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Excerpts from a previously unpublished sequence of poems named The Year of the Pin-Up Calendar.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...
Questions Concerning Aristotle’s Tomb by Manash Bhattacharjee
An archaeologist in Greece unearths Aristotle’s
Tomb; others dispute the evidence.
If Aristotle’s ideas are consulted, the archaeologist
Needs to prove, the tomb’s where he claims it,
Not...
Four Watercolours by Sudeep Sen
The London Magazine has been celebrating the life of our former editor, Alan Ross. An important figure in the literary world, Alan was known...
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...
What You Call Your ‘Winter Mode’ by Patri Wright
On the wicker chair I wait for the duvet’s rise:
you’re just a mound, breath,
as I worry over why, again, you’ve overslept.
Could it be early...
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,...
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...
Coming Thunder by James McAskill
When we stole the eggs from the barn that June
you said we held life in our hands.
Untrue I said as I carried a near...
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...
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...
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...