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      Memory and Sky In the search for sky the slip of landscape: blues and greens, browns and white clouds of paint, lost black mines. The sea's a beast, a wild gatecrasher and breaker of the picturesque. If you drag your brush across the canvas,...

      Numinous You see, there is this fold, and this ridge, and this sweet hood, and this little shiny popping button, and this smooth silver-glistening, and this depth, and deep, deep within, there is something that touches you back.     Math...

      egg her first was almost translucent light brown with dark freckles laid in the pot of a dying nasturtium a virgin birth in a pile of hay dropped and abandoned like it was nothing special     Geraldine Stoneham lives in South Australia...

      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...

      ‘I found it particularly hard as a dad.’   Keir Starmer, Prime Minister’s statement in the House on historic forced adoption  I’ve been staring at the blank page of this notebook for an hour. I close my eyes and breathe in for four, hold for four...

      Duomo We slept as best we could on the night train. Leaving the station we walked empty streets aimlessly until turning a corner there it was, silent and vast as the moon.   Ken Cockburn is a poet and translator from Scotland and works in...

      Balancing   On the pitch of the roof a jackdaw holds a twig longer than its wingspan— do corvids feel pride? Balancing the weight, the bird shuttles from rooftop to rooftop to join its partner. They fly together beyond my view where their...

      When we die, do we   go back, small cell, atom slit by light. It takes up  space, an ocean, a planet, a  god. Too large to understand  the scale, although we accept the concept. Constellations, tongues of vibration. Unlearnable logic between...

      Sunflowers   a friend messaged me: “every time I see sunflowers, I think of you” and somehow, that was all I needed to remember that somewhere in this world I still bloom in someone else’s mind.   Fran Hayden is an emerging poet and...

      At Sea   Both cast out to sea, I wonder –  did your ashes ever meet?  It was under the same sun setting, although years and miles apart. My grandmother, loosened slowly into Cardigan Bay under a Hay Moon. My best friend, spread across a bed...

    Well after Thomas A Clark when the people are gone and the wooden house has been burned down to recover its nails for a short while afterwards there may flourish a small orchard and a well blinking at the sky   Mark Rutter’s poems have appeared in...

      Why don’t you eat pork?    If you don’t believe in God, my friend says,  why don’t you eat pork? I have no answer for her. I have only the blue-tacked mezuzah stuck to the doorway of my bedroom, the dried wax still wedged in stubborn clots ...

      Undertow   On my phone a newsreel shows a car boot lifting just above the flood. Tail lights like eyes caught in a comic gasp, while its body, like the carriageway, lies under sixty million litres of last night’s rain. Walking through town we...

      Summer’s End Today I tipped the packet of coffee into the cafetiere instead of the tin. Caught myself in time, didn’t pour water in. I’ve started to write notes to myself: Shut bathroom window. Lock back door. Yesterday at the bank I couldn’t...

      Summers in black Who’s idea was it? I think his, as I’d started wearing everything from Oxfam. Among my finds collarless shirts. There was I and my clique, ourselves fearfully fresh, seeking out lived-in things, clothing with more history than us....