Oakley Flanagan I once thought we had fought to become entitled to love & divorce; leave the parade, go home mindless. I was near senseless, forgetting what we’d inherited. See, …
The Owl
Maya C Popa Took off from the field again away from you and back in my direction. We share an owl now – we did not mean for this to …
The Mystic
Raymond Antrobus The lightbulb in The Mystic’s living room is reluctant. The pink laminated sofa looks like a fat dick in a greasy condom. The Mystic sits in the deck …
To Turn
Amineh Abou Kerech They threw a very little ping-pong ballat my country, a very little ball. I thought the ball would come backand everything would be okay but I was …
my poems
Danez Smith my poems are fed up & getting violent.i whisper to them tender tender bridge bridge but they say bitch ain’t no time, make me a weapon! i hold a poem to a …
Caddisfly Larvae
Fiona Benson Trichoptera At first we take its chamberfor a twig –a dark lengthamong the dredgings; then it moves,and we see it is a sleevestitched and glued,careful découpage of wet, …
Poetry London Clore Prize 2019: Highly Commended
Catherine Higgins-Moore I’d been waiting months For a house in the new estate. They weren’t allowed murals. They’d built-in kitchens. Tarmaced driveways. An address that didn’t mark your card. I …
Poetry London Clore Prize 2019: Highly Commended
Nicholas Murray WODGE I’d like to think it was our tongues,recalcitrant, not coldly mocking,that made the new boy into “Wodge”.The best that we could do. So Wodziński, the doctor’s son,shared …
Poetry London Clore Prize 2019: 3rd PRIZE
Anita Pati Manju Because he liked the toddy,because he twinkled for her,he beat her.Because he towered andshe was a bird, because he was sousedand the kerosene caskto cook sabzi exploded it …
Poetry London Clore Prize 2019: 2nd PRIZE
Amaan Hyder duas a dua for my mother the head girl / leaving school a year early to be married to move to england / the headmistress announcing it at …
Poetry London Clore Prize 2019: 1st PRIZE
Roger Bloor The Ghost of Molly Leigh Pleads, Yes Cries for Exemplarie Justice Against the Arbitrarie, Un-exampled Injustice of Her Accusers Question the First: By which Devils are the Operations …
from ‘New Cemetery’
Simon Armitage ~ dear Hey Lane Cemetery Resident Poet, a.k.a. self-appointed Clerk of Works (Cadavers Division), a.k.a. one-man Inspectorate of Graveyard Bins; why shouldn’t plots be sunk by banana-yellow Caterpillars …
Things Already Lost
Anthony Anaxagorou A dead rat could be a dead lung except nobody wants to touch a dead rat without gloves. At the end of the funeral my son asks when …
Very
Mimi Khalvati Very… the very first time that I heard – or worked out what it meant since at that age English was still a mystery – the word ‘very’, …
Where’s Wally?
Lucy Mercer My aunt tells me elderly Halloween stories of her friends’ husbands exploding blood all over the curtains. I cover the holes in my face – I am filled …
How to master the art of poetry submissions
1. Here’s the headline: read the magazine you’re submitting to, before you decide to submit. You’ll get a sense of where your poems will best fit, and you’ll have an …
The Catalogue of Errors by Helen Mort
not that you fall headlong through the spoilt floorboards of your house drop through layers of darkness ground floor, basement, lower ground slowing, opening steady as a lift not that …
Beggars of Life by Denise Riley
The movie is over, yet the screening reels on through your eyes – you’ve left the cinema, but you’re still seeing ‘in’ graceful Ozu, or ‘in’ kindly Kore-Eda, or in …
The Swords by Abigail Parry
Nine shafts in steely fluency, between the headboard and the wall grey-blue like ice or gunships brute and serious a face between cupped hands and all the saints polite as …
Airplane Above My Bed by Matthew Dickman
Did I die before I was born? Did I have to have a body first, wasn’t I a nobody before I was a baby on earth? Wasn’t I a sucker …
