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      Toughened Bark it takes a hefty blow sometimes to split you open a sharpened blade to split through years of tough old bark in the deeper channels feel how sap and resin thicken sap to carry nourishment keeping the woodiness supple resin to...

      A Space of Her Own A thirty-year-old woman walks into the wee sma’ hours of a December night. Snow is light on her hair and the back garden shrubs. It thickens. The sky turns white. She stands still. Her boots are coated, and the heels disappear....

      Cremation morning after your cremation   I wake no calls to make to stethoscopes or wreathes your bones no longer at any postcode watch black smoke clouds from neighbours’ chimneys   ghosts how can your blood now be this urn of ash to lick my...

    Siberian Larkspur     Jemma Walsh is an Irish poet based in London. She is currently doing an MA in Creative and Life Writing at Goldsmiths College. Her work has been published in The Irish Times, Moth Magazine, HOWL Magazine, Crossways...

    Quiet Joy   Stay silent under eyes of stars quietly watching,   the cat slinks by my house, pads slow, wary,   a mouse like a dreamer’s sleep in her mouth.   Single light from a top window opens its shadows.   She leaps with...

    Dingo in a World Heritage Site     I won’t forget her on the beach – fur the colours of sand. We wouldn’t have spotted her were it not for the jiggle of her gait, the turn of her head with ears pricked, the spine’s taut bow and torque of her...

    ecotone     you         stoop         & shell your self   touch in gustgasp       gentle     now       hailsharp     you brave me    ...

      Answering my father   You stopped the car in the lane just before our driveway. I didn’t ask why. Chestnut trees leaned in on either side, the damp air breathed. You sat there, looking straight ahead and said there’s nothing worse than being...

      Gay Chicken This is how it starts. Champion of every round,                                                       player, Don’t care to cleanse                                                       yourself from the corridor rumours.             ...

      Virginities one for hurting / for loveless / for rinsing yourself off afterwards and meeting your eye in the bathroom mirror and saying firmly you have not made a mistake / for a mistake   for knowing who you are / for confirmation for otra...

      Shabby chic my body is a shipwreck blooming with coral I open my legs and out pour gold doubloons it is impossible to slam a door underwater there is an opening here fathoms deep I have made a mast of myself washed up on a beach somewhere once a...

    Marianne North transports the tropics to Kew She packs the globe in a wooden box, ships it to London, shrinking each place she visits to the space between her hands then draws them apart like a conjuror nectaring sunbirds out of sable hair, butterfly...

      Willow Woman After ‘The Huntress of Skipton Castle Woods’ by Anna & the Willow Pliant yet unyielding—there’s steel at my core— I’m fixed in the flex of blown breeze, leaf ripple. Hems besom discarded leaves, gathering them in as kin, and I’m...

        Tetris We’re there on the midnight pavement with the amps and the guitars, the kit and the cables, remember, you and Drew and Tom and James and me, after that gig— instead of the bus the taxi driver turns up in this car like your mum’s and...

      A very small thing. I found your fingernail creased inside the poetry I read to you.  A dry paring, thin crescent, white as a hospital tag, cut when you could still fight me, with your vowels and yelping, with the stricture of your hands. I...

      Fumes Everyone goes to the harvest – men, women, and children leave at dawn, as soon as the fog changes colour. It’s safer then, but beyond the stockade, they still wear masks and gloves. Except for the woman at the front – her mouth is free. She...

      Bear Bear, you’re a mouth that breathes while it chews and you spray your wisdom on bits of bread Bear you’re a man who lives fast and loose with a loneliness cavernous inside your head Bear can I ask you to eat your own tongue when you spy bought...