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      Smashing Narcissus We set about him with rifle butts and spades, waiting our turn alongside our enemies, the same sunburnt flesh, the same blistered feet. Met where our camps, the same badly pitched shelters, the same lack of meat, converged. Laboured...

    She remembers the house of her husband He’s not, as they said he is: loathsome, most monstrous. He has a strange and sinister beauty. His eyes are obsidian, shot through with gold, a ruby burning in each. A noble brow, and magnificent cheekbones. You can...

      Renegade Voices I am most visceral when being disarmed by a song, a lyric written and sung… in the broad New Yawk vowels of Dean Friedman. The scowl of Dylan. The scat and growl of George Ivan. Matthew Devereux's demonic staccato. Pierce Turner...

      Wake (Leaving Amorgos, Greece) The ferry pushes the sea, forces a long, white reply that speaks of where we’ve been - a hulk of rock, a prison in the time of the Colonels, now a place of painted chairs, fairy lights. I lean over, try to read the...

      A November anniversary In a corner chapel of the abbey I lit a small candle, and sent the flame as a message only half composed to somewhere I hardly believed in. Room is restricted on the ferry: six cars, a few pedestrians and dogs, all of us...

      Sabbatical there's not much you can do when the planets are telling you to stop and gravity, who only wants the best from us, says get down to the ground, that you are wanted, and so you obey, become as asphalt or fertiliser. you press yourself...

      Hamlet in the Scanner Can’t hear yourself think only the bass line of a heart thumping. Your head’s clamped. You can’t move. A panic button slicks a palm, a soft wet plum. You could be bounded in a nutshell and count yourself a king of infinite...

      The Insanity Ensemble   It is not like an egg cracking or an exquisite shiver of shattered glass. It is not a supercelery bone snap or a wired ballerina bend. A cortisol swoosh floods your certainty a prefrontal cortex throb threatens thunder. A...

        High-Visibility The precondition for being a ghost is not only death but faith in an afterlife. Kit Fan. When I lost loved ones last year I thought my childhood fears would return. Sleeping in mum’s house waiting for the seen and felt, the...

      Lesley  Burt lives in Dorset. Her pamphlet, Mr & Mrs Andrews Reframed, was published by Templar Poetry in 2023, and  Alice spins her Glitterball by Tears in the Fence in 2024.  

      On sunday morning you lay together laughing She gets into your bed like when she was little. Flowers grow out of the wardrobe, moss claims the windowsill and a vine snakes its way to the bed post, climbing. You are laughing. Imagine she is...

      I had a leaf in my hair when I arrived the receptionist thought it was a hairclip I didn’t know how to tell her I’d been doing my pre-op under a beech tree, leaves drifting down like snow fungus like a great carved shelf bracketing the...

      My Dad Complains That The Hedges Are Overgrown and the word bemuses me, implying as it does the concept of excess in what can only be good. Why do we crave these straight lines and clean edges? The hedge itself is a border, a defining. A this is...

      Between the Ears For Seán Street, in celebration of his 80th birthday (2nd June 2026)   Molluscous receivers, would that you could turn your talents inwards, and pick up all that goes on in the cerebral swamp that separates you, with its...

      Twitch There's a flash of colour from the hedge. His arm shoots up and hangs pointing - at the empty space where the movement was. As he names the bird he thinks he saw     Luke Moran is from Folkestone, he works there in the public...