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      Singing Lessons for Beginners Necessity, that scold’s bridle, held her humble and mean, So that she no longer spoke, just looked - Her world reduced to a search for special offers, Fluorescent beacons that steered her far from Shelves profligate...

      Astral Projection Mrs Norris had thought ascension would be whirligig rides in bright violet rays, as the training books all implied. She worked hard on her technique diligently preparing an inner world, a kaleidoscopic version of her garden, neat...

      All that unpicking at the mercy of wind The tide unpleats from her godet, zig-zags in running stitch round the base of the côtil. Her quick fingers unravel raw edges, unpin seed potatoes, rip daffodil seams. She pulls hems from fence posts, tacks...

                                  Matthew Caley's latest and seventh collection is To Abandon Wizardry [Bloodaxe, 2023]. He's made a Poem-Film with film-maker Jesse Adlam for Unicorn...

  Jenny Robb has been writing poetry since retiring from a social work and NHS career in mental health and children’s services. She’s been published widely in magazines and anthologies. Her second collection is Hear the World Explode, Yaffle Press 2024.  X:...

      Ballad of the Cobbler’s Shoes Rural Action Derbyshire charity reports children are doing P.E. in wellingtons. You try doing star-jumps, steps, or squats, in knee-high wellies. One at first, then in twos and threes as term ran on, turn-up for P.E....

      A Town of Shadows Ashington I was born in a town of shadows. The shadow of the black bridge, where boys would crawl, hand by hand, under rails in Beeching’s gaze, cheating teenage death by drop into the lazy Wansbeck. The shadow of the Charltons,...

      Crushed She was only a little woman five feet nothing in nylon stockings. If I stood sideways they’d mark me absent. Lightweight in her youth the heaviness came later. See what you did to me she’d say, scar stretching red across her belly, this is...

      The Language of Inflections When she said ‘could’, it was clearly in italics and when she said ‘one day’, the creak of glaciers shuddered around its edges. The way she said ‘yes’ was a stone dropping down a bottomless well. When he said ‘trust...

      ice cream under the sun   the days are long but the years are short. seconds are tiny kitchen knives in my back. i stopped reading Dickinson, her voice is a sad parrot. i often imagine myself drowning in her punctuated chaos. the grass is...

      BECAUSE When she is toddling small, she learns to hear real good because she cannot see. Faces, unless they come swimming up close. are a blur of piggy-pink and ice- cream. In the street, she doesn’t know, cannot be certain when to smile, when to...

  Lesson   A cell, an upright piano. Sentence, one hour. I’ve never shown any interest in music, never tapped out thumps on the dining table, stamped out beats in my scrappy shoes or hummed silly tunes. The teacher is an old spindly man. Grim, out of a...

      Skins My mother had a handbag made from the skin of a female cobra her brother killed in the garden. No rrkk-tkking Kipling mongoose to protect her, just my fierce uncle, bantamweight in a stained banyan brandishing cricket bat and torch. Rain...

  Generational Divide She only speaks to me these days through groaning floorboards in the night and slammed doors. Through eye-rolls, half-eaten dinners, and empty packets of birth control pills. Her friends and their mothers are ghosts, glimpses of them...

      Hauntings No-one has seen a ghost while breast-feeding despite the unearthly hours, the half-light mad sing-song routines of rocking a child back to sleep. A potent cocktail of hormones. Perfect conditions, you’d think, for a woman to slip through...

      As the Festival Wanes I The furniture covered in once transparent now foggy sheets craft the room a morgue, and we identity the bodies, "This cupboard, my mother brought with her from her father's place." "This couch still has my uncle's bottoms '...

      Burning Wings Dark but tolerable The air, itself, no longer sweating. And the yellow moths like some strange throw-away tissues used up by nature circle the lamp hanging above. Nearer and further they stitch, around and back and past me. I see one...

      Grief I wasn’t in, so she left me a note. Each word a tangle of broken ends, some oddly linked to the next with a ghost trail of ink from her rose-gold marbled fountain pen, a rare indulgence she’d bought herself. I think I’m about finished, the...