by Kate Birch | Feb 9, 2020 | Featured, News
The ordinary becomes extraordinary in the shortlisted works for our first Pick of the Month for 2020 and the decade. Seemingly familiar warning signs in Rob Stuart’s Word & Image are, in fact, ‘Poetry Hazards’. Melanie Branton’s...
by Helen Ivory | Feb 9, 2020 | Featured, Poetry
Some things never change Before I went to school one day I hid it under the bed, forgot about it for years. Then, when I met you, something triggered so I dusted it off, placed it in the centre of the kitchen table. You hardly noticed – just...
by Helen Ivory | Feb 8, 2020 | Featured, Poetry
Charge Sleeping in doorways, they huddle against the cold; plunge the needle tip. Searching for a vein, while others crave a socket; plug-in heroin. Waiting for a plane, they hug the corridors; hooked to the drip. Peter Bickerton is...
by Helen Ivory | Feb 7, 2020 | Featured, Poetry
The Machinist (Put Something of Yourself into Your Work) The hum and buzz of faster machines buoy her. Decides brightness should be her default. She unwraps a blood-red cuff from her wrist, smoothes it onto the metal bed of her Jones Imperial....
by Helen Ivory | Feb 6, 2020 | Featured, Poetry
Rocks without names I watch the silence out there through the hurly gush of Atlantic and tide swashing at everything I mean, if I could find words. I keep hearing it say nothing to me. The moon shining on white flecks of rock in the cliff face...
by Helen Ivory | Feb 5, 2020 | Featured, Poetry, Prose
Neutropenic
I enter through the airlock, wearing a blue paper gown, hands still damp. There’s a low window which gapes incredulously at concrete slabs with weeds oozing between them, a bare tree, an after-thought of grass. Beside the window, an...
