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      HG I know others blossom but I vomit ectoplasm, and squaring the corners of my bed, the nurse reminds me I’m not dying. I’m just expecting an alien that feeds on my nerves because I’m not even exaggerating how much her old school air is grating on...

      Matred After the medieval “Noah plays” of Chester, York and Towneley. Noah’s wife is traditionally not named in religious texts. The name Matred comes from a novel by Madeleine L’Engle. It is known: a woman like that brings evil on board. Look at...

      In the Café Did anybody actually (most of all, me) think I could write here? At a trestle table, notebook blotting crumbs (fast hardening to glue), leftovers of a cartoon transfer, vermilion-tipped cactus tramping down the radio. Heat on the...

      Wrapping Up You have buried your mother and put a memorial bench on a high hillside where the wind blows sunsets straight through and it’s always better to wear something warm. A great walker, your mother. Cities, holloways, rugs by cradles. As...

      Ritual You used to wind yourself in curtain turning taut, look down at your feet, pirouette as the fabric hugged you in. I’d idle as you called me from your hide, and draw the other curtain. And unspooling the fabric as I called your name, you’d...

      Breckland Thyme Deadman’s Grave, 2019 With the rabbit-chapped, seeped the sward along: runner-by-runner the undershrub, shored up, stakes its waspish claim, its hereabouts, blotched with drought & the scar the boot left it, rucks the air with...

      The lesser black-backed gull The gull on the meadow taps her little yellow feet like a shovel-snouted lizard dancing on a floor of lava, a unicyclist balancing on the spot fixated on her singular task. No herring here in the meadow though the sea...

      the word of the Lord ask this place ask the silver day the steady horizon the self-heal the buttercup the hard fern in the ditch ask the bee and the tormentil this rock smooth as an elephant’s back as you sit and watch the breeze stir the surface...

      Unlocked Dogs in spring park light pulled by intent wet noses through luminous grass haven’t read the news didn’t switch the TV on follow only their noses so what do they know     Seán Street’s most recent collection is Running Out of...

      ‘He opens his throat for the crow’ (Matthew Hedley Stoppard) Down the chimney at dawn – crow caw. Wings of night retract. What does it wake me to as sky is hearthed by morning and my home warms slow? Its meaning in my gullet, I learn the way of...

      Last thing he does he dithers round the kitchen, lifts his 12-string from her hook, strikes a ringing rasgueado, the echo bouncing back emphatic from the slate flags and off the marble table. He opens up the draught and gives the creaking stove a...

    How it begins This is how (I like to think) it begins: night-time, August, the Devon cottage, where the darkness is so complete, you might lie in bed, hearing the flit flap skitter of moth wings, fearing their glancing caress against your cheek. Better...

      When Remembering I’m More Than What Wires into Forgetting When naked with myself, I feel where a right elbow isn’t, then is. I let my left palm guide me through the exhibition of my body. I’ve never been here before, or so it seems, as I photocopy...

      Category C bail violation The night of his arrest I climbed a hill to find a deep cave in which to hide as reality reset, such shifts too frequent now, and rarely for the better, an abject pattern emerging, as when raindrops flow across a waxen...

      Dreamspinning As a kid, Nehisi used to sleep in a treehouse. He could curl right into it from his bedroom window. He would have a hard time falling asleep every time his parents got loud or physical. Whatever his parents lacked in romance as a...

      Heels for Libby I don’t wear them or have any but you gave me a pair of seven-inch goth platform heels. They made me six-foot-eight. I was twenty, or maybe nineteen, sixteen years ago dancing in the bar at the end of the Curry Mile. Don’t put your...

      Mom, We’re Not the Same Anymore: Our Equations Have Changed! Nothing changed much, mom, but everything did. They say change is a constant, but this constant became a coefficient always racing to catch me (before me). Had it been π, I would have...

      Scott Elder’s work has been widely published and placed or commended in numerous competitions in the UK and Ireland. His second collection, Maria was published by Erbacce Press in 2023. A third, My Hotel, is forthcoming by Salmon Poetry in 2026. ...

      Tour of the Excavation Collaged from text in the ‘Ice Age to Iron Age’ gallery at the Great North Museum, Newcastle, UK The enigma is why this civilisation became extinct at the same time as a peak in carbon 14, which is a natural element, but in...