A little bit later than usual but very much worth the wait. The shortlisted works for March are moving, witty, controversial, striking. And, unsurprisingly in a month that featured both International Women’s Day and Mothering Sunday (UK), there’s a certain slant to many of them!
Choose from:
- Pamilerin Jacob, Annette’s Ode: a deeply moving and emotional weighty poem
- Arlo Kean, Morning Outing with Mum: working on several planes to show how difficult it is to ‘be’.
- Jessica Mookherjee, Herb of the Sun: the marigold as messenger to connect the narrator to her ancestry and her self.
- Kate Noakes, Jess Phillips reads the names, again, a powerful call for recognition of women killed by domestic violence.
- Rebecca Parfitt, Animals: thought provoking flash fiction, something out of the box.
- Chris Powici ‘Fisherman’: exceptional use of language and imagery and quietly poignant.
All six of the shortlist have been chosen by Helen, Kate and IB or received the most attention on social media. They can be found below. (Please scroll down.)
Please VOTE HERE. Voting will close at 9pm on Tuesday 29th April.
Our ‘prize’ is £25 towards the charity of your choice or an emailed National Book Token giftcard*.
*Book tokens can only be used within the UK. Sadly, we are unable to find suitable cost-effective alternatives outside the UK.
THE MARCH 2025 PICK OF THE MONTH SHORTLIST
Annette’s Ode
Slithering through incisor-gap, English leapt
from your lips to mine, a string
between you & me, ringed
with hot coals we slide back & forth
in the air like abacus beads. Coals
that warm & warn: lighting the way
as best they can, although
Yoruba is the exact shape
of the bulb in the room, & we have,
like plants learnt to tilt
in the direction of that Light,
prayers pouring out of you unhindered
like water from a hose
left in the lawn all night, every
cranny of me grateful to be
soaked & nourished
Annette the gap-toothed,
You kissed a man & I was born. You gave him
your laughter & he built an empire,
died, leaving you to mourn. Your one love,
muttering psalms in the grave’s dark
wishing he could return, seeing only
your gap-tooth in the distance
thinking it a door, through which
years ago English leapt, lip to lip
anxious to fulfil the injunction of blood.
Pamilerin Jacob’s poems have appeared in POETRY, Lolwe, The Rumpus, Agbowó, Palette, 20.35 Africa, & elsewhere. He is the Founding Editor of Poetry Column-NND and Poetry Sango-Ota, among others. His manuscript, ‘Blight Fantasia’, was a finalist in the Walt McDonald First-Book Poetry Competition 2024.
*
Morning Outing with Mum
we are at a cafe just round
the corner from hampstead
heath & sipping berry sunrise
smoothies out
of soggy paper straws we
are watching tangles of cockapoos
too many north london
mums boys i went to school
with disguised by full grown
beards we speak about
my studies ahmed butler
nelson vuong (I even use the word
teleological) mum appears
impressed i press my now useless
straw into my glass
pick at a strawberry seed
wedged in my teeth mum is
being weird quiet
contemplative she is half
smiling i fiddle with my rings
uneasy the waiter seems angry
a child has thrown chips
on the floor the child is very pleased
about this i am unsure what to feel
for a moment i find myself
wishing i could be
so demonstrative
i sit silence
it feels as though
mum has something to say
i look to the chips on the floor
she inhales. ‘I have to ask… are you gay?’
i guess
we have found
a language of sorts
critical theory as ice breaker
or bull-dozer more like
of the walls i’ve built &
suddenly all the mums
are laughing at me i am naked
the dogs are growling
mum has changed the subject
it is not still me
i am tired hoping the outing is
almost over
& then she shuffles in
her seat i brace
there is more
i assume girlfriend maybe sex or- ‘and, are you a they/them… yet?’
the cockapoos have pooled
together each is carrying an item
of my clothing on its back over
parliament hill i see a doberman
approach the cafe fear for the
skin that coats my
flesh smoothie gloop
residue on glass
i have realised mum was never
impressed
i am realising the irony
i will come to realise this smoothie
always had a telos
seems almost funny to me now
that t e l o s is an anagram
for s t o l e
*
Herb of the Sun
The pain comes plucked from a field
in garlands of sunlight.
So many women weave aches into strings
of marigolds, with bent backs from children,
livelihoods of pouring orange petals, scents
of sweet incense and the sunlight is strung
up on trains from Silguri hills to all
the holy places in those northern mountains.
My aunt sends me a picture of marigolds,
to remember my blessing. We’re both aging
and far flung. I’m a sticky-neck garish
thing, she says always the bright flower,
cheerful blossom, a fiery little immigrant.
Jessica Mookherjee is a British poet of Bengali heritage and grew up in Wales and London, now lives in Kent. She has been published in many print and online journals and anthologies and was twice highly commended for best single poem in the Forward Prize 2017 and 2021. Author of three full collections, her second collection Tigress (Nine Arches Press) was shortlisted for the Ledbury Munthe Prize in 2021. Her most recent books are Notes from a Shipwreck (Nine Arches Press 2022) and Desire Lines (Broken Sleep Books 2023). Jessica also works full time as a Consultant in Public Health.
*
Jess Phillips reads the names, again
Each year in March, on the eighth day,
the one we’re allowed to call ours,
slowly, Jess reads our names,
not the bitch, slut, whore we died hearing,
but the gifts from our parents.
Remember us now in this careful litany,
ordered by the dates of our deaths,
not bitch, slut, whore from the mouths of men,
but us as named daughters,
named women of these isles.
Who is here to listen to ‘unnamed woman,’
or the woman added to the roll
at the start of this very day?
Just over a dozen of you shift, embarrassed
on green benches. And you other representatives,
can you not spare six minutes to hear our names?
Kate Noakes‘ most recent collection is Goldhawk Road (Two Rivers Press, 2023). A pamphlet, Chalking the Pavement, was published by Broken Sleep Books in 2024. Her website is www.boomslangpoetry.blogspot.com. Kate lives and writes in Bristol.
*
Animals
I didn’t think too hard about the personality of the meat on my plate, until I bought Organic. The rack of ribs I was tucking into was born the first week of February – it was three months younger than my baby son. The label told me the breed of its parents: ‘Lowland Ewe, crossed with Texel Ram.’ It fed on the beautiful lush grass of Southerndown. I thought about it as I chewed. I thought about it as my baby boy suckled milk from me. Urgent. Like this lamb was at his mother’s teat. Nudging it as my boy nudged me, pinched me. But I still ate the lamb that made the milk that fed my baby.
Later that day, I read a strange news clipping in the Fortean Times: A farmer noticed one of his cows was giving half the milk she should. ‘I’ll catch the bastard stealing,’ he said, heading out the door to keep watch. He watched her for three nights, waiting in the darkness, but each night the farmer fell asleep, his rifle dropping to the floor, and the thief snuck in unseen.
On the fourth night he waited and waited, but nobody came. Nobody, that is, except a snake who glided further towards the cow who did not flinch. The farmer’s eyes, wide as the pales that caught his cow’s milk, watched as the snake wound its body around the cow’s leg, reaching up to the udder, taking the teat in its mouth to drink. The farmer stared, eyes unblinking, breath shallow.
And when the snake finished, the cow turned and licked the snake’s head, tender, like a mother to her newborn. The snake slipped away, disappeared into the undergrowth.
The farmer thought the cow a beast of the Devil, calmly walked forward and shot the cow dead.
I thought of the snake, returning the next day, in search of its mother cow. Hungry. Her milk had turned to blood.
I thought of the ewe, in search of the lamb lying dead on my plate.
I thought of my son drinking from me, the lamb that drank from the ewe, the farmer that drank from his cow, and the snake.
A mother needs her child just as much.
All of us, animals, killing and eating, killing and eating.
Rebecca Parfitt has been published widely. She is the author of one poetry collection, The Days After. In 2021 her short film, Feeding Grief to Animals, was commissioned and produced by the BBC and FfilmCymru Wales. She is also Editor of The Ghastling, a magazine devoted to ghost stories, horror and the strange. She is the Commissioning Editor for Honno press, the UK’s longest running women’s press. She lives and works in the Llynfi Valley, South Wales.
*
Fisherman
After a long, dreich day in the firth – soaked gansey, torn gloves, a few sorry mackerel dangling from the lines – I hauled up on the beach. Thick smell of wrack. Bird cries. Night.
I lit a kerosene lamp, stood at the sea’s edge, and threw a pebble into the dark. Waves poured over the skerries and I thought of broken crates, creel buoys, bits and pieces of sailcloth – things a child might play with – coming in on the tide; how everything we do, or dream, returns to these rainy, gull-haunted shores.
And in the lamp’s flickering yellow light, I prayed.
Chris Powici lives in Perthshire where he writes poems, essays and occasional flash fictions. His latest poetry collection is Look, Breathe (Red Squirrel Press).