Love, I felt you leave our bed last night, I heard you dress and go. Hush-deep darkness hinted it was late. You barely left an indent in your pillow, your …
2014 Competition: Commended Poems
Paul Stephenson for ‘Oppositions of Want’ Tim Turnbull for ‘Happy Times, Old Man’ Geraldine Clarkson for ‘Love-Cow’ Bethany W Pope for ‘My Mother’s Keeshond’
Far-Fetched
Das ist der doux commerce! – Karl Marx Ay de mi – a pin- prick of blood, scarcely more than a pore flaunting its friendship with a vein; bright …
A little girl I knew when she was my mother
A little girl I knew when she was my mother emerged from the pages of a bed from sheets the colour of old snow crawled from the …
Pareidolia
Melted likeness in the mountain’s landslide, like the prophet in a crust of bread, defers to the face in the brain that is part idolatry, part will to survive. We …
The Animals That Love You, At Dusk
I pass through the fig that is your body your compass rose in its ripeness it owns both nadir & zenith I pass above & beneath it while all around …
Stoppages
(after M. Duchamp) A line cast over water settles on the water skin. Salmon engage in piscine trigonometry, track the crooked trajectory of light. Pouting courtiers, indifferent to our …
Ethiopia Shall Stretch Forth Her Hands (The Seven Commandments of Joe Louis)
Joe Louis, mid-clinch, is lifting his opponent – the six-foot six inch ‘Ambling Alp’, Primo Carnera, – into the air. In the Hague, Italian and Ethiopian officials have come to …
Pantheon
Pan follows you to a wet wall to pebble dash your hopes that you’d at least seen some green in the fair silos. Shivered when you felt intentions were not …
The Letter Always Arrives at its Destination (1st prize: 2013 Competition)
Then I wrote often to the sea, to its sunk rope and its salt bed, to the large weed mass lipping the bay. The small glass bottles would be …
To all laments and purposes
Against platinum birches I want nothing here [but you]. We have trees at home. Shall I wing you the courtyard fountain’s midnight palaver, to lull the list of …
Canakkale
All but a century gone. By the thousand, pinned down on slopes, on beachheads shot to death, and rawboned, ours and theirs, blown to pieces. Two-faced anthropos, late again, stirs …
Gianfranco Faustino defends his Machine for the Extraction of the Soul (3rd prize: 2013 Competition)
And, sir, can you describe your ingenious machine? A finely-wrought confection of filigree and tendon, a four-chambered suction pump, needles thin as vinegar, a glass holding vial for the …
The Wolf Man (2nd prize: 2013 Competition)
Of course I believe that The Wolf Man is the best of my horror films – because he is mine. – Lon Chaney Jr. You can’t know how it …
Control
I’m reading some things Charlie wrote about cancer and Colette because I can’t sleep and because what he wrote is beautiful and it’s cold outside because it’s November and my …
Apologies from the Ground Up
The staircase hasn’t changed much through the centuries I’d notice it, my own two eyes now breaking down the larger vertical distance into many smaller distances I’ll conquer almost absently: …
! (‘It entered creation…’)
It entered creation as sudden as angel or injury – the stacked letters of io, a tower of fire. Already it is intimate with bishops, philosophers, flouting borders, stowed in …
Why Explain the Precise by Way of the Less Precise?
– Timothy Eastman, Physics and Whitehead: Process, Quantum and Experience It doesn’t seem right to think blunt blows could do a thing like that but we do know arrowheads are knapped with …
The Golden Dragon
It was raining in Soho. We were in a Chinese round the corner from where they used to live – a street of tenements long since razed for a wing …
An Easy Day for a Lady
The Grépon has disappeared. Of course, there are still some rocks standing there, but as a climb it no longer exists. Now that it has been done by two women …
