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Small hours chat (after The Poet or Half-past Three by Marc Chagall 1911-12) O celebrated bard, you should know espresso mixed with drags of Gauloise won’t steady your head. Your pondweed face betrays chaos, lays bare a wretched heart, while cubist-dissected skin...

Half Past Eleven Much like a burnt-out farmer flumping down upon his ache-allaying, tender bed past toiling in the unforgiving sun, Ma does the same when stove-led tasks are done, heat-pillaged, sapped, and flabby at the head, with arms full splayed. Throughout her...

Lot’s Daughters Visit Their Mother Each year we climbed to that place high above the ruins. The first time, our almost-twins bundled in shawls, we found her tall, unyielding, testament to all those she had loved and known: kith, kin, home: the cursed we left behind....

Mel Tibbs lives in South Devon where she is completing a Masters degree after a career as a freelance copywriter and magazine editor. She has previously lived in the Midlands and all over the South West, though she grew up in Canada and began raising her own children...

      COWBOYS NEVER DIE a cowboy is that split second of doubt between victim and victor, quick whipcrack out the corner of the mouth, then dissolving into being. a good cowboy never introduces herself, wants you to confuse her for some other tasselled...

Bust of a Young Man (from the Burrell Collection) Bronze. Roman copy, made in the Eastern Mediterranean. 100 BC – AD 100 I'm nineteen, I'm ancient. I am so hungover one of my eyes has fallen out… He'd come in every Saturday morning, looking rough as fuck. Chipped skin...

      Everybody Knows Ceilings don’t hold water well. Burst a pipe at the top of an apartment block to test this theory, if you will. Lock the doors to each flat. Let the water run down between kitchen floors, popping out the eyeballs of ceiling lights...

      Abertawe After Richard Siken For CHD Tell me about the time I mansplained that Swansea is the English for Abertawe and means town at the mouth of the River Tawe. And about when, from the hill above Rhossili beach Lundy Island’s spectral mass...

  Mark Wyatt’s pattern poems have appeared in Ambit, The Echo Room, ELTED, Nine Muses Poetry, P.E.N. New Poetry II (Arts Council/Quartet), Poetry Nottingham, Slow Dancer. He is currently developing a sequence of pattern poems that take inspiration from...

      The Pleasure of Fruit I tempt you with morsels of soft-skinned peach, a pear sliced in quarters, pipless and skinless. Your teeth may be failing but your tastebuds savour the sweetness; juice drips down your chin. Sticky fingers once picked...

  Lesley Burt has had individual poems published in various journals, including Tears in the Fence, Prole, Dreich, Ink Sweat & Tears and London Grip. My first pamphlet, Mr & Mrs Andrews Reframed, was published by Templar in 2023, and my latest - When...

      Seats Before a table of white People, I stand with ballet Slippers strapped/soft soles Head pointed towards the angels. A dance, I commence. Pirouette Grand adage, en point Followed by flight as a helium Addicted balloon. Circling a table of white...

      Hawthorn Joseph Bacon. Aged 24. 5 feet 5 ins. Dark hair. hazel Eyes. dark complex[ion]. Labourer. Born in Derbyshire. Trial of Joseph Bacon & Richard Briggs The Old Bailey, 1790 The first night you lay down your head in London there is...

      His Last Picture (After The Martyrdom of St Ursula) In a courtyard off Spacconapoli there’s a Madonelle, outdoor shrine with a pale figurine, withered flowers. He emerges at nightfall, lights a solitary votive candle, prostrates himself at her...

      35mm Haul down the ladder and you’re in under a skylight casting a blue dream. Lino offcuts, packing cases, old 45s, brogues, spilled jigsaw pieces, hats. Here our cast-off selves come to console each other. We remember less than we forget. Under...

      The Song of the Scans This is the song of the cells’ soft throb, the quivering coherences, their shuffling the profit and loss of life, to have and to hold. This is the trace on the scan, clouds, miasma of tissue, the ghostings of bone. And this...

      Witch No man can hold me. See - I blur the line between days, inhabit that space between sleep and wakefulness. The blue hour’s lung swells - Exhales - past fresh-laid hedges with their dark-ditched waters stirred by breath I seek out the roots of...