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            Beth Davies’ debut pamphlet, The Pretence of Understanding, was published by The Poetry Business in 2023 after winning the 2022 New Poets Prize. Beth also won second place in the 2022 Magdalena Young Poets’ Prize. Her website...

      How to Love the Word “Lesbian” We took the bus in tutus & fairy wings, gripped on to the cowboy hat trying to fly from your curls in July's breeze. In Trafalgar Square, floats of rainbow companies waltzed by & we rolled our eyes, couldn’t...

      The Conversation It’s been quite a while now and… You know we get on like a house… August twelfth, a year ago, can you… I bet you thank your lucky… Things have evolved, haven’t… Can you believe we’re both still… You know how in Prague when… Did...

      Agnosthesia for MH She gives me a word to look up in a dictionary of obscure sorrows. I, who try to decipher echoes from other people’s reaction to my words throw down a bucket into the well recognise water when people tell me how sad––how...

      Longing After Hafiz Longing curls its legs up on the sofa in our house. There’s a dip there now. How I long to turn us into a day trip. You belong in that chair over there asking what happened with that text and where I bought this jumper, whether...

      Mercurial Mornings See the local estate agent crooks Ten a penny Smoking their rollies, washed down with protein Pigeons with emerald necks Mealworm toes Clucking ‘round bins Unfazed by the likes of you Or me Taxi drivers Caffeinated Menagerie of...

      Doctors in difficulty after Helen Mort A trainee in difficulty is one whose progress is causing concern or who is not meeting curricular requirements. This may be due to ill health, life events, difficulties with learning or through less than...

      My early days with junk food When we got home from junior school, Mum was still working. We would go to the cupboard where multi-packs of Fine Fare’s basic crisps were sorted into old shoe boxes, one for each child. Although Mum said those should...

      Lightheaded Sick of steadying the base of the ladder while you ascend to fix or fell sculpting, tweaking real and here when mostly I feel hardly real and hardly here. I’d rather be inside pretending I’m not pretending commentary inside my head is...

      In the Event of [        ] Read Poem Most things have their uses, some have value or worth and a rare few acquire some purpose and even meaning. Some things we hold in trust, some we forget we even own and then there’re those items we hang onto...

      Somewhere to get to The light is growing in the East the headlights skim the road that runs beside the flooded fields we’re a month off blossom when it comes I will drape myself in the year’s renewal and ask how many times I will see my little...

      Coping strategies With the neon-splashed night at the window I counted each contraction down, obediently, as my mother had told me to do. Ninety-eight, ninety-seven… This instruction reminds me of my friend’s advice: if you’re ever in public and...

      You ask me why I put myself through that, as if I jumped out of a plane 14,000 feet of fear and longing. As if I were a camel pacing two-toed, unhindered into the eye of the needle. As if I plucked the thorn instead of the rose, wrist of scars no...

      The Circles on Your Ceiling You wake up (so you tell me) to the lurid gold of summer splashed like paint across your tea-brown walls; curlicues across your bed- room ceiling: complex, inter- locking circles (‘rings left by Goliath’s teacups upside...

      Fortuna rolls the dice in Tumahole Free State, South Africa I have never seen a baby so tiny outside a womb. You hold her jigsaw of bones in a blanket, afraid to scatter the pieces in case they’d sail like seeds onto the road. A dung beetle rolls...