It’s all in the details today, ‘fake shearling’, ‘quiffs, cowlicks, scars’, ‘a hairline crack behind the fridge’, ‘grilled cheese sandwiches’, ‘haloes of smoke’ and ‘a network of cues’. There is, as one of our writers puts it, ‘more than one way to “see” the world’, so whose vision will get your vote today?
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- Tom Brookes, ‘Flock’: which captures the texture of time and makes an ordinary day extra-ordinary.
- Stephen Chapell, ‘At the Barbers’: portrait of a woman barber whose attentiveness and care extends to the reader
- May Garner, ‘The House Keeps Score’: speaks to the idea that houses hold echoes and ghostings of whatever lives they have held.
- Louella Lester, ‘Unnatural Migration’: flash fiction which delicately communicates both the subtle and overt emotional currents in this piece.
- Rob A. Mackenzie, ‘Sea Lily’, an ekphrastic poem about the nature of fixedness and unfixedness in all things.
- Surmaya Talyarkhan, ‘No mental image’: an illuminating and luminous prose portrayal of aphantasia, the inability to voluntarily visualise mental images
All six of the shortlist have been chosen by Helen, Kate and Zakia 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 11 March.
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 FEBRUARY 2026 PICK OF THE MONTH SHORTLIST
Flock
In the charity shop I try on a coat
flocked with fake shearling,
shaved-soft almost: fibres
fired onto plastic to fool the wrist.
At home I snap it.
A dust of fur lifts, hangs,
then drifts onto the draining board,
the bulb, the bruised apples.
Kettle clicks. The day adds up
in what catches:
tin-lid nick, salt sting,
the flinch I don’t record.
Above the library we meet
in a room of hot carpet, wet cuffs.
Radiator tick-tick.
A laminated notice by the sink:
PLEASE RINSE MUGS
ringed with old tea.
On the table: a plastic tub
of instant coffee, white sachets,
a stack of paper cups
soft at the rim from thumbs.
No circle. Just a scatter,
knees, bags, paper cups,
space left like manners
and fear.
Someone’s brought finger Nice biscuits,
sugar stamped in little diamonds,
coconut-sweet, too delicate
to dunk.
A man worries a bus ticket
into a thin white curl.
Someone re-ties
the same shoelace, again.
When one voice breaks
we all lean a fraction,
one hinge between us.
Walking home, bypass wind
throws grit at my eyes.
Overhead the birds bunch, loosen,
bunch again,
a dark seam unpicked and re-stitched
by the air.
I zip the coat to my chin.
Static lifts the fine fur, makes it cling,
not one wing: many.
The flock opens, closes,
a mouth.
I don’t look up.
Tim Brookes is a poet and spoken-word writer/performer from West Yorkshire. His work focuses on place, memory and the pressure of systems on the body, mixing lyrical bite with everyday detail. His pamphlet Keep Taking Six from 100 (Yaffle Press) was published in 2023 his first collection The Holy Ordinary will be published in 2026 with Yaffle Press. He hosts Under The Lobby Lights and Soul Shed Spoken Word nights in Wakefield.
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At the Barbers
She has a way of tilting your head
as if lining up a thought.
Neither rough nor tender—decisive,
like someone used to responsibility.
She remembers names,
gently enquires after sick wives,
errant sons, daughters who never phone,
knees that won’t work on the stairs.
Old blokes come in for the cut,
eyebrow decluttering,
nose tweezering,
ears tweaked of fluff.
She works quickly, cheaply.
Cash only. Her father’s rule.
Upstairs he “keeps the books,”
which means smoking by the window.
She wanted to stay at school
she tells me
but left at fifteen
learned the grammar of heads—
quiffs, cowlicks, scars,
the way grief settles.
When I sit she listens
as if the day depends on it.
At the end she brushes my collar clean,
steps back, checks a job well done.
I leave,
feeling better.
Stephen Chappell came to poetry late (he is 72 and counting), finding the writing and reading of it a pleasure and an addiction. He lives on the side of the Malvern Hills with dog, cat and significant other and is mostly happy, especially when writing.
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The House Keeps Score
The house keeps score
in places no one checks any longer.
A hairline crack behind the fridge.
The soft dip in the hallway floor
where grief learned how to pace.
We didn’t mark the days
after you left.
We measured time by sound,
how the door stopped opening,
how the stairs forgot your weight.
There are rooms that still expect you.
They hold their breath
the way lungs do underwater.
Even now, the walls lean in,
listening for damage.
Early, I came to understand
that silence isn’t empty;
it’s crowded with what wasn’t said.
With apologies that miss their cue.
With footsteps that turn around too late.
Some nights, the house exhales.
Wood ticking like a body cooling.
I stand still, afraid to interrupt
whatever it’s remembering.
May Garner (She/Her) is an author and poet residing in rural Ohio. She has been writing for fifteen years, beginning her journey on Wattpad, and growing into a published author over the span of a decade. She is the author of two poetry collections, Withered Rising (2023) and Melancholic Muse (2025). Her work has appeared in over thirty literary presses including Querencia Press, Cozy Ink Press, Arcana Poetry Press, Livina Press, Speckled Trout Review, and other.
*
Unnatural Migration
When Mom flew off with the Canada geese you made me promise that we would never leave one another. Ever. I wanted to protect you, even though you were an irritating baby sister who I had to bribe with candy and pop, so I could hang out with my friends. If I was away too long I’d find you on the porch when I got home, tears running your cheeks while you asked about Mom.
Mom showed up a couple times a year when she flew through heading north or south. She knew Dad kept a shotgun in the closet by the door, so she’d call from a payphone to make sure he was out. Then she’d honk from the road, just in case. We would run out, but you would always slow down when we reached the ditch. Pretend you were watching the ducks swimming in and out of the big culvert. Made Mom get out of the car, waddle over to corral you, and then shoo us both toward the car.
She’d push us into the back seat and give us gifts, t-shirts, often the wrong size, stuffed in crumpled paper bags, pretending they were brand-new, but they didn’t have labels and early on you figured out they were from the charity shop one town over.
She’d drive us to Nelly’s Diner, park at the back, and watch us eat grilled cheese sandwiches, while she nibbled away at a bowl of greens, until you pointed out the window toward the big loose ball of dust rolling like a tumbleweed down the gravel road at speed. “Mom look, I bet that’s Dad coming to find us.” Then Mom would peck our cheeks, say her goodbyes, wing it through the kitchen and out the backdoor, while I refused to let you squirm out of the booth to follow.
Louella Lester is a writer/photographer in Winnipeg, Canada, author of Glass Bricks (At Bay Press 2021), contributing editor at NFFR, and is included in Best Microfiction 2024 & 2026. Her writing/photos appear in variety of journals and anthologies. http://louellalesterblog.
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Sea Lily
after Alison McWhirter
Everything is moving. I have to remind myself
it’s a flat canvas and behind it a wall that’s solid
as I am.
Although three quarters of my heart,
and one third of my bones, are water. Which
explains a lot.
Appearance can be deceptive
sometimes, but never here. I root among
many layers: clouds of mustard, pink ribbons,
haloes of smoke, lightning streaks, the sea
lily on its stalk, fragile in depth
plant-like
animal, I’ve swum into this shapeshifting
world, no longer quite sure of what I was
or might become.
Everything that matters
in art resists all explanation, but is bound
to emerge anyway, and to keep emerging.
Rob A. Mackenzie has published two poetry pamphlets and four full collections, the latest being Woof! Woof! Woof! (Salt Publishing, 2023). His work has been translated into French, Italian, Serbian and Czech. He founded and runs Blue Diode Press. bluediode.co.uk
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No mental image
I have a friend who designs cards for friends every Christmas. She carves the pattern into lino, maybe a robin, or a heart shaped a bit like a beetroot. I often feel like a lino tile someone has hollowed – not in a violent way but not unmarked either. It’s how time manifests in all of us. Like a gouging but with an aesthetic, unique to us.
I first heard of aphantasia in a writing workshop – a poet told us she didn’t see visual images in her head. I had always thought everyone didn’t. Research says only 1-4% of people have aphantasia, which they describe as another way of apprehending the world.
Researchers are quick to pity the aphantastic, noting how participants in a study expressed shock on discovering that other people can conjure up an image in their mind’s eye. They frame aphantasia as an absence, I think of it as a gift.
It’s no surprise that three of the poets in the room has aphantasia. There is more than one way to “see” the world. When I call to mind a sandy beach, it’s not a picture, but a network of cues. Because after all, nothing is static. And if you think of an apple, it might be green, but the apple another person thinks of could be red. What if every possible apple was in my mind’s “eye” at once?
Other issues are associated with aphantasia: people who can’t visualise an image in their mind’s eye are less likely to remember the details of important past personal events or to recognise faces.
When my husband reads, it is as if he is watching a film in his head. His reading is painfully slow, I imagine the mental clutter accumulating scene by scene. When I read, it is clean. I am stringing something together – I can describe the characters, I can predict their actions, but I read fast and what I imagine is not visual. My memories are similar – when my children are not there, I can’t call their faces to mind, but their faces have been in motion all their lives, I can’t believe there is one image that would stand for them.
I have always had a shuddering dislike of photographs, particularly since my father’s death. Who wants to stare at a stuck face? Like a stuck clock – I think aphantasia may give you a different relationship to time.
It is true that I am less likely to remember important past events. I couldn’t tell you in what year I got married. But the sensation of the room erupting into dance will stay with me, without the sweaty photos. And I have watched that video of my dad whirling around the room any number of times.
I can’t recall my dad’s face and I’m grateful for that, he is in my past. I imagine the researchers would find me a cold fish, but they come with bias. To me, this is a world focused on presence. But I can have my father entirely in his absence. I’d say that was pretty much exactly what love is, the ability to be with someone when they aren’t there – to know someone so well their presence isn’t material to the knowing.
This morning we were looking at a seagull. My husband pointed out that for a bird to tuck its wings in when it isn’t flying, is an extraordinary feat of engineering. I thought about the skeletons of wings I have seen, the narrow fan of bones. I couldn’t for the life of me imagine it – think of the origami of overlapping ligaments, or an aeroplane trying to nestle its huge wings in.
I learned how to open a fan one-handed in Spain in my teens – it makes a satisfying sound, like an abacus, the sound of sequencing. How can a bird spread its wings noiselessly in and out? It seems like a miracle akin to flight.
Surmaya Talyarkhan (@surmayatalyarkhan) completed an MA in Creative Writing at Royal Holloway in 2025. She lives in London and has published poems in Dreich and Wee Dreich magazines, Between the Lines anthology and Sphere, a Royal Holloway zine.