Peter De Ville

      Kiss A pop, a flush of flame, the chill falls back to walls and panes. The fire will have its evening feast. The keeper serves the hissing snakes, the hollow, roaring throat, the crackle and the cackle, and the lisping whistles simpering from its...

Richard King Perkins II

  Clinging For three days I’ve carried you on my back even though you keep falling off. Unhurt, I help you atop my shoulders once more praying that you’ll cling to me so tightly my hair will tear out in clumps. Your tiny body keeps falling though— my special...

Simon Collings

      In Syracuse Yesterday evening Archimedes came round for a bath. He was ages about it and afterwards he said he’d been thinking about the relationship of mass to volume the mathematics of bodies and cooling bath water. I said I hoped he had not...

Idris Pavieu

    With a torch He could have signalled out to sea An SOS, a wrecker’s trick A flattened hand against the lamp, He might have seen inside himself As children do He would have finger-painted Scarecrow silhouettes Until the sun seeped through the blinds Until...

Robert Nisbet

    Good Luck It was his great good luck not to have had an expensive education nor pull nor place nor privilege at all, but that he, living alone, in ’98, should be working for Murphy’s, a small firm in a small country town, buying and selling musical...