Hello

      Second Generation Upgrade I take an invisible dog on holiday to the coast, with raven feather tied to my hair and a new iphone in my bag, my passport is ready for a quick get away, and I must look a sight in these snow-boots and sunset skin. I ask...

          Dane Holt’s poems have been published in Poetry Ireland Review, The Trumpet, The White Review, Stand, bath magg, One Hand Clapping , Anthropocene and elsewhere. He is poetry editor of The Tangerine, a Belfast magazine of new...

      The Arrow that Flies by Day (Psalm 91) To my first readers I present fragments, half- rhymes, vowels, words, somewhere a metronome beats time and we split the line into syllables, metric feet, then come the myths and metaphors, music sounds near....

      I take a torch to 4am climb the stairs so I can be closer to the moon or Venus, something private, divine Moisture on the roof out of nowhere suggests autumn is creeping in like the possum whose red eyes in the beam are jewels of curiosity or fear...

      Harlan & Siv Euglena Harlan presides at our Church of Gullibility in the Vale, accused of murdering his younger self. Prosecutor Marat Siv arrays testimony, exhibits, arguments against the Judge-Who-Rules-at-Pulpit. During a recess, Siv...

      Auntie Joyce I knew your face when I saw you from the backseat window in the hospital car park where you stood talking to my dad, so I must have seen you before then. Perhaps at your son’s wedding, for you had to be there. I remembered you also...

      Norwegian Trees Still Bear Evidence of a WWII German Battleship According to their research, one tree sampled saw no new growth for nine years after 1945. -       The Smithsonian Imagine a ship pulls up into your fjord and releases a cloud of...

      Coping Because I had a vivid dream I could telephone you in Heaven, somewhere my brain believes it’s true; delusion is a kind of redemption. My conscious mind habituated to our almost-daily conversation, my unconscious has found a line to sustain...

      My Swallows after Ann Gray I talk to the swallows as they dip and dive wonder if they return because of me. I tell them the cactuses are dying, that I'm the wild boar rooting around for grubs, that I don't sleep much these days. I tell them the...

      Toast Ken (now Kenneth) shrugs. He can’t have his liver ripped out after all without his reading glasses. I have Alzheimer’s. Those marshes. I know. Nigel (already regrettable) shares a name with – let’s leave it at that. Sends new guidelines,...

      Mechanical Bear   I would give you a mechanical bear and watch it move across the table-top. Soon the mechanism would go, poor bear, but you’d improvise and make it climb walls. No bear in history had made it as far. The first bear in space, the...

      The Cosmos of Small Details: When A Young Poet Asked for Advice For Dean Young (1955-2022) Hey Bro, how do we know what’s real? Like what’s really real? Can you actually prove to me dinosaurs existed? Prove evolution? Prove radio waves? Gravity,...

      The Perfect Platonic Prison The canal is the most perfect of mirrors reflecting the purples and blues of the boats and the greens and blacks and blues of the trees. They all reach down in perfect symmetry. There are shabby huts and black cats....

      Bunnies? We were delicate creatures once: shy, wide-eyed, exotic incomers. Holes had to be dug for us. Always toothsome, we have descended the scale of what is desirable, losing caste, coarsening, getting bigger, faster, fitter, more inured to...

      She runs a circus now Her will drives them round the world – a cavalcade of needy clowns, prima donna gymnasts, tigers. Even in mufti, you can sense the whip back on its hook by her basking boots. They keep changing the legislation, so she runs...

      Convergence   After that first year, they were never the same,  the planners with their Glastonbury smiles, their beatnik topology, though they still carried the henge inside them,  a degree or two of slippage was lost at the roundabout,  the...