This bed a purse of flame and I, a hot coin thrown to its tawny lickings lie, het suckle-pig, skin lachrymose with rendered tears, beast burned to its bone – I have squirmed my own grease on the sheet’s thirsty pone. I paid for my dreams, blazed a cruel ascension in this bed … Continue reading ‘Villanelle to all my Wasted Flesh’ by Jane Burn
Tag: New Poem
‘Standing Up’ by Amlanjyoti Goswami
Standing Up Head bowed, his ears perked. Eagle-nosed-spectacled, the teacher asks a common class: Was it really the sun that came in through the window? Or was it the sun’s rays? The class sniggers. The sun, he finally lied, defiant About the slanted truth. His failure, reported, circled in red. The long trudge home. And … Continue reading ‘Standing Up’ by Amlanjyoti Goswami
‘Three Girls’ by Helen Frame
Three Girls after the BBC three-part drama series of the same name Her skin is powdered moon and her eyes slate roofs at dawn and she’s free as a bike ride in Provence and she’s fifteen like holidays in the sun and bubble gum in pink and yellow wrappers and she’s hitting puberty like cardamom … Continue reading ‘Three Girls’ by Helen Frame
‘Foaling’ by Rachel Bower
Nobody told me I would become a beast during labour four fingers open, a horse measured in hands. I whinnied and brayed but no-one understood – they tacked me up anyway and let me shit on the floor. When my legs buckled they walked round me, tidied the stalls, talked among themselves, indifferent to my … Continue reading ‘Foaling’ by Rachel Bower
‘TV’ by Simon Costello
You tell me to leave it on, in case a culprit cuts a portal in the window, grows a shadow on our landing. So I blast it to ten, & the six o’clock cracks the walls with a quake in China, a ring of dealers sewing cocaine into hems, a passenger plane leaving … Continue reading ‘TV’ by Simon Costello
Two poems by Jack Houston
Comfort Self-interest does not work to bring about human happiness on a global scale any more efficiently than it achieves it for people on the small interpersonal level where we all live our lives. -- Darryl Cunningham, Supercrash, Myriad Editions, 2014, p.152 Let me sit on my own and watch my friends in … Continue reading Two poems by Jack Houston
‘real boy’ by Thomas Stewart
this is a true story: they said you’re not a real boy until you cut the wizard out of the tree, it’s a question of which tree: real boys might pick oak, birch or beech, and then boys that pick alder, elm or hawthorn are unreal, unreal boys hold the axe and … Continue reading ‘real boy’ by Thomas Stewart
‘The Mermaid Aquarium’ by Cheryl Pearson
A month or two at most, I told myself; a place to catch my breath. The long, dry haul of my body’s bulk along the shingle, up the beach, the dragged slug of my tail a mess of scrapes. A wake of salt and scale all the way to the waterline. I can’t complain; it’s … Continue reading ‘The Mermaid Aquarium’ by Cheryl Pearson
The Barbecue (Royal Wedding, 1981) by Paul Stephenson
Mum was mincing steak when it started with Dad’s panicked shouts. She darted out onto the lawn, freshly Flymoed, to see flames dancing, him charging across the about-to-be- christened patio like a bull in a wipeclean plastic apron of a busty bikinied woman, his legs zig-zagging, his beard ablaze, soon tangled up in bunting. The … Continue reading The Barbecue (Royal Wedding, 1981) by Paul Stephenson
‘On the lifeside’ by Sepideh Jodeyri
A poem by Sepideh Jodeyri, translated to English by Fereshteh Vaziri Nasab On the lifeside He had a shapely smell, Cruel shapes And stranger-biting eyes It seemed that he craved for my heart I poured sugar for him on the lifeside He ate and didn’t eat The lifeside is huge and high On the lifeside … Continue reading ‘On the lifeside’ by Sepideh Jodeyri
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