A Real Poem – 1. In love, there are times where unprecedented things happen. I’ll just say it here: I have never been to battle, but I battle every day. We speak a part. Studies show this. We speak a part, as we are made of parts. We are partly made of mothers. 2. There’s only two moments in a life, but I … Continue reading Two poems by Leah Umansky
Swimming in crop circles It’s the hazy bleached-air season of white. Stalks hunger and cling to the August sun, ears tuned for the suck and swing of the scythe splitting ranks one by one. Four boys and I swim rapt in butter yellow, rolling in circles, daring dives into terra. We taunt the proud, crackling wheat, flatten it to dust, stamping dry … Continue reading Two poems by Jo Burns
Home comforts Until you’ve lived in a country full of kitchens full of saucepans that slowly creak to the boil, a kettle won’t seem to whistle like the owner of a loose dog calling it back, calling it home. Twenty years apart With a synchronised swivelling of necks and a coughed silence, they welcome me in, wincing as I order. Once I’ve … Continue reading Three poems by Matthew Stewart
Salomé in the mirror I find myself calling for your head on a brass platter from Bernese the kind I can make into a table I smile I smile manic delighted There will be no church or mosaic shrine on the spot where this happens I smile I smile manic delighted I’ll take just your cheek … Continue reading Two poems by Kate Noakes
In Zero Gravity If ever you are sucked out into space by an ill-judged partnership, a scheming co-worker, the belligerent family member, you’ll know what love spurned feels like: your eyes bulge but cannot shed tears, out beyond the troposphere. The moisture on your tongue boils, blood does not flow. You lose what’s down or up, the cognisance of arms and legs, vacuum-sealed in the … Continue reading Two poems by Ken Evans
Water lilies We are watching the sun’s slow dive into the Wirral. You want to touch the water-stars of its last light. Soon it will be time for us to separate . Outside this frame of hush that weightless walk back from the Tate — where I had wanted to fall inside the green water lilies that lay like time or surface tension. Do you … Continue reading Two poems by Michael Brown
Swimming Lessons Hard as stone, Mexico City I measure you in cruise liners far from the sea and hands wider than the whole of Northumberland grasping at clanking locks, the cats in bin liners are lost in their own little world – warm and burly the night light sea, I swear they dance and what if the rooftop was not to keep rain out? But … Continue reading Two poems by Jack Little
Degas’ The Tub for Vicki Feaver It’s the way she lies abandoned, Jezebel, to her liquid bronze bath; hair dripping over the lip of the tub, as if recovering from a marathon or from giving birth. Like the post-natal bath I had in the shock-white hospital – blood streaking the water, even the gleaming metal taps. Her slim body bathes … Continue reading Three poems by Marion McCready
Paused You can’t live in a trap but you do, in a trick, you’re trumped, stumped, spun to the side. Meant to be gone, you persist, by nettle and scratch, worked out of whim or words. Time is a tick, a stop, a slur, a blind bit of balance. You can’t live on what’s elapsed but you have, run up in homespun, made up … Continue reading Two poems by Jacquelyn Pope
Starlings the bird of her life she realized now feeling déjà vu as she watched them chirp their way through the cattail marsh geese honking overhead. Overturning leaves with their dark pointed beaks their heads the iridescent blue of bottle flies their under feathers fan out almost adorably like a yellow Easter chick’s in the spring breeze— and then fall flat again. (first … Continue reading Three poems by Morgan Harlow
