Issue 25
Peter Sansom

3 Poems

Poetry Society i.m. Sarah Maguire Sarah half a lifetime ago I met you in a meeting at the top of Betterton Street. I remember your tank-commander’s watch exactly an hour wrong.  You were one year older and half a lifetime further on.  I think we made each other frivolous, though you were serious in your […]

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Sarah Corbett

3 Poems

Tree (i) The oak tree planted at my son’s birth stands at fifteen feet in its thirtieth year. This early in the season, it holds its crisp leaves tight as gifts for a lost child, rustles in the wind like tissue paper. I listen for its heart which sleeps on, deep in the cool of […]

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Dane Holt

Gas

Gas The Friday he has your money by doesn’t come. ‘The reports are the reports,’ he says, not answering the phone. He’s a match and every room he enters has been filling steadily with gas. The anniversary passes like a kidney stone which gives him another good idea. The best he’s had for a while. […]

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Mark Russell

2 Poems

Commuters My body is like an urban car share. In the morning my ghosts climb aboard. They relish the journey without complaint. They like it best when I have time for breakfast and ask them how they’d like to spend the day. They are happy to come shopping, mow the lawn, search the internet for […]

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Joanna Guthrie

3 Poems

Vicar prays on the beach Steady upwards on his knees, ruminant by stewing sea. Fear pestering him like a litter of pups. Shhh. These big waves blot out the smallers. Irritated. Next to them he is a dragonfly of a thing flitting the water’s roof, not long in the world: snapped in, snipped out. His […]

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Katherine Duffy

3 Poems

Eclipsed The third mask is gone. My favourite. How soft it was; its fleur-de-lys pattern, snug blues on taupe, didn’t make my skin look sallow or grey, but rather fresh, I thought. A cloud on my face, it blotted me safely, as I walked past shuttered shops, stood in queues. It held back smiles and […]

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Sean Lysaght

3 Poems

May A maiden aunt, who approached Those dazzling heaps of white As she crossed a field to the well, Along a worn path Her nephew followed in June When the blossom was all over. I fished obsessively in the river And made her anxious. (She believed That the big pool by the bridge Had swallowed […]

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Michelle Penn

2 Poems

Retablo for impossible waters Every river a keening. The Seine: I was flayed on my back, dress shrouding, shoes drifting away, I was inventing my own madness and drowning happily in it. The Rhine: I posed on a rock, singing men to their deaths, that must have been me, the woman left and lost and […]

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Greta Stoddart

3 Poems

Slow Cinema Slow Cinema You’re late but it doesn’t matter with this one says the man just go on in and the place is empty so the film’s showing to no one and as it happens it happens to be showing an empty auditorium much like the one you’ve just sat down in with a […]

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Iain Bailey

2 Poems

Trim I had him under the clippers. I asked him apropos if He could have been present At one gig in all of music history What would it have been? He thought about this for a while. Little sheaves of dry dark hair Fell about his shoulders. All The blonde goes out of it At […]

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Martin Malone

2 Poems

In An Orkney Wood Set off through a kissing gate and walk the old drover’s road through Binscarth and Wasdale past the loch to Refuge Corner. In the silver light of afternoon, alder and ash crowd a hoggin track shrubbed with Purslane. This hillside confounds the myth of a treeless north, as the rook-laden canopy […]

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Mary O'Donnell

Cocoa l’Orange

­Cocoa l’Orange     Like a crouching battalion, the thirty houses in Heatherbell Way nestle along the incline of the mountain. The McEntee’s long landing window is positioned directly opposite the window of the Kearney’s master bedroom, slightly to the left of its en-suite bathroom. Since the first lockdown, Jake Kearney has spent more time […]

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Nicholas Murgatroyd

Fallen Stock

Fallen stock   Tony’s out of the door and jogging across the yard before the trailer’s through the gate, a sheepdog worrying his ankles. A moment later his face is at Ed’s window, a tired moon in the dawn light. They’re up on the top fields. Do you need a hand getting out of the […]

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Kavan Stafford

My Husband’s Doing Soup

My Husband’s Doing Soup     A cyclist shot by, passing so close to Elizabeth that she felt his Lycra-covered arm brush against hers. She stumbled to the side, almost tripping over her own feet. He didn’t even glance her way. He disappeared into the fog, the steady rattle of his wheels on the metal […]

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Henry Tydeman

An Unravelling

An Unravelling   Julie turned the corner into her street with a touch of grumpiness about her. It was raining steadily, though it hadn’t been when she left her house half an hour before, which was why she had decided against a coat. Now she was wet, the rain having made short shrift of her […]

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