Poetry | A Letter from Brooklyn by Derek Walcott
An old lady writes me in a spidery style,
Each character trembling, and I see a veined hand
Pellucid as paper, travelling on a skein
Of such...
Poetry | The Sleepers by Sylvia Plath
No map traces the street
Where those two sleepers are.
We have lost track of it.
They lie as if under water
In a blue, unchanging light,
The French...
Poetry | Atlantic Palimpsest by Kerri ní Dochartaigh
-for Heaney and the Peace Bridge Grey and greying sky
reflected in choppy body,
as our matching heron
performs his balancing act for all to see. The Donegal hills,...
Poetry | The Goldfinches of Rome by Peter Anderson
Carduelis carduelis (Fringilla carduelis. Linn. 1758) Dawn on the Palatine:
planets bow out, stars pick their way
through rat-traps and incident tape.
The morning after the party...
Poetry | Waking Under the Walnut Street Bridge by Mara Adamitz...
let me persist but not divide let me sit quietly with the tiniest ...
Poetry | On His Deafness by Damian Grant
'No-one has ever written a poem “On His Deafness”';
(David Lodge, Deaf Sentence).
- - - - - - - - - - - - - -...
Poetry | Under the Loquat by Peter Anderson
He had that majority under the loquat,
rain falling like a god in gold, the breakthrough
sun, and the spin on things, tar growing a fur.
Loitered...
Poetry | The Line by Fiona Sampson
White trunks divide the dark
beside the line
and in the dusk trees pause since if they do not move they cannot
see themselves
or know this moment has...
Poetry | The Air Has Cleared by Manash Firaq Bhattacharjee
The air has cleared today, Over the city, and in my head, I see the trees breathe The invisible greenness of air, I feel the taste of sunlight On...
Through it by Ila Colley
This is not throwing plates, how
you ask me. Too late for that.
This is a whisper dissection. This is a beggar’s hand in my mouth.
This is...
The First Time They Lowered The Flags by Peter Ainsworth
The first time they lowered the flags
The President bowed his head. The next time they placed flowers
To mourn the dead. The time after that they held
A...
Acrostic by Sudeep Sen
(R.I.P. Derek Walcott: January 23, 1930 – March 17, 2017) Deep seas of yesteryears wash new froth on your home shores.
Egrets, sea gulls, circle the...
Pigeons by Kate Bingham
I It’s just the same old air a person breathes,
roughly the same respiratory system,
steady compared with ours, the same idea
of hindrance (flesh the breath must...
We Are The Cenotaphs by Aaron Fagan
Over a cup of Marco Polo
And a bowl of bird's nest soup,
Listening to the world as a whole
Through the particular, I laugh
Into the telephone...
Competence by Anna Kahn
There is nothing in this room
for those who have not learned to
sing without thinking, who don’t know
where the music fits in their bodies, how
to...
Bright Celestial Objects by Rebecca Goss
After Alison Watt, ‘Venus’ (2015) Their backs against the grass,
she felt a pull, as if the leaves on the trees were lodestones,
the hairs on her skin...
Madness by Patrick Cash
There’s a stream by the Avon ward
Where I stand to watch the water flow
And unwind the whirlpools of my mind
When it’s dark I let...
Puddocks by John Greening
for SECH Clare would have called
these five red kites circling above dead
or stag’s-headed oaks like iambs broken from
a line of English pastoral by a name that signifies
a deed...
They Would Have All That by Mary Jean Chan
To sing the evening home, the lover prepares
a pot of lentil stew – her phone lighting up to
the news of love’s imminent arrival, imagining her lover’s...
That Boy by Robert Nazarene
He was patient as a dead bird.
He perched on the ledge of bottom
and rocked. He was the missed flight.
He was silence calmed down.
He loved...
Shining Shoes by Nausheen Eusuf
Weekends, growing up, I'd watch my father
as he sat on a low stool in the veranda surrounded by half a dozen pairs of shoes,
their laces...
I Don’t Live in a Mountainous Country by Talin Tahajian
We look up, & beyond the maple trees & the brick
steeples with weathervane roosters, clouds billow
as sleeping monsters. Not the sort of billowing that clouds...
The Year of the Pin-Up Calendar by Imogen Cassels
Excerpts from a previously unpublished sequence of poems named The Year of the Pin-Up Calendar. February there is a white pigeon opened like a book
on the...
Catalogue of Minor Extinctions by Tyler Raso
i. labrador duck Sitting at a disrespectful distance—
---------back where they came from—gets
defensive when blinking (like only
---------shepherds have a right to). welcoming wreckage to its homeland by
---------sailboat...