As always, we have an eclectic and compelling shortlist for our October Pick of the Month. Whose work will you choose?
- Mike Anderton,‘You Can Eat The Evidence’: if modernity is about our alienation from the processes that sustain us, this poem resists that wholesale.
- Marnie Cockrill, ‘Clerking notes’: speaks of the belittling of female pain and the definitions of types of pain.
- Philippa Greasley, ‘How Would You Draw a Bear?’: plays with the idea of perceptions, challenges our uses of words, and definitions, and questions certainty.
- Andy Humphrey, ‘Cine Reels’: an evocative and haunting portrait of a father, mirrored on the screen.
- David Lukens, ‘Samaras’: a poem that focusses on these winged seeds to speak of faith, myth and evolution.
- mulika ojikutu-harnett ,‘Monocle’: an intimacy that has you leaning in to listen, completely irresistible.
All six of the shortlist have been chosen by Helen, Kate and Tasneem or received the most attention on social media. They can be found below. (Please scroll down.)
Please VOTE HERE. Voting will close at 6pm on Wednesday 18 November
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 OCTOBER 2026 PICK OF THE MONTH SHORTLIST
You Can Eat the Evidence
The peach parts badly around the stone.
You give me the larger half
and lick the torn place on your thumb.
I have no objection to being alive
at this particular table.
Before breakfast I buried the calf.
The spade struck a bottle, then clay.
I broke the bottle to get past it.
The mother stood at the fence
with milk hardening down one leg.
There are jobs that leave the hands
unable to close neatly around a cup.
You set mine beside the bread
and did not touch it for me.
Our graft-warrant has a frost guard:
the successor must be supplied in living sap,
not borrowed from an assumed summer.
I inspect the bud beneath the binding.
Its witness is still sealed.
The dead stock offers nothing to unfold.
You say this branch is taking.
I want the whole tree inside your saying,
the white grub and the ladder,
the year we have no right to spend yet.
Yesterday the church sent a form
about the use of the lower field.
I wiped peach juice from my wrist with it.
There is still room for a signature
where the paper has dried.
At noon we go to the graft.
You loosen the tape one turn.
Under it, pale tissue has crossed
the cut from both directions.
I have seen this before.
I stay longer than seeing requires.
Your hand rests open on the fence.
A wasp lands, tests the salt,
and leaves without taking anything
I can name.
The peach stone is in my pocket.
I keep rubbing it
while you talk about rain.
Mike Anderton is a poet who was born and lives in the South West of the UK. He shares a home with his partner and a dog, and works as a scientist when he’s not reading or writing poetry.
*
Clerking notes
So, what has brought you in today Mrs…?
Owens. Mrs Owens.
Ahh, nice to meet you Mrs Owens. What brings you in today?
Worry mostly, I worry, I’m a worrier. But I’m particularly worried about this.
Worry not, Mrs Owens. Is your worry irrational or rational, do you believe?
Well, I don’t know, irrational, I hope. But it is just so constant…
Supposing it is constant, how would you characterise it? When did it start?
It started a few days ago, it came with this grumbling pain, I don’t know why…
I know it’s frightening, I’m sorry. The worry, anything makes it better or worse?
Well, I’ve been taking some paracetamol. That helps a little, but the nights are the worst.
What do you worry about at night? Has anything like this happened before?
Yes, for many years now on and off but it’s getting harder and harder to ignore.
If it has been ignored before, why can’t it be ignored now? What is different?
I don’t know, Doc. It’s just frighteningly painful and I can’t get it to stop. I did wonder…
I fear we must stop getting side tracked. What is your specific concern?
Well, I wondered if perhaps something had ruptured or burst. Might I be bleeding inside?
Now, now Mrs Owens. If that were the case, I’m sure you would be in significant pain.
Wouldn’t you agree that this pain is not what is significant to you, Mrs Owens?
Marnie Cockrill is a poet and artist from north Wales, studying medicine at Exeter. This professional pursuit, combined with her delight in the natural world and fascination with human relationships informs much of her writing.
*
How Would You Draw a Bear?
after Jen Campbell
Grass seeds planted in doormat fur,
fish scales stiff between tree-root teeth and
the cave-deep noise of animal-sleep.
Still, how would you
know it for a bear?
How would I?
You would call it bear, sure of the feeling of its name in your mouth,
you always can tell, without checking, it’s bear, not lynx or coyote, and
you would tell it to keep to the tight woods, stay, not to roam.
But if it wasn’t a bear, after all that?
Would you listen to the sound of its paws on moss
and watch it scratch its true initials into the bark?
Would you let the bear go, under the clear and flannel-wet sky,
even if you never were sure, in the end
if it was a bear.
Philippa Greasley (she/they) is a queer Autistic writer from the Cotswolds. Their fiction and poetry has been published in literary magazines including t’ART Press, Anarkiss Zine, The Poetry Lighthouse, and placed in the final stages of the Bridport Prize 2026.
*
Cine Reels
On screen, Dad was
the radical –
the introverted
pen-and-notepad kind,
donkey jacket, beard,
betrayed.
Another time
he played a photographer
eyeballing Liverpool –
statutes, pigeons, couples
out to lunch. Thieves
snapped in the act.
Our hometown Hollywood
never had
content warnings.
Murder
came in piano discords,
a hymn swelling to chorus;
death was a one-word
manifesto
crumpled, windblown.
Fin.
On screen,
they killed Dad.
We watched him die
over and over.
Andy Humphrey has published two collections of original poetry, A Long Way to Fall (Lapwing Press, ISBN 978-1-909252-40-0, 2013) and Satires(Stairwell Books, ISBN 978-1-939269-16-4, 2015). He lives in York and works as a solicitor. https://www.writeoutloud.net/profiles/andyhumphrey.
*
Samaras
Having earned their wings through evolution
it is almost as though they are loth to use them
preferring familiar earth, the old tree’s broad shadow.
Everywhere you look these whips of sycamore, living
where they fell, rooting out some well of nourishment
in a wall, a bed, a yoghurt pot of rotting leaves.
And so many of them! Impossible to count their bristling ranks
like massed souls grumbling on the banks of Lethe
jostling to be noticed as the fates allot each life.
Was there a single moment — when the air darkened,
and down they span like fallen angels, a forest
carried within their collective spinning wings?
I do my bit, kneeling to uproot individual stems
while the tits turn cartwheels in the old tree’s limbs.
I know this is no more or less than they expect.
Underground, a widening web of roots
is slowly moulding faith from darkness
settling itself for the rise and fall of years.
David Lukens lives in Wiltshire. His work has been published in magazines such asAcumen, Butcher’s Dog and Under the Radar. His pamphlet One Brief Wave won the Cheltenham Poetry Festival’s first pamphlet competition and was published in 2021.
*
Monocle
remember when we lived
in the shrubs? stewed in a shared
room. its stench. our own
ripeness torturing lungs
scored elastic.
remember as well
as thieving, together we hauled
the laundry of our bodies
pretty-with-dumb into
a service kitchen
unable to see further
than a bus length
to trouble beverley
cooking. noses grifting
for food. left over.
crumbs from our parents
unfinished plates. your glasses,
trodden in haste, worn monocular
milk-bottle lens
held to eye as quizzing glass.
and remember too
we sinned in the maelstrom.
knowing nothing of aging. how
easy bone breaks by some
-thing as simple as coughing
mulika ojikutu-harnett (lowercase) is a Nigerian-Brit producer, coach, and analytic psychotherapist published in PERVERSE, Clarion, Agbowó, Tentacular, Under the Radar. Her poem ‘Bruisewort’ was awarded in the international Kent & Sussex Poetry Society Open Competition judged by Kit Fan (2025)