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 cries. They packed me into a truck but … Continue reading ‘Foaling’ by Rachel Bower
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 black crumbs over the Andaman. These scenes render themselves to … Continue reading ‘TV’ by Simon Costello
One Whenever I find myself In a strange city I imagine I have found My new home And must find A way To live here Twenty-Four My life shrinks I will share All with you Forty-Eight This girl snagged The handsomer twin You once coveted They are living Now in Paris Where she suffers A treatment nearly … Continue reading Five poems by Dan O’Brien
Morning Song An open-windowed church-belled morning chimes of loss and mine; water pipes sing, and I bring back to bed a blue enamel pot of hot coffee, as silk as the slide of skin on sheets, and rough hot bread warmed in an oven kept in overnight and bite into a grape and lazy eyed the women I have been no longer fight … Continue reading Two poems by Deborah Alma
Rain on the Conservatory Roof First it rains, then it stops, then it rains again. The blackbird hops on the lawn with its keen eye, looking to be fed. The wind chimes chime by the door, the clocks tick in the clock-emptied house and though the furniture’s gone, its ghosts are here: the drawers still full of her things, the bed with the … Continue reading Three poems by Cliff Yates
But now I have put away the pepper and dirt and have a mouth all full of big yellow teeth when I was banished I spoke like the banished my, my, my, gardenia and gladioli now it rains, rains and rains like wheat in a wreath * lingers his hyacinth picking up what i put down enchant someone’s little blue husband in the … Continue reading From a Lyric Sequence by Cat Woodward
Whale-boned Corset and Other Relics How I loved the net flaring around my thighs, blue smocking smoky organza into fingertip deep slots of mussel black nibbling my chest. The power of an unscrutinised body. I was the dress. And so, the loch biting my arms as I exalt its sting of marbled August, cutting my fingers as they pull through resisting cold—remote luxury … Continue reading Two poems by Sarah Hymas
The Cottage in the Wood Be careful of the stories you keep, my mother said. Peel back their metaphors and check under their skins before you put them into your basket. Mother forgets, sometimes, the basket, the tightness of its weave, how big its handle. Life was simpler under lamp-posts. It’s hard to remember when Mother stopped dropping breadcrumbs. Only that the birds … Continue reading Two poems by Hannah Linden
Movement My grandmother standing on a West Ireland pier trying not wanting to take it all in the Atlantic both the linctus and the tall dark man pushing it to her My grandmother feeling as young as she is with the odour of rope and the spit of birds ripe to distil in the pits of these kids’ hopes and memories My grandmother … Continue reading Two poems by Humphrey Astley
25B the bear’s leg scorched a bronze bolt on black fur too close yr grandaughter’s heart reduced to menthol cinders scented jumpers chanel factoids &breathe standing in the shadow of a yellow fiesta for anti-climb read anti cry read girly anti social the awkward silence … Continue reading Three poems by Sarah Crewe
