’t need to be a big ripple nudging its reed-nest for the overstep to plop into the up-plump of the breast,and the coot to...

Briony WillisWITCH WITCH, by Rebecca Tamás, Penned in the Margins, pp. 119, £9.99. (paperback) In her latest collection, WITCH, Rebecca Tamás explores the triumphs and oppression, the...

Hannah Lowe’s fourth chapbook, The Neighbourhood, begins with a winding dotted line that travels from the first to the second page. The image continues...

Michael HenryJoan Howson's Cottage This is Black Rock Sands that ............my parents walked to from their honeymoon hideaway. Those are the footprints they left ............on the sand. That is the...

The People's Forest — a literary strand to Waltham Forest's programme as the first ever London Borough of Culture this year — has recently...

Leminscate, Chris Viner, Unsolicited Press, 2017, pp. 72 The 6th isn’t busy. Six days since the attack And inside the Monoprix The aisles of life still reel...

Raymond Antrobus is a poet, educator, curator, editor and investigator of missing sounds, who is a founding member of Chill Pill as well as the Keats...

They live inside the warmth of typing fingers, inside the ghostly glass of hidden years you wanted to implant inside this week. The doors and windows to...

Michael O’Neill (1953-2018) was a very gifted poet and a brilliant literary critic, who was Professor of English at the University of Durham, where...

Xeixa: Fourteen Catalan Poets Tupelo Press, 2018, edited by Marlon L. Fick and Francisca Esteve The news in recent months has been splashed with images of...