during the course of a particular day the word shapen happens sharpens how I see the snow how I know it is what it is only listening to it glistening …
Many Bird Roast by Rachael Allen
I came in, dandy and present arguing for a moratorium on meat of the kind splayed out on the table, legs akimbo like a fallen-over ice skater skidding on her …
Kissing Edwin Morgan by Roddy Lumsden
seems uncanny because he is gay and I am straight and because the day is especially cold. A hungry kisser, kissing him brings out the hive that is him. A …
john
i do not know my grandfather, who is a famous photographer who works primarily in black and white. although i know he is not a large man, i think of …
The Littlest Giant
In the bolted summer grass, he’s just another over-grown boy fiddling the stem of his pen, sipping a cup of tea. The …
I Watched a Soldier Aim as the Deaf Boy
I watched a soldier aim as the deaf boy took iron and fire in his mouth – his face on the asphalt, that map of bone and opened valves. It …
mineral intimacy
unabashedly love the minerals of you / I always was a wind-fuckèd gull for the White Cliffs pressd hard & lithic between the lower elements of yr lips / When …
Five Go To The Island Again (commended poem: 2016 competition)
Timmy is long dead, and the others scattered. Like picnic crumbs, thinks Anne, on those occasional sweetly devastating days when there’s a gust of island air, coast-cupped, hot and sandy, …
Ancrene Wisse (commended poem: 2016 competition)
for homeless women everywhere OUTER RULE I : Of Devotions They have shaggy quads and, down inside their cowboy boots at least one cloven hoof, and, under silk that …
Colonsay (commended poem: 2016 competition)
From a certain position it is possible to see a strange agitation of light as sliding frames and the slight adjustments of falling rain assumed into the sea …
THE DISCOVERY OF NEPTUNE BY JOHN COUCH ADAMS, 1845 (3rd prize: 2016 competition)
I Imagine it thus: a ballroom full of ash and one speck moves. It is not clearly to be seen, yet it whispers still. I dreamed it, Your Majesty – …
The Bittern (2nd prize: 2016 competition)
Mate-less marginal screened by reeds the other side of the marsh terrestrial averse to flight shy of light, never seen but guessed the buff barred breast-plumage wry neck angled heavenwards …
The Self-Made Man (1st prize: 2016 competition)
after The Abominable Dr Phibes Once you’ve redone your face – sat before the bloody canvas flinching under glass, stitched the quilt of jowls, broken in the nose, napkinned the …
House and Field
When Granny and Grandpa sold the old farmhouse and gave up their subscription to The Field, boxes of junk arrived for Dad to house and soon mildewed editions of The …
Fretwork
What comes moors itself like a claw or core. A child’s shoe built into a wall, dressmaker’s dummy mute and white among the trees. What comes knuckles sulfur and ulcers …
sloe
what was this, as blue as autumn evenings or black as the bible? hanging, in october’s showers, in the mists, so dry it shrivelled everything to bitterness? the sloe. we …
