Hello

      Abreast Wait, I'm talking. It's my turn. Be patient. It takes me a while. I have to work it out. I will keep it short. You see I've lived a while, learnt a few things, for example clichés are true but not always. Listen to your friends, to your...

        On My Evening Walk Down Walworth Rd For anyone considering going on T I’m ready for your future self to walk right up to me. I am certain that I will recognize you because I’ve been practicing! As night falls like a slow curtain onto...

      the feminine urge to murder a lover over breakfast because he talked over you at last night’s dinner party. swallowing remarks like dripping yolk, whilst he sips his tea brewed with love— and arsenic. the feminine urge to wash his whites with the red...

      Trearddur Bay Everything was slate. Outside, the rain made barnacles of water on the wooden slats and waves jumped like giddy children onto the stones. Jellyfish loomed, a cove of beached moons. You stood in your room for hours a rock pool waiting...

      Dad You reach the end of the garden path and open the gate. I wait at the door. You reach the vestibule with its mosaic tiled floor with a big hug for me. Daddy’s girl, always. Tea done, you fetch Glen’s lead and we climb the hill to the spread of...

      Smile Your smile Woke something – Up. If you knew, You would hate me: Being, this, or that – One thing, or another, I’m not, But love, Mirrored in your smile, I felt it then.     Sarah Nabarro lives in London with her husband and small...

      The Heart Intervenes, a Dream Poem We are four strangers learning to live together in a new suburb where streets are names from the past. “Good morning!” I precipitate crisis in the kitchen by eating biscuits when no one else thought to bring...

      LULLABY Night drops by In a coat of onyx and blue Lights up his silver pipe And asks how do you do Night perches on my bed Says  - kiss goodbye to sleep Blows smoke rings in the air Throws a dreambone at my feet Night wiggles his long fingers Taps...

      boudicca you’re a brewery down the road i drank a bottle of your finest on the train back from bury st edmunds the red queen (no one will call you ginger) i see you everywhere realised you were also the wetherspoons round the corner the one with...

      Confluence  Stour springs from greensand into lakes marbled with lily-pads hosts to hazes of dragonflies & pseudo-Roman reflections glides sixty-one miles seaward past the rare Black Poplar meanders through chalk      clay      heathland...

      Memories are squirming prehistoric creatures burrowing under my clothes, enlivened by tea in that mug that matches your eyes, Revolutionary Road shown on TV, the airline ticket from our Paris trip leading to le labyrinthe, feet blistered trying to...

  Helen Pletts translates work by Ma Yongbo 马永波    Wander around the Barren Mountain from Afternoon till Evening on the Sunny World Poetry Day Leaving the Dull Books Behind When you enter mountains, afternoons stretch and lengthen like days; mesmerise. You...

      Trespasses Forgive me The E flat on your baby grand (not quite in tune). This same finger in the crack that goes clean through the bungalow’s supporting wall. Then flicking dust from the fringed edge of your floral lampshade. Noticing that they...

      Seventy-one Things Paulie Should Know Farewell to the mountains, high-cover'd with snow, Farewell to the straths and green valleys below; Farewell to the forests and wild-hanging woods, Farewell to the torrents and loud-pouring floods. My heart's...

      A Bad Spell The rowan by the house is cracked in two, her bark ragged, grown good-for-nothing old. Fungi feed haphazardly and once, a treecreeper, his heart of white running like love on her trunk. A calligraphy of twigs marks wind-spun air, frail...

      Cousin I didn’t know who the call was about, just that it was past my proper bedtime on that surrogate school night, Sunday. I think the grownups had still been up because the landing light was lit for me and it would have been dark if they were...

      Islay: Your last holiday As he fixed scales in Port Askaig, paid in single malts and country charm, we loitered, impostors on an island farm. All at sea on a serenity of sheep, we played monopoly, box tatty and frail. Its missing chance cards, no...

      Bird of Prey Mami, I find myself wishing your memory were a bird of prey— red-tailed hawk or black vulture, just as long as the talons dig, long as edges curve into outstretched fingers. Oh to pierce through that final blur, I’d prize any...

      One Winter’s Line Between underpants and saggy bra, she hangs her fallopian tubes out to dry. They dangle like a pair of tan tights, dancer’s legs in the wind. She bends, reaches inside the basket, mistakes her vagina for an old sock. She...