*****
Anindya Banerjee • Jane Breen • Jude Brigley • Colin Carberry • Stephen Claughton • Helen Fallon • Stephen Finucane • Diarmuid Fitzgerald • Angela France • George Franklin • Euron Griffith • Hilary Hares • Sue Hubbard • Linda Ibbotson • Jennifer Johnson • Wendy Klein • Sydney Lea • Michael Loveday • Christine McNeill • Kathleen McPhilemy • Mark Mansfield • Jean O’Brien • Abigail Ottley • Matthew Paul • Tom Phillips • Kathy Pimlott • Selese Roche • Daniel Rye • Myra Schneider • Richard Tyrrell • Merryn Williams • Patrick Williamson • Robin Lindsay Wilson
*****
Anindya Banerjee: Poem
UNTITLED
In memory’s sumptuous palace
It is always ten past two
on a winter’s afternoon
in Deshapriya Park.
The antique scoreboard judders.
The side batting isn’t doing too well
and Doshi is bowling his off spinners
from the street end.
Lunch has been an adventure,
a cornucopia of food,
fit for a king,
and so much more for a
seven-year-old.
Every lunchtime and
dinner is like that.
Lentils, two types of vegetables,
two types of fish,
and a chutney to
follow.
Too much food.
Too much love.
A stroll to the park
is the natural antidote
to indigestion
with the heartbreak of
a December sun
clothing the grass.
In memory’s palace
there is always room in the park.
And green spaces
and old grandfathers on a bench.
My grandfather, staggering
with his memory at a
young age,
The porters playing
a card game, which he dimly
observes with a wan interest.
Where does the world go
when memories vanish
or creep in and out like a
mouse in the dark?
Where nothing is safe,
nothing is secure,
nothing feels right,
nailed down,
on point.
And in memory’s palace
the batting side
continues to collapse,
And Doshi bowls his off
spin in the park.
Anindya Banerjee is Professor of Economics at the University of Birmingham. He has been an academic from the age of twenty-five and has worked at a large number of universities around the world. His specialization is in the world of modelling data but his love is in art, in history, and in the poems he writes regularly.
*****
Jane Breen: Three Poems
WOMAN AS TREE
Roots creep through the dark zapote flesh of my mother,
fingering their way to light. Women take my rhizomes,
pull the tender stalk, wipe mucus from my leaves,
sow me in the ground. Which tree am I? The mesquite,
with fishbone leaves, pods hanging as a dead man’s bones,
or a slender lapacho craning candy buds into the sky.
I sing the lay of trees, but music stops as the axeman
chops at roots and tears my limbs. He rips me from the
earth and shoves me in a pot, whets his knife on my stem,
splitting bark and spilling sap. Fruit ripens in an amber pod,
though I hide it from his itch, urge birds to steal it,
fly beyond the clouds. He riles at my deceit, kicks
me into the drag and pimps me to a lumberjack –
aboard this truck, a distant mill chines a new lullaby.
PIETÀ
(Peter Kollwitz, 06.02.1896 – 23.10.1914)
Solid in her hands – she smells
the pear wood ripe for cutting.
No umber strokes of etching,
no blurred and softened lines:
a mother’s body aching
for steel knives. Scalpel gouges
prime timber as she scorps
him from grain: toy drum
around his neck, eyes blank
as spent shells, boy snagged
on trench wire of a war she did not
mark. This, her shrift, scratching
him alive, fingers brail wood
and ink seeps through a shroud.
NEW DAY
You wake clawing
under sea skin,
grasping for the torc
of beach, waves crumbling
into spray and breeze
on your body like
sunlight through silk.
Gills in your neck shut
as you sink deeper,
night trawling
through lungs, kelp
netting your torso
in this roily void.
No whale song here,
just a monitor
echo and
his rasp from beyond
an opiate veil –
you chained
to a widow’s bed.
Jane Breen is a writer and bass player from Donegal. She won 3rd prize in the Plaza Short Story Competition 2023 and 1st prize in the Five Lamps Arts Festival Flash Fiction Competition 2025. Her work has been published in Powercut, Dreich and The Apiary magazines. She is an MA student at QUB and bass player in the rock band Innocents Abroad which has just released an album, Late Spring.
*****
Jude Brigley: Four Poems
TRANSPLANT
‘En’s coming for tea,’ Gran said.
When my grandmothers used en for both genders –
I thought them ill educated, guessed a pyat
must be the local name for a crow, but underlined
it as dead and common in my diary back home.
Also, ingrained/degrained. I still ponder
which is right. It seems that alright boy
works a treat for either gender if you are
stood at the bar in Narberth’s Ivy Bush
or if we should meet at Martletwy ferry.
And when my father observed that the apples
were hanking on the trees, it was not made-up.
The word was passed on through churning afternoons
at the Cleddau farm. So much we did not know
or half-heard, laughing as Dada repeated
that he came from horny-handed sons
of the soil – daughters too it seems. Town dwellers,
we did not see ourselves as migrants for the coal
and the iron but teased our country cousins
for their accents, feeling superior, correcting
their unsophisticated lexis. We were Valley
folk, using a singular word that linked us back
to the harvest gathering or the milky parlour,
but unattuned to our own odd cadences.
TENACITY
Driving at night in the snowy weather
of Dublin, Ohio, I contemplate how life
may proceed. In the silence of snow,
the swish of traffic is feedback, lights smudge
as if an apocalyptic movie. The gutters
are piled high with white light, as we
lose our way on familiar roads, turned
fresh by the odd light and narrow spaces.
After a mile we turn in a left-hand street
where the sludge is thick and wheels
judder, only to be overtaken by a boy racer
who slides sideways and back with rash
nonchalance at grinding brakes, his wheels
spinning. We are more sedate, follow
the tracks the plough left as markers.
They piled the crystals truck high
in the Whole Foods car park.
As we drive the black, snaking road,
the frozen tears continue to bamboozle,
resolved to cover – walkway, concourse, bush,
a barren tree – with a bounty of feathered fruit.
SHERRY ANYONE 1968?
The warden of my Hall of Residence
invites me to her room for sherry
before dinner on the High Table.
I write politely that I will not partake
and go to the Woodman for pie
and chips without much pondering.
Next day, I am summoned to her
room, accused of rudeness. Not so much
an invitation more a command, I quip.
She regales me that I need better
social skills, making my class
credentials bristle. You will
be invited for sherry and dinner dates,
she says. I only shrug, I will decline
again, making for the door.
The warden thinks herself vinatero
guarding the yellow liquid – amontillado,
manzanilla, oloroso, cream – for the few.
At Plasnewydd Street we drink QC
at Xmas, cheap plonk but agreeable
to our taste, No big deal to drink
and argue around the kitchen
table with three generations
of astute, quick-thinking minds.
The warden gets it wrong. Invites
never come. Her circle is drawn –
pale as albariza, with no sunburnt mirth.
At Xmas I drink a bottle dry, talk
loud and much – my glass a swirl
of gold, toasting the home I love.
Jude Brigley is Welsh. She has been a teacher, an editor and a performance poet. She is now writing more for the page and has been published in over a hundred journals including, Door is a Jar, Blue Nib and The Lake.
*****
Colin Carberry: Poem
SAFE HOUSE
We installed CCTV, wire, double locks,
night lights, and reinforced door protectors;
and raised the outer wall six layers of blocks,
topped with steel spikes. Let rumor take its course.
“He has that house lookin’ like a prison…”
“With these foreigners you can never tell…”
“Narco” is the label they agree on,
but “terrorista” does the rounds as well.
We know it’s pure green envy. They’re pissed off
because their joyless lives have gotten stale–
’cause their efforts to have me tossed in jail
backfired. Safe as houses now, we grin
and watch each cur-captive clamp back down on
the bitter bone of their contention: life.
Colin Carberry is a Toronto-born Irish writer and translator now living in Linares, Mexico. His work has appeared in numerous journals, newspapers and anthologies worldwide (Poetry Ireland Review, Exile: The Literary Quarterly, The Irish Times, Reforma, Jailbreaks: 99 Canadian Sonnets, El Norte, and The Antigonish Review) and in three poetry collections, and his poems have been translated in many languages. His Selected Poems, Ghost Homeland (Scotus Press, Dublin), was translated into Bangla and published in Kolkata, India, in June 2024.
*****
Stephen Claughton: Two Poems
DOG DAYS
‘Yes, these are the dog days, Fortunatus’
‘Under Sirius’—W. H. Auden
Earth’s cracked like the poet’s face.
For weeks it has been as dry
as one of his own martinis.
It’s the fag end of summer,
a lethal cocktail of
barbecue weather and drought.
Grass fires burn out of control.
Hosepipes are banned.
Jaundiced lawns play dead.
These are the dog days, indeed:
even at night we stew
under the sky’s tight lid.
I retire to the cave of making—
nothing doing there:
the Muse has bunked off to Baiae.
I’m stuck with time on my hands
and I’m making no use of it,
the creative sap run dry.
Outside, the garden tap
drips like a water clock.
Everything’s being wasted.
Come evening, I do the rounds
with a leaky watering can,
refreshing thirsty plants.
A potted azalea croaks;
the frog squatting under its leaves
utters a guttural thanks.
I’m like a capricious god,
reigning over its world.
I pour; it responds on cue.
Our own gods have deserted us.
Whatever happens now,
we’ve only ourselves to blame.
THE FLOATING WORLD
after Hokusai
Yi Di invented rice wine
for the Emperor Yu
and here it is being made.
The liquor’s squeezed from a sack,
pressed by a wooden beam
that’s weighted with a rock
slung underneath one end.
Two men sit on the bar
to add their weight to it.
One, astride, holds tight;
the other, sideways on,
balances as best he can.
A third figure, bending low,
grasps a bamboo pizzle
that pisses into a trough.
Hokusai, Taitō, Manji,
whatever he calls himself,
the old-man-crazy-to-paint
hardly touched a drop,
whereas his daughter, Ōi,
sole carer and apprentice,
drank enough for two.
Painting the floating world,
she did her best to drown hers.
Artist or piss artist? Both.
Stephen Claughton’s poems have appeared widely in print and online. He has published two pamphlets, The War with Hannibal (Poetry Salzburg, 2019) and The 3-D Clock (Dempsey & Windle, 2020). He reviews for The High Window and London Grip and chairs Ver Poets. Links to his reviews, poems and pamphlets can be found at: www.stephenclaughton.com.
*****
Helen Fallon: Three Poems
DIVING FOR WORDS
On my side of the table a purple notebook,
deep green malachite beads you bought in Sri Lanka,
an Irish-English dictionary, notes scrawled
in pencil on narrow margins, a bowl of fat pink apples.
On your side of the table a gold-edged card,
an invitation to your niece’s wedding,
a sheet of ink-splattered golf scores,
the history book I bought you for your birthday.
Between us:
A China teapot stands an island in the centre.
Fingers brush as we both reach out, laugh.
Currents stilled, we trawl for words
pearls scattered in the ocean of our thoughts.
IN THE FOREST
Gunfire rattle shatters the air. Children scream,
short legs dart between spruce trees, twigs snap, bark crunches.
A fair-haired boy crouches in the belly of a rusted tank.
CEASEFIRE. GET IN TWO LINES, NOW a loudspeaker crackles.
The general marches down the row, calls out SPY or NOT.
They answer yes or no. A whistle blows. GAME OVER.
Guns clatter to the ground.
They run to join me at the wooden fence.
Can we have ice cream now?
AN ORDINARY MARCH MONDAY
i.m. Senator Billy Fox, died 12 March, 1974
Spring unwraps itself, green shoots peep up
around twisted tree trunks. Lenten roses open,
coral pink blossoms bleed into red.
Dad cuts back the ivy that shrouds the house,
talks of planting the early spuds.
I’d helped chit the seed potatoes, lined them
eyes up, in egg cartons in the barn.
The windows were laced with ice.
An ordinary March Monday–sardines for the tea,
homework at the cluttered kitchen table, then kneel
to say the Rosar–the joyful mysteries.
Nearby, a senator, visiting his girlfriend, is shot dead,
the house set alight, the family Bible with all their history
in this contested space, thrown on the flames.
Helen Fallon is a retired librarian and lives in Kildare. Her work has been published in a number of journals and anthologies including Skylight 47, Poetry Ireland Review, A New Ulster, The Ogham Stone and Washing Windows: Irish Women write Poetry III and IV. Her poem ‘Shell-Shocked Land’ was placed second in the Poetry Ireland/Trócaire 2019 poetry competition. She was selected for Poetry Ireland Introductions 2022 and awarded a John Hewitt Summer School 2024 Bursary. She enjoys writing, reading and travelling.
*****
Stephen Finucane: Two Poems
TREES AT DAWN, SHANKILL
You stepped out on a November morning
to discover that the stripped trees had raised
themselves up to stand imperiously
and range around on every horizon;
primed, composed, pronouncing themselves against
the pearl dawn in bold configurations.
The air reeked of the night’s intimacies:
moments, phenomena known to those trees.
They were silently declamatory.
You did not attempt to decipher them;
not merely because their untraceable
intricacy must surely befuddle
your effort, but because you knew better
than seek presences beyond presences.
SHANGANAGH SHADOW
Time being finite, you snatched at any sight
you discerned of lights that burned or might burn
beyond the mere here and now and you turned
to dreams dreamed to free you, keep you in flight
from what you knew unalterably to be
unalterable.
You lived, however, moment to moment.
There was, of course, no buttressing design.
The life that you bore was not for yielding
to needs, creeds and depleted chimeras.
You watched your shallow shadow creep across
the lustrous face of the cemetery wall
you were edging past that sunlit evening.
You recognised your clenched, prophetic form,
your unnervingly distinct uniqueness
unerringly articulated there.
You saw that although it moved as you moved,
it failed to look as though alive to you.
It seemed rather the spent remnant of you,
a glimpse of the delible life you’d lived
visible after the event of your
demise.
Stephen Finucane is Irish. He has worked in education for the past thirty years, at present in adult education, delivering courses to the unemployed. He lived in London in the late 1980s and early 1990s. He taught in an inner-London comprehensive school for seven years. He has also lived and taught in Germany and Cyprus. His work has appeared in Crannóg, Poetry Salzburg Review, The Wild Word and Drawn to the Light.
*****
Diarmuid Fitzgerald: Poem
WATER DIAMONDS
for Arlene Fox
We followed our noses from the village
and somehow ended up at Coney Island.
The heat from my car almost made us pass out.
There was a row of houses facing the sun.
We left our shoes, wallets, and keys on the rocks
hoping no one would take them away.
There was one family with a whining child,
crying about something we could not hear.
The tide was out, rocks were slobbered
with seaweed. The sand absorbed the light.
The water was surprisingly warm this far north.
Seaweed floated like hags hair clutching our ankles.
The waves mirrored the ripples of sand
and the pull of the water tickled our feet.
The sunlight sparkled in asterisks wherever
we looked. You scooped up the water
and called the droplets water diamonds,
then splashed me and wetted my clothes.
A boat far out looked like a statue,
hand raised aloft.
Diarmuid Fitzgerald’s first collection of poems The Singing Hollow was published in 2021. Two collections of haiku were published, Thames Way in 2015, and A Thousand Sparks in 2018. All these books were published by Alba Publishing. Follow him on Instagram @deewriters. See http://www.deewriter.com for personal writings.
*****
Angela France: Two Poems
GRAVE GOODS
What would you leave in my grave
to sustain and comfort me?
Perhaps a bag of magnetic words
to arrange and rearrange themselves
into eternity. Walking boots, their tongues
holding the shape of my ankle, sides
ready to cradle my feet.
A dog collar, supple and rounded,
a dark bar and ovalled hole to show
a neck-size, a few hairs fringing the edge.
Something of the woods on the hill;
beech masts, acorns, a few bronzed leaves,
a walking stick and water bottle.
A lighter and kindling, fuel for a fire
to gaze into. No room for my bed
but some of the mahogany rails,
one of the springs from its creaky base.
Books of course, however many will fit,
the problem of choosing will not be mine.
MEETING CHARLIE
A boy lopes towards us through the long grass
loose-limbed and bouncy, his long black coat
flying out behind. He’s at that stage of growth
that gives him height but not enough to pass
for a man. His cheek is round and smooth,
he has that beauty that glows in some boys
before they are all big feet and hands and noise.
He skids to his knees to fuss my dog, amused
by the dog’s hard leaning, asks what he’s called.
He springs to his feet, arms spread wide, No Way!
that’s my name too! with sunshine in his grin.
It’s my plan for Charlies to rule the world!
He leaves me smiling as he strides away,
but saddened by how the world’s arrows will sting.
Angela France’s publications include Occupation (Ragged Raven, 2009), Lessons in Mallemaroking (Nine Arches, 2011), Hide (Nine Arches, 2013) and The Hill (Nine Arches, 2017). The Hill was developed into a multimedia poetry show which Angela toured, funded by Arts Council England. Her latest collection, Terminarchy, came out from Nine Arches in Summer 2021. Angela teaches creative writing at the University of Gloucestershire and in community settings. She runs the monthly reading series in Cheltenham, ‘Buzzwords’
*****
George Franklin: Two Poems
A POEM LIKE A TRAIN STATION
For Francisco & Flor Larios
This poem is like a train station.
Down long staircases, escalators,
Are the platforms of coming, going,
Of tourists and businessmen, children
In strollers, their mothers staring
At the steel and glass of the ceiling.
Passengers are lined up, made to wait,
Boarding is not yet allowed. I take
A chocolate bar from my pocket
And offer you some—you break a piece
Smaller than mine and slip it into
Your mouth. The crowd moves down the staircase.
The train for Sevilla is leaving.
Through the window, fields, abandoned farms,
Trees stunted by sunlight and drought, roads
Leading off into the hills, towns where
Only a few old men and women
Sit and wait for each other to die.
But then Sevilla appears, a stone
Jigsaw puzzle of streets, shop windows,
Balcony of our friends’ apartment,
A familiar voice. This poem is
The train station of our arrival
And the station of their departure.
They are rare birds from Nicaragua,
Birds with bright plumage. They can tell when
The weather is changing. They listen
To the conversations at bus stops,
To the way candidates complain on
Television, blame immigrants from
Latin America, from China,
And even Africa. The weather
Was turning cold, too cold for birds with
Bright feathers, migrating birds who would
Die in a cage, their feathers covered
With shit and ugly words. So they left
For Sevilla, for churches and feasts,
For palaces with gardens where birds
Can hide in the dark green of lemon
And orange trees, where Machado played
As a child, where the air is sweetened
By orange blossoms and the fountains
Tell stories to the sky and black earth.
This poem is a train station where
We meet our friends gone to Sevilla,
Who walk together in the evening,
Their bright plumage reflecting the last
Rays of the Andalusian sun.
THE MOST POWERFUL ACTS OF IMAGINATION
TAKE PLACE IN THE WORST OF CIRCUMSTANCES
The women at the prison talk to each
Other about their boyfriends outside,
About their children’s fathers, about
The children themselves, who would
Now be unrecognizable except
For a photograph or a Christmas card
Several years old. The boyfriends
Wait for them. The children, no longer
Children, wait for them, receive emails
Describing Thanksgiving or how
They used to watch the news
Every morning before someone stole
The remote or before a guard took away
The remote to punish someone who
Fought with someone else over what
Show to watch. Whichever way it
Happened, the remote is gone, and
No one can get another even though
If they were on the outside they could
Have one delivered the next morning.
Some of the women will get out soon,
Get back to family, boyfriends,
The grown-up children. They may
Even see the ones who enlisted, who
Come back home on leave, in camo
Fatigues, with a duffle bag on one
Shoulder and with stories they don’t
Want to tell. Some of the women lost
Their children to adoption
And don’t know where they are
Or who they’ve become. If these
Women write letters, they don’t know
Where to send them or what name to
Put on the envelope. On the outside,
The boyfriends are waiting, going
To work in cars they saved to buy,
Avoiding trouble, and speaking
Respectfully to police and neighbors,
And the grown-up children are
Waiting too, even if they only wait
For a woman in an old photograph,
Someone with short hair, young
And tough, who always spoke
Her mind, got in trouble, angered
Her parents and the minister who’d
Baptized her when she was still
Wrapped in a blanket. The grown-up
Children miss what they don’t
Remember. The women miss what
They want to remember.
George Franklin is the author of seven poetry collections, including What the Angel Saw, What the Saint Refused and a book of essays, Poetry & Pigeons: Short Essays on Writing. He practices law in Miami, teaches poetry classes in Florida prisons, and co-translated, along with the author, Ximena Gómez’s Último día/Last Day. In 2020, he won the Stephen A. DiBiase Poetry Prize, and in 2023, he won the Yeats Poetry Prize from the W.B. Yeats Society of NY.
*****
Euron Griffith: Three Poems
HIT POEM
Ah yes. The one that made my name.
Flashed in neon around Piccadilly Circus
and Times Square forcing traffic to beep.
Jealous rival poets hated me when Paul
McCartney read it out at Wembley
before launching, tearfully, into ‘Blackbird.’
It caused quite a stir. Naturally I knew
it was special as soon as I printed it.
Some poems have that. But none of mine
up to that point! I showed it to my wife
and she said it made her want to give up
her job there and then and save a polar bear
or work with starving children or protect
the coral reef. Something anyway. She said
here was a poem that changed worlds.
Okay, I admit. I laughed. Because although
I knew it was good I never expected it to bring
down the Tories. Or to cause Putin to withdraw
his tanks from Ukraine’s borders. But it did.
Breaking into the TLS was great but stopping
actual wars surely knocked it into the shade?
Politicians wept with remorse when they read it
saying that from now they really would be clear
as opposed to just saying that they would be.
Eton College was shamed to allow the homeless
into the sixth form at no expense whatsoever
and the Athenaeum burnt itself down in self-disgust.
Trump finally came clean and said it was a wig.
Ed Sheeran declared that now he could never
write another song. He became a monk.
Don’t get me wrong. It was a hell of a poem
even though I say so myself. But I don’t do it
anymore. No amount of cheering at gigs
can persuade me. Musk offered me eight million
bucks to perform it at Madison Square Garden
but I still said no even when Sir Bob Geldof
himself was told to call round and beg me
on bended knees to read the fucking thing
because of the change it could bring.
They all tried. Dalai Lama. Charles. Macca
with cheery thumbs aloft and a matey arm. No.
I’ve had enough. It overshadowed my life.
All those other poems I wrote got ignored.
The thrush one for example. Raindrops
on rivers and ponds. Those. The lyrics.
The ode I wrote when you said you’d had
enough of life in the castle and that you
were going back to your mum in Cheam.
That bloody poem became a monster.
Total strangers yelled out verses and lines
at me in streets, cinemas, supermarkets.
So no. I’ll do readings but not that one.
My agent just called. The Pope was on
the other line. Pleading. I said hang up.
ABOVE AND BEYOND
That leaking gutter thuds raindrops
regular as military beats on
the flat roof’s snare.
Comanche gulls circle chimneys.
Clouds, thick as cows,
are whispers disguised as oratory.
A finger could run through them
like sunlight killing a dream.
A plane unzips the sky
unleashing smoke
which clots slowly
into obscene shrubbery.
Silver-foil satellites, tethered
in invisible orbit, glide miserably–
ruled by crackling languages
and somersaulting crews.
Planets roll like balls booted
into undergrowth.
Stars broadcast
an eternity of explosions–
a thousand billion deaths
unmourned, unheard, unavenged.
THE COLLECTED HAIKU OF PHILIP LARKIN
The church seemed empty.
Bit of a dump, took off clips.
Shrugged, then biked it home.
Brides from Hull to Leeds.
They’ll have kids and fuck them up
like my lot. Yours too.
Marie all tied up
in a brown bag from Soho.
Slowly unstapled.
Neighbour’s baby screams
so told to turn Bechet down.
Now we both suffer.
Poetry has gone.
Deserted me for Ted Hughes.
Yes, Ted fucking Hughes!
Silent libraries
are havens where I hide from
the burden of verse.
New jazz to slag off.
Nine hundred words. Typing ‘shit’
till the ribbon snaps.
Entered suburbia
and bought a new mower. Feed
lost hedgehog with scraps.
Letter from Kingsley
saying Thatcher has his vote.
She’ll kick them all out.
Poor hedgehog is dead.
Minced by the Qualcast. Blood and
grass rinsed from the blades.
Throat cancer they said.
Doctor tight-lipped as life went
on. Seagulls whooping.
Will there be statues?
Bored kids memorizing lines
whilst cursing my bones?
Told nurse I was bound
for the inevitable.
Think she was Polish.
A name on a grave
is, ultimately, all that
will survive of us.
Euron Griffith has published poems in Poetry Wales, Ambit and The Spectator. He has also published six novels – four in Welsh and two in English together with a short story collection, The Beatles in Tonypandy and, last year, a memoir based on his adventures (or misadventures!) in the music business called A Casual Life in Six T-Shirts. He lives in Cardiff and is currently working on a new Welsh-language novel.
*****
Hilary Hares: Two Poems
THE INNATE PHILOSOPHY OF NEIGHBOURLINESS
It’s not all about the bins and using the WhatsApp group
to share reliable plumbers. We clap for carers,
always put out Halloween pumpkins, pay attention
to our small front lawns. Sometimes it’s about the BBQ,
or who’s doing what for the Christmas Safari supper.
On the whole, kerb-weeding is divvied up amicably,
the loan of designated parking to people with an excess
of visitors is rarely an issue. It’s a private road and so
it’s often about the street lamp, our shared responsibility
for its upkeep. According to the electricity company,
it’s a household in its own right and is entitled to a rebate.
This is discussed endlessly at the annual Residents’ Meeting.
Number six has just been acquired by an over-tanned Canadian.
He’s thrice divorced, says that every two years he buys a house
for a woman he’s come to hate, asks: Why do we need a committee?
There are only nine households. How can we possibly fall out?
THE CYCLICAL NATURE OF THE TOWN CENTRE
In this pothole, which is soon to be forgotten
when the road is resurfaced, there are dirty grey
dregs of the last great deluge that choked up
the storm drain in South Street which is now
overflowing with the outrush of effluvia gushing
from the hills of the home counties and pouring down
Union Road where William Cobbett pulled pints
in his pub for the locals brewed from the hop fields
which were eventually reinvented as Keepsake Close –
a Taylor Wimpey cutting-edge development for the
upwardly mobile – where verges are immaculate
and tarmac is pristine and, is blissfully unaware
that in the end it all comes down to potholes.
Hilary Hares lives in Farnham, Surrey. Over 200 of her poems have found homes online and in print including Ink, Sweat & Tears, The Interpreter’s House, Magma, Stand and South. Her collection, A Butterfly Lands on the Moon supports Winchester Muse. She won the Christchurch Writers’ Competition 2013 and Write-By-The-Sea Competition 2018. Her pamphlet, Red Queen (2020), is available from Marble Poetry and a recent pamphlet, Mr Yamada Cooks Lunch for Twenty Three, supports the Manor Farm Charitable Trust. Website: www.hilaryhares.com
*****
Sue Hubbard: Two Poems
CAMELLIAS
xxxxxxxxxxxxxLate March,
and their waxy buds open
against the fence of this small
London garden, the petals
almost too flawless to be real.
There’s something improbable
about them, as if made
of plaster to decorate
the cornice of some high Adam
ceiling in a great country house,
or be worn by a French courtesan
to signal her availability
on days she’s not bleeding –
when her white camellia
is changed for a red –
or to lay on the lid
of a pitch-pine coffin
in a funeral cortege led by
a team of black-plumed horses.
In my night garden their
virgin faces tease the old moon
with their porcelain perfection,
though morning showers
batter their lucent petals
turning pale alabaster
to a brown-stained mulch,
so all that’s left is
an absence, a nostalgia
for the brilliance
of white camellias.
THIS LIFE OF THINGS
The wind wanted to sing,
so decked its head
with a coronet of bird’s down,
gathered up a timpani of raindrops,
cloud symphonies
and thunderous drumrolls,
a bolt of lightning
streaking through the white dawn sky.
All that fluency, judging
nothing, selling nothing
just filling spent gullies,
the crannies of old trees,
blowing over schoolyards
and rusted bike sheds,
ruined villages and parched fields,
with its fragile song.
Over the cat’s saucer of milk,
a child sucking its wet thumb,
those drying sheets that smell of home.
Singing up our life.
The life of things within.
Sue Hubbard is an award-winning poet, novelist and art critic. She has published five collections of poetry and four novels. Her fiction has been published in the US and translated into French, Mandarin and Italian. Her latest, Flatlands, was on a Sunday Times best historical fiction list.
*****
Linda Ibbotson: Three Poems
COURTAPARTEEN
She combs the beach at night for words.
Unties them from broken places.
Beloved, Immortal, Incarnation,
stripped bare by the wind, fall from clifftop tombstones.
Words penned by monks are caught in the wetsuits of swimmers
on the strand at Cnoc an Rois,
or gently teased out from the finely tuned ear of a conch.
Sometimes they gather as a murmuration on the salty tongues of seabirds,
before being trampled by wild mountain goats.
She gathers them from the wreck of the dark winter,
places them into nets before burying in her black woollen cloak.
At sunrise she stitches them to the skin of the moon,
offers them with incense as prayers to the mouth of the Holy Well,
the open window to the afterlife.
HENRY MILLER TO LAWRENCE DURRELL – 1935
Dear Lawrence,
You asked about my life in New York.
I lived at 91 Remsen Street,
a Brooklyn brownstone.
It was cold, December 1924.
In the thin morning air
joggers and dog walkers
flaunted like Christmas gifts
past snow-covered door steps
on Cranberry Street
where Walt Whitman’s
Leaves of Grass was published.
They passed cargo warehouses and longshoremen,
steel barges abandoned beneath dark places
where the homeless kneeled before ripening wounds
and fought for the last crumb.
Across the East River,
skyscrapers stood back to back,
glass fortresses cutting the warp and weft
of Manhattan’s broad avenues.
The Brooklyn Bridge, as if a grey sinew
sank into a foggy silhouette
and my thoughts scattered like spume.
My writing then was untethered,
plagued with self-doubt;
write, edit, re-edit, discard,
the ache of ink hung in the air.
I had become a hunter of words
searched for conversations in eyes,
seduced the church of unorthodox muses,
watched death peel from distempered walls.
At night I clutched a hymn of remorse,
bled in all the broken places.
Sincerely yours,
HM
ANDRÉ BRETON AT HÔTEL DES GRANDS HOMMES
‘All my life my heart has yearned for a thing I cannot name’ André Breton
Paris
August 1919
A death of all we had known.
In this wounded landscape, war marched on.
Rivers of blood gorged their secrets into the air.
I watched restless dogs in midday heat,
longed to decipher the edge of a fraying world.
From the recesses of mind, surrealism,
now the hand that pushed the pen.
I looked to the statue of Voltaire,
rewrote history in imagined conversations,
watched the sky fall backwards.
At Place du Panthéon,
Corinthian facades of stone scholars, soldiers,
visionaries from another age, looked up to the gods,
searched for rationale, as the gods looked down.
I became a watcher of holy light,
lit a candle under its skin.
In the distance, the midnight bell of Saint-Étienne-du-Mont
chimed at the wrong time, its sorrowful throat abandoned to wine.
There are those who look the other way,
hide in leather briefcases and nights full of promise,
but the city knows every name, pulls you in before it releases you
from the waiting room of the dead.
Linda Ibbotson is a poet, artist and photographer from Sheffield, England, living in Cork, Ireland and has been published internationally, including The Irish Times, Irish Examiner, California Quarterly, Limelight, Boyne Berries, Washing Windows Too. In 2021, she collaborated with Russian classical pianist and composer Arsentiy Kharitonov.
*****
Jennifer Johnson: Three Poems
WHAT A PITY I WAS A GIRL?
My mother wanted me to be a boy,
to be just like my three brothers
able to fight with the roughest.
She used to dress me like them.
Later, she wouldn’t allow me
to wear makeup, told me that was
for prostitutes, which was strange
because every other woman I knew
used cosmetics every day.
My mother disliked other women,
always preferred to be with men.
What a pity I was a girl,
she said whenever she had to
buy me any bras or STs.
Breasts and blood became taboo.
She told me I had to act tough
and for the love of God not
to be so soppy and weak.
Later, when all the girls at school
did the ‘Duke of Edinburgh’
they did ‘Design for Living’.
I had to do ‘Physical Activity’.
The girls often taunted me.
Why don’t you try to look nice?
You’ll never get married!
I’ve managed that twice,
never once wearing makeup.
A SLOW MATURING
When younger, I used to joke bitterly
about the panoramic views I had
working in a basement with artificial light,
on pay just enough to survive, not thrive.
I used to complain about the vibrating
rock music drumming through the walls
of my bedsit, how the landlady always
took ages to repair the heater.
When I found myself on the dole,
I started to read biographies
and soon found that even Jung
had difficulties in his life.
Travelling to work one morning
on a tube near Edgware Road
talk of body parts told me how life
could be ended in an instant.
I later read news beyond glancing
at headlines, reducing my self-pity.
Personal anger was transferred
to Srebrenica and many horrors later.
Older still, I didn’t dismiss the old man
upstairs as some tiresome drunk
despite the many nights he needed
someone to unlock the front door.
Now in my late sixties, someone asks
how I will put up with my pain
for two decades or more? I think
I’d be delighted to live that long,
to continue to enjoy my books,
my walks and any poems I write,
continue to share my married life
and to learn something new each day.
PERIPHERAL NEUROPATHY
My burning feet wake me each night.
However hard I try to leave my feet
uncovered when I go to sleep
they’re somehow covered when I wake.
My feet burn, forcing me to get up
and walk around. After a short while
I rub my feet which hurt a bit less
and I try to get back to sleep.
Luckily, I feel the pain only at night
when I’m lying down but it’s knowing
that nothing will change for as long
as I live that sometimes gets me down.
Luckily, I can ignore the daytime pain,
enjoy life in the way an older person can,
grateful for the positives that remain,
company, eating, reading, writing.
Jennifer Johnson was born in Sudan in 1956 and moved to England as a child. She worked in Zambia as a VSO volunteer as a young woman. She has been widely published in magazines and anthologies and was awarded a Bread and Roses prize in 2022. Collections include Footprints on Africa and Beyond (Hearing Eye, 2006) and Hints and Shadows (Nettle Press, 2017).
*****
Wendy Klein: Poem
BOBBE-ZEYDE OR THE SECRET LANGUAGE OF MY GRANDPARENTS
i. Zeyde: Hymn for the Schlepper
for Samuel Heyert (1879-1962)
Let’s hear it for the rag trade, for shmattes; for the schlepper
xxxxxxxso small you could miss him — too fast or too slow
or hidden by a tall bolt of cloth, the skeletons
xxxxxxxof suits draped across his skinny arms, his kippah
held on with his sister’s bobby pin.
xxxxxxxLet’s hear it for his papa stuck behind his papa’s Singer
by the one tiny window for light, the clatter of
xxxxxxxof the treadle beneath his carpet slippers as he shouts
for his son to schlep, schelp quicker or the goniff
xxxxxxxwill come and steal their work.
Let’s hear it even louder for the schlepper who has
xxxxxxxlost his kippah and won’t say where, but knows
it’s gone forever as he’s off on Monday to work
xxxxxxxas a postman to earn his fees for college where he’ll train
to be a lawyer who can thread his wife’s new Singer
xxxxxxxfor the shmate stays forever in the blood.
ii. Bobbe: Chicken Soup for Pesach
for Rachael Heyert, who never had a birth certificate
My grandmother never kept hens.
xxxxxxxWhen she asked her kosher butcher
for a boiling fowl, she didn’t see a tired bird
xxxxxxxdone with laying, but a rich broth
laced green with celery, with parsley, later dotted
xxxxxxxwith matzoh balls so light they wafted
instead of floating. So today
xxxxxxxwhen I take a knife and poultry shears
to a free-range, organic supermarket bird
xxxxxxxstripped of giblets, but killed, I’m assured,
in her contented prime,
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxI feel my bobbe’s breath
xxxxxxxin my ear, muttering about the crazy price —
that dead is dead — that soup should never happen
xxxxxxxto a pullet, that young meat is for the grill or the fry pan,
asking again what happened to boiling birds,
xxxxxxxinsisting that spring chickens are meant
for better things,
xxxxxxxand I wonder whether
she’s thinking of my mother, dead at 35,
xxxxxxxher younger sister at 42, herself gone before my age now,
or the death reserved for tough old birds like us
xxxxxxxstill making chicken soup for Pesach.
Note: Bobbe-Zeyde – Yiddish for grandparents; Shmate/shmattes – rag, rags, as in the rag trade; Kippah – skull cap; Goniff – thief
*****
Sydney Lea: Two Poems
CALLING THE WIND
A charm of goldfinches, skulk of foxes,
mural of indigo buntings.
A raft of otters, clew of worms,
wake of vultures, sloth of bears.
I revel in old-fashioned words
conceived for the animal kingdom,
a drey for a gray squirrel’s nest,
to choose another example of many.
But it’s patois terms of long-gone friends
I revere, no matter to think of them hurts me.
Last night, beneath a crescent moon,
a pair of coyotes squalled,
sounding like dozens, as they somehow can manage.
Our late neighbor Polly described them as brush wolves,
and another beloved, Annie,
lost to us now for decades,
said song dogs. I see, despite the richness
of life that still surrounds me,
I’ve started to gather up the names
of absent dramatis personae,
along with a batch of their faded expressions.
I think of Bill, Annie’s husband,
to whom stag beetles were woodchip-lifters,
Canada jays were Gorbys,
and peeps meant all the plovers.
How can life be so short?
I asked as much, as the elderly will,
standing outside our cabin last autumn.
It was getting on dusk, chilly,
the westerly sky gone pink.
My little huff of breath made a cloudlet.
I watched it evanesce.
Frank, Bea, Creston, Don,
Ada, Carter, Earl,
on hearing the drawn-out wail of a loon–
as summer receded, color
beginning to creep into foliage–
would all insist she was calling the wind,
something to help her get airborne.
By the end of fall the loons would be gone.
PREDATOR
Zeke’s dad knew where to find him.
The near field’s Charolais herd
kept grazing, undiverted,
while a redtail grabbed a rabbit.
That shriek. Bright eye of that raptor.
I must have been eight or nine.
On the pond, five Muscovies gabbled,
heedless, it seemed, of the kill.
When his dad came out of their barn
fuming drunk, my friend ran to hide.
No good. I think I recall
a certain cloud’s lining. Red.
Red on the prey’s flank and scut.
Somewhere right now, the shrill
of a siren. The rabbit was dead.
Sometimes Zeke’s dad could be fun
but this time he grabbed my friend
and dragged him back inside.
I think I remember screams–
not like the rabbit’s, no.
Zeke wouldn’t speak of that day.
I don’t think anyone bled.
The hawk flew away through the trees
and quiet reclaimed the woods.
Sydney Lea is a former Pulitzer finalist and served as founding editor of New England Review. He was Vermont’s Poet Laureate from 2011 to 2015. He is the author of twenty-three books: a novel, five volumes of personal and three of critical essays, and fourteen poetry collections, most recently Here (Four Way Books, NYC, 2019). In 2021, he was presented with his home state of Vermont’s most prestigious artist’s distinction: the Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts.
*****
Michael Loveday: Two Poems
ESCAPING CHOLERA
‘Put yourself calmly into the dice-box of small events, and be shaken out…’
(Edward Lear, Saloníki, 11th September 1848)
Staying here
risks illness or the trap
of quarantine
The one route out
is west towards Illyrian Albania
along the Via Egnatia
to Akhridha’s lake
and beyond
to the northern wilds of Skódra
where mountain air
may help
I cannot dare to make this plan
but there is this need to throw
my teeth and bones
into the dice-box
of each singular day
in the grip
of an untameable hand
ready to be
shaken
made strange
through strangeness
rent apart —
STILL CAPABLE OF WONDER
Edward Lear, Tyrana, 27th – 28th September 1848
The gallery above the stable,
where I try to sleep, is a dais
colonised by rats and mice,
cockroaches too. Webbed canopies hang
huge above my bed —
I could reach out
and my hand would vanish
beyond the film
of flimsy gauze.
Through a gap,
behind a sapphire screen,
the exhibitions
of a whirling dervish —
a blur,
a curve of self —
make manifest now
a world
capable of wonder
in this khan that depends
on holes for windows
stopped
with sacks and baggage,
where dark-winged moths
will hurry,
hustle towards
my eyes and face,
and fray me —
Michael Loveday’s publications include He Said/She Said (HappenStance Press, 2011); the hybrid novella-in-flash Three Men on the Edge (V. Press, 2018), shortlisted for the Saboteur Award for Best Novella; and the craft guide Unlocking the Novella-in-Flash: from Blank Page to Finished Manuscript (Ad Hoc Fiction, 2022), which won a Best Indie Book Award and the 2024 Independent Press Award for Writing and Publishing. He works as an editor / mentor, specialising in narrative poetry sequences and the novella-in-flash. www.michaelloveday.com
*****
Christine McNeill: Two Poems
LIGHT
I give her what she needs.
She much prefers the dark.
Walks to her desk as if approaching
someone sleeping.
Fumbles for my switch.
I throw my energy onto the blank page.
She takes the pen
that lowers from her hand,
curves in black ink.
What I do is a matter of degrees.
Sometimes she pushes me away.
My brightness an interference.
I can almost tell the point when
this is about to happen.
If I could,
I’d respond in advance by flickering.
She struggles to make a decision.
Words must correspond with her idea
of a plot. How to cross the imagined
into articulation?
A black crow wings past the window.
She sees it. And suddenly
her pen moves at speed,
fills a whole page.
I glare at what has been written:
a Last Will.
MUTE
He gathered the calm flowering
of spring in his throat.
With camera, set off across fields:
the swan was there – the same
of decades earlier. He was smitten again
with love in his ear.
They took what they had been denied,
a blessing now without a priest.
She beat her wings when the sun set,
exchanged happiness for guilt,
flew back to her mate.
Not using words, he took pictures,
hundreds and more,
that resurfaced in my hands:
white blouse and skirt
and a boat crippled with seaweed,
not sinking at all, despite a large hole
where water rose –
I still wipe his tears.
Christine McNeill has published seven poetry collections, the latest The Breath of Time (Shoestring Press, 2023). A new collection will appear later this year. She co-translated (with Patricia McCarthy) Rilke’s The Book of Hours (Agenda Editions, 2007). Shoestring Press published her personal selection of translated German and Austrian poetry in 2022.
*****
Kathleen McPhilemy: Two Poems
MARY ANN McCRACKEN ON CAVE HILL
Still with grave dirt under her nails
and a lock of hair cut from his body
still yellow, still curly, bound to her heart
she walked alone to the end of the line
in the first act of her postscript life.
She went to claim her legacy, her treasure
all that he left her, her duty, her prize;
when she snatched the jewel she’d half a right to
the basalt caves were a shrieking O
the limestone below bone-white distress.
She slipped her joy into a silken casket
she shipped their secrets overseas;
when she got back, no one dared question
the yellow curls of the fairy child
she brought to the house, raised as her own.
CHRISTMAS CARDS
drop through the letter box
in this house
where silence has not yet lost its shape
its blue tremor
though small six-legged things scuttle
in undusted darkness
and spiders trap glimmers of light
in their busy networks;
the house curls round the absence
that sighs through its rooms
hovers over the rinsed cup
left on the draining board;
slowly, sadly, dust motes disassemble
into ordinary emptiness.
Kathleen McPhilemy grew up in Belfast but now lives in Oxford. She has published four collections of poetry, the most recent being Back Country (Littoral Press, 2022). She also hosts a poetry podcast magazine, Poetry Worth Hearing.
*****
Mark Mansfield: Poem
THE BLACKENED CHAPEL
Beware of darkness falling faster, calling
creatures that you’ve never heard till now.
Take heed of how the wind and clouds play falsely
moving separately as stern turns prow.
Note the waves reversing course in swells
that race to where the dawn lights up the west.
Disregard your useless phone. The shells
pocking the drowning shore would serve you just
as well. This was not prophesied but dreamt
one night in a blackened chapel, an arsonist
left in ruins. Who dreamed, then rose and scrawled
what was no dream upon its crucifix
which lit our way inside while someone wept—
as more nukes flared west, and dying species called.
Mark Mansfield’s most recent collection is titled Tales from the Wingèd Chariot Inn (Chester River Press, 2024). His poems have appeared in Anthropocene, Dreich, The Fig Tree, The High Window, Littoral Magazine, London Grip, Magma, Orbis, Poetry Salzburg Review, Skylight 47, Stand, and elsewhere. He has been a Pushcart Prize nominee. Currently, he lives in upstate New York.
*****
Jean O Brien: Two Poems
THE SPACE-TIME CONTINUUM
Minkowski’s a space – Time Continuum
“mathematical treatment of
Physical events as happening in the four dimensional
Space-time continuum” (Louis A. Girifalco).
Looking for my imaginary childhood companion
in family photo albums, I try to spot her
image, a hand, a sleeve or even a shadow.
My family knew her well, but all that did are
now dead. My mother always laid out
her place at the dinner table.
My insistence kept her alive, she had
no history, only existed alongside me.
My granddaughter seems to want to claim her,
says she grew young with me. Is certain that
it was she who saved me time after time.
I told her how once as a child I fell
headfirst from the high branch of a tree,
she assures me that it was she who caught me,
saved me. I have tried to explain, her eager
upturned face dissolves time like the change of
radio frequency.
I am regaled with tales of whenever I tripped or mis-
stepped that she was there to share the weight.
I feel as if time has slipped or snagged. Perhaps
this child is right, maybe it was her I dreamed into
being, possibly time is a two-way thing and we
are not stranded in the here and now after all
and she has been waiting all along for me
to catch her and pull us both through the needle’s eye.
JUST A BREATH AWAY
See the mirror gradually empty,
unsparing in its view, the fading reflected
face once full-cheeked and freckled, snub-nosed,
generous-lipped.
The contours now grown slack, a maze of lines
runnel downward, eyebrows sparse, sunlit eyes
fade from cornflower to gray.
Follow the outline and you will notice
lineaments of raw bones are showing through, planes
of cheeks declare themselves amongst the ruins
shrunken by loss. Finally fifty years
after I last saw it, just a breath away,
it reappears like a lost domain.
My mother’s fragile face
is misting the mirror and
shadow-tracing me.
Jean O’Brien’s latest collection is Stars Burn Regardless, 2022, (Salmon Poetry). An award- winning poet, most recently she was shortlisted in the Bridport Prize (UK), 2025. She previously won the Arvon International Poetry Prize, She publishes regularly in magazines, anthologies and e-zines. O’Brien holds a Kavanagh Fellowship and was Poet in Residence in the Irish Cultural Centre in Paris in 2021/22. She holds an M.Phil in creative writing/poetry from Trinity College, Dublin and currently tutors in poetry/creative writing at postgraduate level.
*****
Abigail Ottley: Two Poems
ARS POETICA
‘I am asked why my poems are so clear. I’ll confess: It’s what happens when you want to be understood’. – Mary Jean Chan
Why are your poems so sad / angry / bitter/ hard to hear?
Why don’t your poems ever smile?
Why do you include so many gods in your poems?
Who cares about those old stories anyway?
Likewise, why the Bible when no one reads it?
Don’t you think that might put people off?
Why do your poems so seldom rhyme?
Doesn’t that make them just stories?
How much do people pay you for your poems?
Why don’t you write a novel instead?
Why is there always an ‘edge’ to your poems,
even when you’re going for comedy?
Why do you write about death / loss/ your family/ the past?
Why do you dislike men so much?
Didn’t you love your mother?
Don’t you think there are some things a person
shouldn’t really write about at all?
What does your husband think about your poems?
Are your poems true?
SELF-PORTRAIT
after Tove Ditlevsen
I cannot
do maths beyond simple arithmetic
see well enough to read a number plate
cope easily with strangers in social situations
roller skate
skydive
climb ladders
make my own clothes from a paper pattern
watch TV reality shows
forgive or forget some stuff that happened
remember being happy at school
I cannot stop
remembering bad stuff
not liking being hugged by strangers
fidgeting
fiddling with my hair
staying up late and then not sleeping
feeling like an imposter
eating too much sugar
eating too much cheese
overthinking things
working always working
crying instead of getting angry
feeling it’s my job to make everyone happy
saying yes all the time and seldom no
I can
love my dog
help my daughter with some things
manage most things in my life with competence
enjoy my own company
overcome obstacles
keep on keeping on
crochet
knit
write poems
read books still
embroider flowers
make rugs out of T-shirts
try to make sense of an upside down world
reassure myself that all will be well
Abigail Ottley is a Pushcart Prize and Best of Net nominee. Twice winner of the Wildfire 150, in 2024 she placed 2nd in the Plaza Prose Poetry competition and 3rd in the Patricia Eschen Award. She also won the Metro Poetry Prize on the theme of Care. Her debut collection, Out of Eden, will be published by Yaffle in May, 2025. She lives very quietly in Penzance with her husband, David, and Dexter Dog.
*****
Matthew Paul: Two Poems
THE POSTCARD
Bookmarking Larkin’s Collected Poems at his elegy
for his father, ‘An April Sunday Brings the Snow’,
a flimsy postcard bears two distinctive stamps,
both franked by a Deutsche Reichspost clerk,
‘Hannover 10.1.1937’. Inked on the right,
the three-line address, somewhere in the Fatherland,
has faded to all but illegible. To the left, there’s
a photomontage: the Führer, watched by jolly
SS men, furiously shovels earth; juxtaposed
with six cars journeying along an autobahn:
three to, and three from, the vanishing point
adjoining a pine forest’s high, dark canopy. Gothic
script below Hitler says, ‘23.9.1933, ground-breaking.
23.9.1936, a thousand kilometres completed.’
xxxxxxFrom 1934 to 1937, Larkin’s parents—Sydney,
Coventry Borough Treasurer, and Eva, housewife—
spent their summer holidays in Germany. Teenage
Philip went the last two times. Sydney admired
how quickly the Reich’s books were balanced; gave
pride of place on the mantelpiece to an arm-raising
Hitler figurine. He jazzed up his magnolia office
in Council House with Nazi insignia; removed
them only on the Town Clerk’s orders, after
the Coventry Blitz, a night he shone by staying
at his post and mucking in with the firefighting.
In January 1943, Philip, exempt from serving
due to his sub-par eyesight, wrote from St John’s
to his pal Jim Sutton, RAMC, ‘I dislike Germans
and I dislike Nazis, at least what I’ve heard of them’,
adding that he’s designed for himself a bookplate
featuring, as its main motif, the Star of David.
xxxxxxThe postcard’s reverse is blank.
RECORD BREAKER
Every new moon, in the otherwise deafening dark,
I find it annoyingly next to impossible not to hark
Back to Roy Sullivan, Shenandoah National Park ranger—
‘The Human Lightning Conductor’; ‘the Spark Ranger’—
Telling Roy Castle about how he’d been struck by lightning
On a record seven separate occasions without (clearly!) dying.
Caught out hiking with friends in a thunderstorm,
He saw them dash for cover far away from him,
Such that he straightaway forswore acts of God
And international celebrity as a lightning rod;
Electing instead, at home in Dooms VA, to parse
The unsurpassable certainty of his shotgun’s blast.
Matthew Paul’s first collection The Evening Entertainment was published by Eyewear in 2017 and his second, The Last Corinthians, was published in June 2025 by Crooked Spire Press. His two haiku collections were published by Snapshot Press. His reviews regularly appear in The Friday Poem and elsewhere. www.matthewpaulpoetry.blog
*****
Tom Phillips: Three Poems
I HARDLY THOUGHT TO
I hardly thought to
sit down and consider
mortality
over a fried-egg lunch
but leafing through
an anthology
it occurs to me
that even the best
can hope for no more
than a couple of pages
and most will receive
no more than a mention
in an essay written
long after we’ve gone
noting their exclusion
even those we call
immortal die
that fate is not reserved
for those who bring death
into life (the Hitlers,
the Stalins) but casts
its generous shadow
wherever we stand
although even the yolk
of this egg might be said
to resemble the sun
and today when I passed
our neighbour whose father
is scarce able to walk
I caught her profile
at an angle
and for a moment
her drawn face
looked as it might have done
From ‘AN ENGLISH FORTNIGHT’
Battery Point
Keels like serrated bones sunk in slime
beside apartment blocks already flaking
might stand for the last of England,
its hasty unfounded investments.
What they saw here was crude profit
in balconies, fabricated piazzas,
sunlit aspirational lifestyles
in spite of squalls off the channel.
Industrial wreckage as public art
faces off against fishing-village chic
and other feverish yearnings
transformed into concrete.
Whatever we do, the sea insists,
it will return. Here it comes.
Beyond Reading
Hard not to see as quietly English,
this water meadow rewilding
despite the flocks we chanced to espy.
of Canada geese and Egyptian.
Sweet Thames – it’s tented,
not with leaves, but sheening light.
Wrecks slanting into the shallows
invite us to look on them as aspiration
yearning for recovery
that never came to fruition
in this treacherous age –
like that burnt-out yard on Bristol docks
where charcoaled beams piled up
and won’t be recovered for years.
FOR PLURALISM
Trumpeting blather of blame, the old king
boasts, booms, rambles through his repertoire
of jarring tirades, divisive claims –
re-ascendant maestro of the art of deflection.
Courtiers clamour for him, homage paid
in bank transfers, lavish rewards expected –
forgetting how soon they’ll fall from favour,
usurped by more pliable contingents.
Maligned opponents concede or quail,
stand firm or stand aside, aghast
at each rhetorical blast, but still
secure on tenure, away from the frontline
like generals observing bombardments
that decimated unwitting conscripts.
The king’s word-hoards becomes pervasive.
War is a terminal construction
that attends the religion of common sense
and its simplistic binaries cutting across
the grain of a world’s complexities.
The dead are yet to be identified –
but we should be clear who they’ll be
and that they mustn’t be the price.
What we might do is work away
at foundations, continually chafe
at reduction, avoid avoidance, visions
and their entrances into the fixed –
we all live here too, let’s say –
take down your flags and be present.
Tom Phillips is a writer and translator now living in Sofia, Bulgaria. His poetry has been widely published in journals, anthologies, pamphlets and the collections Unknown Translations (Scalino, 2016), Recreation Ground (Two Rivers Press, 2012) and Burning Omaha (2003). He has translated many of Bulgaria’s leading contemporary poets and his translations of Bulgarian modernist Geo Milev are due to appear from Worple Press.
*****
Kathy Pimlott: Two Poems
PLAYING LADY AUDLEY – A USEFUL MELODRAMA
The scene was a garden. I can’t remember now
if I’d already abandoned my child and pushed
my second husband down the well, if, indeed,
it was me who did it. Someone keen had stripped
their parents’ beds, brought in armfuls of roses –
not just blooms, whole bushes, roots and all
and scattered them on the otherwise bare stage.
I paced the boards channelling passion, oblivious
to the foliage snagged on my sweeping hem,
my own portable long border, the sniggering.
After that debacle it didn’t matter I hadn’t learned
a word of the third act, the upside of which being,
henceforth, having lived it, I’d never have to wake
sweating from that particular, common nightmare.
TODAY’S CONVERSATIONS
The radiographer who apologised that her machine
is disappointingly so not like Goldfinger’s laser
and put on The Four Tops,’Reach out, I’ll Be There’.
Andrew, the hatstall man, though that’s not
his real name, and the newsagent, who both pity me.
When you feel lost and about to give up.
The neighbour whose knee operation hasn’t worked,
who’s almost definitely going to go private.
Phil at the community centre who tells me how
he put the kibosh on the AA booking when they asked
how far the bar was from the meeting room and he said
12 steps, and though I should know better, I laughed.
And your world around is crumblin’ down. A neat thank you
to the bus driver and to the boy on Lidl’s self-service tills
with his handful of bags and ambition. And you’re drifting out
all on your own. Andrew’s glamourous wife. My mother:
her dinner, the weather, the cat, how nothing will ever
get better. The mountain we don’t say. Darling, reach out.
Kathy Pimlott’s collection, the small manoeuvres, was published by Verve Poetry Press in 2022. She has three pamphlets with The Emma Press: After the Rites and Sandwiches (2024), Elastic Glue, (2019) and Goose Fair Night (2016). Her poems have been published widely in magazines and in many anthologies and have won and been placed in competitions, most recently the Welshpool and Buzzwords. She lives in Seven Dials, Covent Garden. www.kathypimlott.co.uk
*****
Selese Roche: Four Poems
APRIL
Spring at full throttle,
pigeons plump as cushions
crash softly about the wood
and in the evening
pheasants stroll along by the fence,
sniff the air,
make neighbourly inquiries
of each other,
their voices rusty, right-angled,
as if they understand
the concept of limitations.
Today I heard the cuckoo call,
faint and faraway across the bog
like a small triumph,
sound transparent as a ghost,
echo of summers past.
Who would have thought an echo
could weigh so heavy?
From this moment
the swift advance of yet another year
will be relentless,
no way back to that foolish innocence,
the brave racket of crows,
the steady red of a tomato make my day.
ODYSSEY
Gently shabby as it was
in those days,
clouds spread like ball gowns
across the uncertain blue,
underneath tall trees
a river flowed
between the banks of childhood
and when the boat trembled
into life,
how loudly we cheered,
each day looking forward,
already aching to return.
City that never was,
city that always will be.
TAXI
Passing the Westerpark,
cherry blossoms glimmer
among the darkening trees
at intervals, orderly like streetlamps
and the taxi driver
wants to talk about war,
turns to look at me,
still a tender boy’s neck,
‘Truth’, he explains,
‘is always the first casualty’.
I resist the temptation to tell him
I’d prefer no casualties at all,
that he should keep his eyes
fixed on the road,
as we negotiate rush hour
along the Haarlemmerweg,
sky flushed peach and lilac,
a sudden impulse of starlings,
nor do I tell him I’m grateful
we are not at war,
and how thankful I am,
as if he were my son,
his young hands grasp a steering wheel,
not a gun.
DARK WATER
It was our place then,
the stony valley and the long dark water
of the Bride river,
shining muscle forever smoothing rocks
into granite limbs,
the blackened kettle Maura hid
among the ferns,
Nell refusing a cup of tea,
noting the water was brown,
looked dirty,
and children let loose,
ecstatic shrieks echoing
in the tall barricade of beech
that sheltered us from the road,
Uncle Dennis protected by the Sunday paper,
Auntie Nell still buttoned up tight
in a jacket and skirt,
refusing to paddle or even remove her shoes.
In the photo she is sitting on a tartan rug
looking baffled,
watches our mother,
rounded as a seal swim with pagan ease
among her children,
pale arms and legs moving
like undiscovered creatures,
in the dark water of another world.
Selese Roche was born in born in Dublin 1943. She works as freelance editor and divides her time between Co. Kildare and Amsterdam. Her poems published in Era, Goldsmith Press, Stony Thursday, Poetry Ireland Review, Corncrake Magazine, London Grip, Skylight 47 and The High Window.
*****
Daniel Rye: Two Poems
ALL FLESH IS GRASS
A cassocked crow
scrats and scrabbles
on the corrugated roof,
writing its own commentary
on a biblical verse,
before admonishing
four widowed ewes
in the field below
with exhortations
as rough as burnt toast.
The sheep congregate
and chew blithely
on these priestly morsels,
one kneeling on a hassock
to get closer to the truth.
They’ve survived another winter
on hay cut last summer,
their seasoned lambs
sacrificed in the autumn
for the food of others.
VANITAS
You noticed it first,
by the path to our favourite place.
A rotting cow’s head
left for scavenging crows,
its Highland horns
tragically heroic,
an abandoned helmet
on a muddy field of battle.
The ground now felt cursed.
We hesitated to look in the face
something this dead,
so unavoidably close
to human bones,
and a skull so stoic
that it was not yet
just the discarded remains of cattle.
Daniel Rye is a poet and musician living in Tórshavn, capital of the Faroe Islands. His poetry has appeared in online and print journals, including Ink, Sweat & Tears and Green Ink Poetry.
*****
Myra Schneider: Poem
HEDGE
After Stanley Spencer, Neighbours
Whenever I come across this hedge it cheers me up,
fills me with warmth as I note it’s been allowed
to spread into next-door’s garden as well as its own.
New leaves are sprouting in every direction
but they’re not intrusive, not prickle edged
and they suggest such softness that for a few moments
I imagine lying down on them as if they’re a feather bed.
I look at the two women: the thin one with dark hair
in bunches is wearing a sleeveless fawn jacket
and offering a bunch of five dark red tulips.
How beautifully the plump neighbour’s cinnamon skirt
and ginger jacket tone with her friend’s and it’s clear
the pair are very fond of each other. This hedge
isn’t like the privet that bordered my childhood garden
and barely saved me from the woman next door.
Her white skin, hair in rollers, her sour face
and muttered threats, filled me with fear. I’d no idea
why she was angry, wondered what sin I’d committed.
For years a sense of prickling ruled me but I wriggled free
of it once I had my own family, a garden left to run wild.
Nowadays there’s no way anyone can escape from prickle:
the whole world’s riddled with it. It’s no wonder
the planet, the dear mistreated planet is rebelling.
That’s why I need the gentleness of this hedge,
the long-stemmed tulips, the kindness of neighbours.
Myra Schneider’s tenth full collection, Lifting the Sky, was published by Ward Wood (2018). Other recent poetry publications include Five Views of Mount Fuji (Fisherrow Press, 2018) and Persephone in Finsbury Park, (SLP, 2016) . Other publications include books about personal writing. Her poetry has appeared frequently in newspapers and journals and it has been broadcast on Radio 3 and 4. She was shortlisted for a Forward Prize in 2007 and she has co-edited anthologies of poetry by contemporary women poets.
*****
Richard Tyrrell: Two Poems
A LETTER FROM 1994
to Louisa the Singer
Dear Weez, I want to welcome you
to the year 2034. It’s our future.
I’ve been visualizing it for ages.
It’s what old age looks like
for poets and singers. Here it is …
London. Our city has ground to a halt.
2,000 cars sit in every side street.
People climb to work
over the bonnets of Jaguars.
There are no Tube trains, just a
Tubemobile like a giant worm in a squiggle.
The homeless are fine, they sleep in cars.
The rich live above us in choppers.
Euthanasia is legal
but smoking is a capital offence.
In a little room in Finsbury Park,
you, Weez, play your piano,
a baby grand with two strings broken.
You’ve passed the menopause and are
more tolerant now. Me?
I’ve grown bald. And toothless. In my 60s
my gums bled and ivory fell out.
My white sinewy body is now
a cardiac danger zone. But
like you, I persevere with creative work.
Separately we compose, sing, write
about love, politics, tragedy, and death.
You work part-time on a magazine.
I survive as a shoddy salesman.
For you, fishnet stockings
don’t pay dividends anymore.
For me, Irish charm has turned
into a stomach ulcer. I eat my meals
in Irish cafés, cook only on Sundays.
You dress in tight black skirts bought
in charity shops and – vaguely freakish –
accost publicans hustling for gigs.
I continue to write my masterwork –
a text so substantial it’s taken 30 years
and still hasn’t reached page 1.
I am more than vaguely sad.
I’m a wreck. Writing sentimental
letters to old lovers. On occasion,
we meet for a drink, near Finsbury Park.
Both thinking, next year, it’ll all come good.
SOMETHING DEAD IN THE HOUSE
To find its corpse
means jacking up the floorboards,
or jerking out the stove
and gassing yourself.
And you have guests arriving,
always the snooty sort
who like napkins
and after-dinner mints.
And always the possibility
that you’ve stumbled
on a major crime,
buried bang in your kitchen.
The odour warm
and sweet,
just a seasoning short
of allure.
The noise of the dead,
never a problem.
even their appearance
a matter of curiosity.
But that cryptic smell –
it forces you to re-imagine
your personal flesh
in terms of proteobacteria and pus.
Richard Tyrrell is an Irish writer. His work has appeared in Prairie Schooner, New Statesman, Poetry Review, London Magazine, and others. He has also written for newspapers like the Guardian, Independent and Times. He has lived in the US, Netherlands and UK. He quit creative writing for a more regular job. But the bug bit again, and he has returned to writing. He has recently been published in Stand and his novel, The Fox of Kensal Green, will be published in 2026.
*****
Merryn Williams: Poem
THE LAST
He turned eighteen in the last winter
of the war, but since it started
this had been the date I dreaded.
Three more years went past.
The last winter, but then we didn’t
know it was the last.
Eighteen, but he was still my baby,
voice still breaking, scarcely shaving.
Call-up papers came.
In church they raised a milk-white tablet.
I watched the list of names grow longer –
boys I knew, and I was sorry –
but screamed in silence one thing only:
Not this one, he’s too young.
In our quiet Thameside town,
grass crinkled, yellow leaves dropped down,
the icy river bore away
the young, bad news came every day.
He left. I prayed to great Jehovah:
Spare my only son.
The church stands empty, and the font
dry. I don’t pray now. I can’t
remember which were killed by bullets
and which slain by the Spanish Lady.
Women my age fill their hours
fetching swiftly fading flowers
to deck the urn below that tablet,
go home and sob, discreetly.
In the final year, they said
keep faith with those already dead;
told us, yes, one day the war must
end, but not too fast.
His name was etched into the tablet,
and that name was the last.
Merryn Williams was the founding editor of The Interpreter’s House. Her latest collection is After Hastings (Shoestring Press), and Shoestring also published her edition of Ruth Bidgood’s Chosen Poems, with a memoir. She lives in Oxford and Hitchin.
*****
Patrick Williamson: from ‘Weekend’, a poetic sequence.
1.
There are a few poppies, just outside, surrounded
xxxxx overgrown ferns, bordered by a washing line.
Remembrance, November parades,
xxxxx woods where bracken crumples, lamenting trees
beyond the yellowed fields. The soil is no good here.
xxxxx The dark
always follows us, caught in its embrace, pushing the soil
xxxxx apart at rain times.
xxxxx Nothing is sacred, close to the edge of this world.
3.
Later, out walking, we come close to slavering bullocks
whose nostrils quiver, we find their numbers pitiful.
The path, curving, forks a still pond, encounters
a plastic bottle anchored by weeds, bobbing
in a river Ophelia could have drowned in.
Stopped by an impassable ford. We choose our roads.
4.
Breakfast again, a local request show shrills.
We are shifty as weather; nobody sits. It rains. It stops.
Turn the outside world off, let the soulless house creak.
Yet these luminous clouds, wood wind, that constant
a cacophony of dogs & crows – and then the mist
spreading from the continent’s edge, closing in.
5.
We’re on the road again, in the rain, to a headland.
I rock-walk along squashed layers of life.
We climb, turn our back on the watchtower,
the distance travelled
seems shorter to the eye than that taken.
We shuffle in the wind a moment,
leaving footprints in the dust, then off
through drizzle, to the station.
*****
Robin Lindsay Wilson: Two Poems
LOVE IN THE LONG TERM.
I was busy being generous –
kind would be stretching it,
but those workdays served
others, and those weekends
accepted invitations to laugh
at puns and bodily functions.
Half our energy was eager.
Half our energy was show.
But consideration and goodwill
ruled the light of each season,
whatever idiots said knowingly
about the winter in themselves.
And comic friends were loved
when they were busy clowning.
And joker guests were cheered
when they reprised goodbyes.
Goodbye with a hug. Goodbye,
how sad. Goodbye old fools.
Goodbye with love – if we care
to remember laughter at all.
LOVE IN THE INTERTIDAL ZONE.
The sea stopped me fidgeting
and the sunset lifted my arms,
until I voluntarily surrendered
to a pristine wash of absolutes
and wished you were here.
I stepped on cold white sand
and decided on an epiphany
while you were thinking of me.
But my footprint flooded with alien life –
a swirling ooze of bloodworms,
beach hoppers and red mites.
I looked up. Sun almost gone.
Only your love keeping me still,
while at my feet little appetites
bit and frothed and sucked
all the light from paradise.
Robin Lindsay Wilson teaches acting and performance at Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh. He has three collections of poetry published by Cinnamon Press. His poetry has appeared in many literary journals, including – The Amsterdam Review, Poetry Salzburg, Acumen, Dream Catcher and The Rialto. His collection of short monologues – Rehearsals for the Real World, was written as an educational aid to teaching acting, and it is being used in colleges, universities and other drama programmes in the USA, Australia, China and the UK.
The High Window 