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      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...

      Lochan In the circle of its trees the lochan shines midnight silk. I could be a lily printed on its sheen but silt would fill my hair if I floated so I dip only my body as I swim and when I scramble out naked, every spike of peach fuzz is coated....

      symptoms she is aggregate concrete and grit held together in a human shape lying on her side knees drawn up flesh tensing to stone and tendons in flames the weight of her body pressed into the mattress leaves a shallow hollow once she’s gone a...

      crow’s landing glimmer blades the field’s lightly fogged grass green struggles through autumnal vague chill flop a crow drops in black flurry sky-fall awkward hops forward eye-dark clever     Martin Potter...

      Riddles Outside the Berber tent the poet and I contemplate the boundless Sahara sky. And I wonder how I got here. No bedtime stories, children’s classics neglected, just weekly comics I learned to read myself. My curiosity deemed dangerous in...

      Elegy for the Caught Fish I Over the Salem highway flies A bald eagle carrying a fish like a weed out of the Willamette. We totem our empires with the raptor, weave into flags, fix on coins but what of the victims? How come no one ever glories the...

      Venerate Her Husband’s Image As A God Think what it must have been like for her fasting from sunrise to moonrise, to wake up three hours before dawn, bathe, apply sindoor on the parting of her hair line, decorate her hands with henna, dress in a...

      Bob & Moses Zerihun drove him over the dead-cow hills and Bob’s long hair stood up with shock at what he saw. Every time they stopped, a volley of shepherd boys attacked the Landcruiser with stinging hands and their weightless voices echoed...