I trust I no longer, I change too quickly, I refute, I refute I change too quickly, I clamber, always alone, scrambling frost on height of longing, I despise my …
Cakewalk by Jericho Brown
My man swears his HIV is better than mine, that his has in it a little gold, something he can spend if he ever gets old, claims mine is full …
Pivot by Andrea Brady
The light that pivots away from us at your point in this year makes you gorgeous and sleep and always returns to you, through the ellipse coloured red for winter. …
Thank You for Your Honesty by Sophie Collins
A response to digital prints, animations and texts by Niamh Riordan 1) To disturb reality using its own means and not a subjective interpretation thereof presenting the viewer with an …
Island Home for Isabelle Huppert (La Truite) Extract by Geraldine Clarkson
After Angela Dufresne World’s in love with Isabelle. Where Isabelle goes. What Isabelle knows. Isabelle’s ideal’s to live alone in green: plumped-up on an apple-bottomed sea, or pear – ooh …
The Tempest by Isobel Dixon
After Sarah Pickstone’s painting The Tempest Don’t we all want a green and pure ferocity, the lashing rain to make us naked to ourselves. Thwarted, aslant against our lives, lean …
Poems in response to paintings by Vera Iliatova by Rachael Allen
All titles are taken from Vera’s paintings Lunatic Urbaine The man who loved me pushed me to the ground in a pool of white plants. When we tell you to …
Saruk Mohajeran by Mark Waldron
Did you not know it was me, when you knelt down to pick up your glove, that it was me in the bristly touch of the carpet? I’d had a …
Creating the Memory Collage by Alice Notley
Because I was mourning Doug so hard but push out onto page Alma, or The Dead Women I couldn’t then react too to 9/11 and I have placed it where …
Milk by Emma Jeremy
It was easy not to like him, because of the milk. It bled from every pore of him, thousands of tiny waterfalls of milk. Milk-falls. You would think that he …
The Detectives by Jane Yeh
No matter where we go, it always looks like California. Get in the car and drive. Our invisible friend Comes with us everywhere, like a shadow. He tells us how …
Skylight by Natalie Shapero
YOU DESERVE IT was what she said when I called a cab at 10 p.m. instead of hopping the 89 bus, which lets off six blocks from my place – …
The Twilight Sleep II by Alice Tomlinson
We bring them in, bursting with promise, sweet in sherbet-coloured nighties, bright spring flowers picked during a gale. We smooth wild hair and swaddle pretty heads in bales of soft …
Dare by Mark Pajak
You dare me to cross Bently road naked. Its three a.m. and we’re the only two awake and its icy and streetlights shy down their yellow. On the tarmac my …
I Need the Courage of a Cremated Woman by Natalya Anderson
Marguerite called me last night from her rotary dial. It’s been several moons since I heard her rosary beads dancing with the cord of that phone. Marguerite has been dead …
The memory-foam pillow (3rd prize: 2017 competition)
– Katherine Pierpoint
