His Bottom Lip by Rachel Long
Clitoral, like finding a small, hidden part
of myself in someone else.
Nerve-wet, fleshy
- for a white guy, and stained
between life-lines with red wine
gone black.
Only this...
Poetry | Full Fathom Five by Sylvia Plath
Old man, you surface seldom. / Then you come in with the tide's coming / When seas wash cold, foam- / Capped: white hair, white beard, far-flung, / A dragnet, rising, falling, as waves / Crest and trough. Miles long [...]
Poetry | A Letter from Brooklyn by Derek Walcott
Derek WalcottA Letter from Brooklyn
An old lady writes me in a spidery style,
Each character trembling, and I see a veined hand
Pellucid as paper, travelling...
Poetry | Michael O’Neill | A Tribute
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...
The London Magazine Poetry Prize 2018 – Winners Announced!
A huge thanks to everyone who entered this year's poetry prize! We had so many high quality entries this year which resulted in a...
Review | Xeixa: Fourteen Catalan Poets
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...
Interview | Raymond Antrobus
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...
Pigeons by Kate Bingham
IIt’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...
Shining Shoes by Nausheen Eusuf
Weekends, growing up, I'd watch my father
as he sat on a low stool in the verandasurrounded by half a dozen pairs of shoes,
their laces...
Archive | Poetry | The Wiper by Louis MacNeice
First published in the May 1960 issue of The London Magazine (Volume 7, No. 5).Through purblind night the wiper
Reaps a swathe of water
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...
2016 by James Stradner
The clouds have swum down from the sky and rolled onto their backs
in the streets, begging for someone to rub their fluffy belliesA day...
Bright Celestial Objects by Rebecca Goss
After Alison Watt, ‘Venus’ (2015)Their backs against the grass,
she felt a pull, as if the leaveson the trees were lodestones,
the hairs on her skin...
Spotlight II: Dostoyevsky Wannabe
The London Magazine has long been a champion of emerging writers and independent publishers, stretching back to the 1950s and 60s, when young writers...
Through it by Ila Colley
This is not throwing plates, how
you ask me. Too late for that.
This is a whisper dissection. Thisis a beggar’s hand in my mouth.
This is...
Poet in Delhi by Manash Bhattacharjee
Can you rinse away this city that lastslike blood on the bitten tongue?~ Agha Shahid Ali
Delhi,where parrots liftthe weight of tombs,poets offer daggersto deepen...
Interview | Momtaza Mehri — Young People’s Laureate for London
Yesterday we spoke to artist and poet Momtaza Mehri, who has recently been announced as Young People’s Laureate for London, who will take over from poet and musician Caleb Femi in the role which was launched by Spread The Word Last Year.
Review | WITCH by Rebecca Tamás
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...
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 billowingthat clouds...
Poetry | Trapeze by Layla Benitez-James
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...
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...
Two Poems by Sean Borodale
Response to Finding a Fossil at Writhlington Coal Batches:A Fossil (a Fern) on Writhlington Batches Re-Take (Pt.II)Time not as we know it
but another time...
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...
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...