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...
October by Lydia Towsey
October
Pizza bruschetta gold dress Rioja
Autumn is here and Winter forgotten
Walking through town arm in arm with a lover
Moon in the sky and leaves good...
Refugees by Manash Bhattacharjee
Refugees
I know a thing or two
about refugees –
As a child I heard father
say, “We were sleeping
in the place we thought
was our country, till
the siren rang...
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Excerpts from a previously unpublished sequence of poems named The Year of the Pin-Up Calendar.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...
Snowbound by Michael O’Neill
Snowbound
Carriages lit and still between the drifts ...
With each flake it took on a new form,
the city they seemed exiled from ---
almost a sad,...
We Wait for Poets by Manash Bhattacharjee
prophets have retired
so do not wait for yours to come to you
~ Ashraf Fayadh (translated by Mona Kareem)
In our country, a prince,
Dara Shikoh, had...
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...
At Aya Sofia by Edward Lucie-Smith
Today it’s snowing, snowing
In Istanbul,
Stamboul, Constantinople,
New Rome, Byzantium.
The city has mislaid its Jews
And most of its Greeks.
The bones of its Armenians
Are long scattered.
Somewhere far...
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...
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...
Poetry | Waking Under the Walnut Street Bridge by Mara Adamitz...
let me persist but not divide let me sit
quietly with the tiniest ...
Last Heron by Stella Davis
Last Heron
As the last heron goes, rooks
fall from the sky like old black rags
to carpet the new-laid field.
Six days now, six days and nights
without...
Caries by Fiona Sampson
Little hole little well
of dark staining the lacquer
of my tooth little confessor
coming close and coming close
why are you pursuing me
interrogator of the nerve
in its...
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...
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...
Exile by Manash Bhattacharjee
Exile
“I rested my mouth on your memory”
~ Yannis Ritsos, from Diaries of Exile
Night arrives like a cart
You push it with motionless hands
There is darkness
But...
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...
Madonna and Child by Hugh Dunkerley
Don’t believe the lies:
Joseph was a randy little sod.
That’s why we had to leave,
go back to Bethlehem
where he told his family
I was pregnant with...
Giggles by Evdokia Charalampous
With her eyes closed
she has been staring at the lamps on the ceiling for days.
By now they must look like Sufi dervishes
whirling in white
to...
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...
Green by Chris Woods
My Kodak Brownie didn’t work
but I have a picture of the green dress.
The film was black and white,
my memory is colour.
We’d eaten our lunch...
The Cult of Isaac by M. G. Stephens
THE CULT OF ISAAC
We all know about Abraham, the great
religions emanating from his skull,
but what about Isaac, where is his world
taken into theological thought,
mulled...
Onion Music by Mark Fiddes
I grow lighter for you
with each striptease
from skin to skin leaving
a glimmering bulb
a milk light by your bed
for you to undress by
or find your...