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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
What Follows by Theophilus Kwek
What Follows
Deer cull, Wytham
7th February 2015
A moment’s pause before a fist of swallows
spooks the sky above the nearest trees.
Something shakes the fence-bound rows,
bursts through...
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...
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 bellies
A day...
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...
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Excerpts from a previously unpublished sequence of poems named The Year of the Pin-Up Calendar.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...
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...
Difficult Cup by Isabel Galleymore
after Wu Hao’s Duke Cups
The china cup is frilled at the rim
like tired lace and all over it
ceramic tentacles extend
to whisper if you drink...
Counting by Ralf Webb
April doesn't rain.
We have spent days watching
the truant magpies comb
our cat-eyed neighbour’s lawn
for bottle caps and burnt-out tin foil.
The cloying sun has not coaxed...
Poet in Delhi by Manash Bhattacharjee
Can you rinse away this city that lasts
like blood on the bitten tongue?
~ Agha Shahid Ali
Delhi,
where parrots lift
the weight of tombs,
poets offer daggers
to deepen...
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...
Home from Greece by Robert Selby
Above whitewashed, tabby-haunted Kamari,
I wearied of the incessant inversions
in Pope’s Homer, and left my self-improvement’s
cooling terrace to the night, now drawing in
here too, across...
Men by Belinda Rule
I only like imaginary
men,
the ones who think
my art is
the most transporting
thing they have ever seen,
and I am exactly as
hilarious as I actually,
actually am.
Even then,...
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...
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...
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...
Eros and Asbo by Miles Burrows
As a man under a restraining order
Still follows his ex about from day to day
I stalk your shadow as if you could show up
In...