Featured Writing

Hattie Atkins: All Creatures

You emerge, bowlegged, and blinking into the sun,skin paled like fruits before the harvest. I ask whereyou’ve been, but you sigh and shake your headand we tread the path home, careful and unspeaking,mud emptying from your pocketslike an offering. I offer a bowl and I offer a bed, but you’re sateddespite all you’ve abstained, and…

Jane Hartshorn: ‘Cardinal’ and ‘Blood Count’

Cardinalwe are crouching overa rabbittrying to discernthe cause of deathtangle of innardsbrocade of purplespleen hot breathof flesh crampedcentipede of thesmall intestinethe dashed cardinalof its open throatindigo-soaked andsteaming runicmy tongue lying heavyin my mouthsqueezing musclesin sequencethe sound of grass and violettearing from the tap-root Blood Countthe cold of the instrumentas it pushes underslipping into dermislike an…

Scott Lilley: sonnet simp

to begin, and no matter how deconstructed the form, in a collection of sonnetsit is somewhat unavoidable that the reader may expect to interpret a love poem.What I mean by this is that said love poem may not necessarily be some overtor passionate elucidation rather may contain yearning, an object of desire, the whimto achieve…

Piero Toto: Trade Lite

the 55 to Clerkenwellbears bodies I don’t needcrouching at the backthey ask why sad, cherie?you love me like Diana Rosson summits I can’t reachat Xmas here I swapa crown for tortoise dustwhile queens dance& vogue asking~?the lights crawl back upto whisper turn aroundlet’s walk me backgoodnight I typeblue ticksremember me todaymy mother slumpedin dreamsplastic               wakes…

Joe Marsh: Glebe Cow Monologue

GLEBE COW: if – upright –gotta start moo own statemoo polyglot statelick it from ice(drools)if only oronly if – or –parse? the moo fieldherd the moochainprove moosengot plans – may₿huh?(drools)state is as it used to ₿(drools)coulda ₿nsellin at Sothe₿ston grand of eth – oo ooover the moon ormooin that it’s warmer – ortoot of the…

Michelle Dyrness: extract from Night for Day

Michelle Dyrness Michelle Lynn Dyrness’ work as a visual artist explores methods using accident, intuition and the suggestive revealed in the unexpected. She has exhibited extensively, and is a frequent collaborator across disciplines, exploring the ways image and language inform one another. Recent publications include Square Confits (Overground Underground, 2022), individual imprints from So Went…

Lydia Unsworth: Walk Around Town

fairy lights rock from the street lightsin a curled windwe thought we’d see starsbut they’ve gone and done thiswrapped a rough blanket round our knees we cried in the direction of the seathe black on black water slap slap slap in my faceyour presence like a hand on my hard hearta push in the chestthe…

Aodán McCardle: an extract from small increments

Aodán McCardle Aodán is a painter, poet,  ex:gardener/tattooist, he has delivered babies warm in the dark and wrapped the dead in white hospital cotton. He is a co-editor at Veer Books. His PhD is on Action as Articulation of the Contemporary Poem though physicality and doubt are the site of meaning and the stance respectively…

Colm O’Shea: an extract from [Untitled]: (a meditation)

Week Two.- There were rabbits here last night, I tell her, here in the garden.Three. Three rabbits, all around the same size, adults, I think. They came out in the evening, right around now, possibly a little earlier. They stayed around for a while and disappeared again.- They might be waiting for us to go…

Wendy Allen: Unreliable Narration in Prague

Did we split up in Prague? We spent a night in that weird hoteldo you remember?where our room, and the hotel gym,were accessed by funicular,and you knew I didn’t like heights and the smellof the incline made me swallow bile andyou told me you’d fucked R the night I saidI wanted a baby and didn’t…

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