Memory and Sky

In the search for sky
the slip of landscape:

blues and greens,
browns and white

clouds of paint,
lost black mines.

The sea’s a beast,
a wild gatecrasher

and breaker of
the picturesque.

If you drag your
brush across

the canvas, topsy-
turvy stipple,

you can smell
salt on the wind.

Rupert Loydell is the editor of Stride magazine, and contributing editor to International Times. He is a widely published poet whose most recent poetry books are Damage Limitation (zimZalla 2025) and The Age of Destruction and Lies (Shearsman, 2023). He has edited anthologies for Salt, Shearsman and KFS, written for academic journals such as Punk & Post-Punk (which he is on the editorial board of), and contributed to books about David Lynch, Brian Eno and Industrial music.

Inventing the Wheel

Down the great hill we plunged,
not scared of picking up speed
because that was the point,
running fast as a horse.

People in later ages wouldn’t believe
how well tuned we were,
those of us charged with taking
things from A to K to P to Z,

but on the aid of horse or dog
you could not always rely
and what would later be training
to men classed as athletes

for us was the core of life
and we’d mock their so-called records
with incredulous snorts and howls,
we whocould shave aeons off  ’em.

Then that one day Noab tripped
over a half-hidden bough and went
headlong down the slope
turning over and over and over

in the way we’d practised,
a blinding somersault,
arms cradling the head
but screaming despite himself

and we watched open-jawed
already writing his obituaries
as he changed into the thing we soon
came to know so well,

turning faster and faster
till the slope levelled out at last
and he rolled to rest just short
of the sacred rowan tree.

Thank each last god for the rain
that had softened the earth
and saved him from ought but bruises
and a horrid cut across the spine

and made him a hero
whose name was writ large in all
our annals till our own name
sank into the bark.

Nick Cooke has had around a hundred poems published or accepted, in a variety of outlets including Acumen, Agenda, The Dark Horse, Ink Sweat & Tears, the High Window Journal and I Am Not A Silent Poet, along with around 40 poetry reviews. In 2016 his poem ‘Tanis’ placed first in a Wax Poetry and Art contest. He was a featured poet on the Flapper Press site in December 2025.

Does it rain diamonds on Saturn?

On the shelf behind me, among so many curios,
a little plastic gem box bearing little bits
of black grit,
a fraction of a gram;
under the microscope, I spy tiny glitterings
of nanodiamonds tell me that this
is billions of years old, billions, part
of the supernova’s disc
that coalesced to make our Solar System
and all that’s in it,
including us,
and so, is older than the Sun. Nearby, a flake of Mars the size
of my little fingernail
that made it through the distant vacuum cold
all the way to Earth to land in the deserts of North Africa
to be collected, analysed, researched and ultimately sold.
In another small, clear box, a different little unassuming chunk of space, this one with proteins and amino acids not found here; is this a molecular alien?
Could we splice them into cells to make ETs, a bit like Jurassic Park but cosmic, and hopefully without all the bother that ensued in Alien?
Is it how life got here in the first place, Panspermia, seeding from space? I imagine that at night it mutters to the other far-travelled grits and gravels about what it is, where it’s from and how it got here. I never hear it do so, but contemplate my collection as a link to the great beyond, a connection through time and space to where physics says we’ll never go except in our minds. There is also a bit
of the Moon and I wonder if its removal changed the lunar orbit,
just the smallest imaginable nanobit,
a nudge to our tides and beach-trips
and does it pull at the minds of lunatics
until
they slowly unravel,
the final, unexpected impact of far-flung space-gravel?
So, I sit and contemplate my collected fragments of space-grit,
what I’d like to add to it;
a chunk of Mercury (I’ve got one now plus a couple of asteroids), a bit of Titan would be nice,
or of Galilean moon, some water from under Enceladus’ or Europa’s ice,
I wonder at what might swim within,
might there be some life that swims?
Maybe a bit
of rock from even further; the next star over if it
could get here; an exoplanet orbiting a different sun,
a long-haul comet (I’ve got a nearer one with ET proteins, no outbreak yet to come),
or who knows,
something frosted, shattered, chipped off by far distant snows
or diamonds compressing and pouring in the murky methane skies of gas giants, knocked free by crashing meteor, or a little chunk of stuff from Saturn’s rings;
if found, I’d love any of these things.

Dave Hubble is a prolific writer and performer, mixing autobiography and satirical humour. He’s supported numerous acts including Attila the Stockbroker, Francesca Martinez, Jess Green, Rob Gee, Professor Elemental and Rob Auton and performed at events including Brighton Fringe. His poems have been published in places such as South, Zoomorphic, Ink, Sweat & Tears and the anthologies Maligned Species, Absent Ginsberg and On the Water. An illustrated pamphlet of Southampton-based poems, Navigational Array, was published in 2017 (Dense Weed Press).