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      I Fall in Love with a Tree Everywhere I Go  When I shut my eyes all I see is the sky hung with oranges like a dozen orange golf balls; the tree itself on display like a circus animal. I am where the palm trees rise and fall on the horizon; where...

      Morning Conversations Every Gulmohar flower is a vermillion cup of the night’s sweet nectar that drenches the birds’ parched songs. Every branch is a perch for daylight to scout, to rest and to tread lightly without leaving prints. The parrots...

      Sonata for the Dead (After Li Shangyin) Crows pick at the rotting bones of skeletons who gaze with sightless eyes at the stars, where our dreams abide, but never come alive. Crows, seeking somewhere to feed, scatter like fallen leaves, as wind...

      Fish-Tale   She gorged on forests, gluttonous for the town, craved torchlit streets every time she went back to normality.  She swapped her tail for a man washed up on the shore along with the shingle, salt-seaweed, and crab-carapace. She burns...

      The Love Poems I finally took the trash out, sent that email, and had enough clean dishes to eat a meal at the table but there was no time to write the poem Before you woke up this morning I slipped into the cool autumn air in search of the...

      Simulacra I was six when I shifted a curtain in a dark room at the waxwork museum and peered through glass at a woman I remember hooks and chains her tattered skirts pale lips crimson stains I thought of her first time I lifted black tarpaulin...

      The Upminster Train We met on the District Line from Wimbledon to Upminster. Chatted all through Southfields. Hands held by Putney Bridge. Our first kiss at a sudden lurch near Parson’s Green. In love as we pulled in at Fulham Broadway. It was all...

      The Lea at Hertford Around me everything is peaceful. The river flows, willows trail in it and children walk by. Nothing of her suicide abides.     Dennis Tomlinson lives in London. His poems have been published recently in Shot...

      Because you’ve never seen one, you ask me about stag beetles What can I tell you now that they’re so rare? Every childhood May or June they came at dawn and dusk, mostly in ones and twos, sometimes formation clouds buzzing, black belly-drop, fuzzy...

      ALMANACS 21. Your optics’ fuzz is merciful. Value speckles on mirrors. Above par days have routed. Profess want of upset - Grizzled hairs invade, marauding. 24. Festoon pine 'til glitzy. Shroud bounty in vivid overlays. Letterbox cards will roll....

          L Kiew is a Chinese-Malaysian based in London, and works as a charity sector leader and accountant. Her debut pamphlet The Unquiet was published by Offord Road Books (2019). She was a 2019/2020 London Library Emerging...

      Containment I drive your lemon yellow Smart ForTwo six hundred miles home from your flat— stuffed to the roof, my suitcase crammed on top, your miniature car swells to welcome a pile of your leavings, rescued from Junk-It Ltd. house clearance:...

      A Parishioner Complains at a Parish Church Council When We Move the Time of Evensong  You have changed the Bible you have changed the words in the service you have brought in girls to serve at the altar and women can now be sidesmen and any minute...

    A dental technician rips up a postcard of dental puns Have you known the suffering wrought by damaged mouths? Or the solemn joy of healing? Have you reckoned with the uses of dental records? Think through the murdered and the long dead; think of things...

      coffee and the interconnectedness of all things i like the darkness of it, the bitterness, the ring of light reflected on the surface. i like the story. the crushed beans. the crop growing on the side of a mountain. i like the journey, but in...

      Escape from the Novinskaya Women’s Prison, Moscow, 1909 Let’s imagine the doors that scraped the freshly cemented floors as a gaggle of raindrops escaped from a gutter, the timetabled chores in the crypts for their needles and cradles, the chapels...