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    How To Write A Poem First, forget the moon. Forget your lover. I want you blind to weather. Stars. All kinds of water. Start with I, with you. With what you know. No reimaginings. No Salomes with milky thighs, serrated knives. No penitent Medusas....

  Did Philippe Petit come to Heptonstall? At the top of the mill chimney some hundred feet above the stream, level with my eyes and my open mouth is a man in a leotard. It is purple, gleaming neon against lichen on stones to which he clings, brighter even than...

      Witches Brooms and Winter Roses This year is nearly over. We walk arm in arm, hear the sound of sirens incessant background dirge. On our street, three cases. One next door, one across the way. Another, three doors down. No dead so far. Stubborn...

      Collation It’s Izabelle’s funeral collation so we’re driving into Gaillac wearing proper clothes. I’m driving, you are listening to some mad YouTuber who claims that water has memory because if you say nice things to one tub of water and nasty...

      A Willow-Tree in Hiroshima Softly & impossibly, her roots still beckon growth. It is a slow hope she is drawing. Their ends were swift - echoes in the floorboards. I am reliving it, since I am solitary. A thrawning suffocation grabs the sky so...

      Wave We have learned to wave distantly through glowing windows    glimpsing a well-placed bookcase or houseplant imagining the corners of a room their piled-up flotsam we have learned not to ask what happens at the watershed we observe flows   ...

    The Glow I recognise the tingle at my nape my face melts, oxters darken, make-up slides, instantly wet through layers meant to cope. Tissues, useless until the wave subsides, my bright red fan announces to the place the hormone flush that’s difficult to...

      The golden hare I colour in a hare for my Mam for her birthday, hop between radio channels and pencil shades: red to maroon, blue to indigo, brown to russet, softest gold for the hare and the glow around it. It is long in body and limb and ear,...

    Anti-Aubade Your sobs disrupt the sound of Robert Lowell reading his ‘Old Flame’ from the app on my phone. I sit on the balcony finishing a final cigarette and try to enjoy it. Leaves crackle in the darkness just outside the panes. The orange ember...

      from The Lorch Family Magic Trick Adolf Althoff is used to riding tigers so when Gestapo soldiers come looking for Irene he plies them with Schnapps while Irene squeezes into a passage tight as a magician’s box – contracting in size until she is...

    Telling the Bees Little vials into which the sun has poured I tell you all I know about the failing crop, a marriage party, a stricken cow. Last summer I tied a ribbon to the top of your home, whispered with a sweet tongue that a new master had come....

    How it feels to be a bat There are the headaches, then the feverish sense of darkness. Taste, none but the crackly limbs of gnats. Hate is a constant on the radar and immense blank surfaces block the call by which I come to belong in the shape of a...

    A defence against all sabotage I shake out the creases from my coat, and climb the hundred steps leading to the feet of a bronze giant, its right hand raised, welcoming. I’m meant to lift my eyes, to take in its magnificence, to be stirred up into...

      The Slip Hold on tight to my writing hand, darling boy. Who knows how many words I have left. Don’t let me give them all to the page.   Holly Conant is a new writer and mature student, currently studying at the University of Leeds. Her poems...

    IMMEDIATE ACTION REQUIRED We have detected a trojan virus! I have developed affinities for dying in peculiar ways such as being choked by the moonlight’s shaking hands or swallowing a cup of live rattlesnake babies Personal and banking information is at...