The usual strong shortlist for our May Pick of the Month, with several offerings from our Mental Health Awareness Week feature, as well as some fine poems examining life, death and heartbreak, longing and belonging.
Will you choose:
- Joseph Blythe,‘Wallpaper’: every layer of the piece delicately bites into language.
- Jo Farrant,‘Losing it before the UFO can find a parking spot’: the deep discomfort of adolescence and the feeling of not belonging in this body or anywhere else
- Martin Figura**,‘Looked after children, Blackpool’: powerful. heartbreaking and, sadly, all too true
- Marissa Glover,‘What Might Have Been’: a moving poem with palpable imagery
- Mofiyinfoluwa O., ‘palm trees on the edge of farewell’: a photograph, a story, life itself. Simply beautiful.
- Jennie E. Owen,‘Then tragedy makes children of us all’: an original depiction of the unmaking of life
All six of the shortlist have been chosen by Helen, Kate and IB or received the most attention on social media. They can be found below. (Please scroll down.)
**As many will know, Martin is married to IS&T editor Helen Ivory. His poem has been shortlisted based on social media response only with no influence from Helen, IB or Kate.
Please VOTE HERE! Voting will close at 6pm on Monday 16 June.
Our ‘prize’ is £25 towards the charity of your choice or an emailed National Book Token giftcard*.
*Book tokens can only be used within the UK. Sadly, we are unable to find suitable cost-effective alternatives outside the UK.
THE MAY 2025 PICK OF THE MONTH SHORTLIST
Wallpaper
I swear I felt the swirly patterned paper
rip from the walls of my childhood bedroom.
It was the same stained cream shade as my skin –
pockmarked, cut and scabbed, dry and peeling –
and I felt it tearing, dragging pieces
of my grey flesh with it,
chunks of crumbling plaster.
They promised me it wouldn’t hurt,
but I screamed when I saw the bare brick
of my bones for the first time,
my blood coagulated as dry grout.
A sharp spirit scent as they cleaned the wound,
restructured my flesh and sinews smooth,
then stitched the seams of my skin
at emergency speed.
Joseph Blythe’s prose and poetry has been published by Stand, Pennine Platform, Grist Books, Swim Press, Allegro Poetry and more. He holds a BA in English Literature and an MA in Creative Writing. He tweets, Instagrams and Blueskys @wooperark
*
Losing it before the UFO can find a parking spot
Used to be the stain inside a makeup bag, glossed on inside cheek, socked on the stairs, Auntie at the Embassy, the sink over adverts and the sinnerman,
and too much, I’ll keep going: my face, not like the moon, my face, like a hot cd. We’re stuck on a scene, frozen,
like the ice cubes I begged Mum to get with the little flowers in them. Like taking a test in the school gym but your knees are so big they’re banging into the desk.
When he asked you out and you didn’t want him to. The text from him (different one) in his 30s who wants you very much. Your chest all safe and tucked away.
A horrific birthday with the candles from up the road and the bad singing, the spreadful orange lights on spitty slippers.
Like your fixations that might just be non-human ponderings. Whether you are or ever will be human or not. Like the lyrics of a beautiful song– goes ahh, aaaahhh.
The sleep after something terrible, the terribleness sticking your stomach bits together. 16th Christmas sliding under it, a present you will never ever remember.
My chest under his legs. His neck in my hips, like in that bit where you’re not sure if it’s part of your back or not.
Never wanting him behind you. Wanting to see him and see you on him, so you knew there was a you to look at.
Looking at someone through a straw right up to your eye and going “I seeee youuuu”. Watching the film from the sofa,
no edges to my legs. Sitting on a dining chair in the middle of the living room. Mum, folding over pieces of hair and using her nails as a comb, and then a pen,
and then folding me up and laying me flat above my head, using my own leg to push through the parting.
She says How, Why, When, When, en, en. Until I’m stuck in a pool of ns and there’s so much Mumness that I need floaties to stay up.
And her voice sounds like it does after something. Pressed into a train seat and covered in fabric annnnd dulled under the tv
and shouting at the sofa annnnnd standing where the computer used to be, spinning spinning, messing up my plaits so she has to start over
until the pattern’s no longer a pattern but a nest I’ve built for needing to want her, for when I’m there and when I’m not and never ever remember.
Jo Farrant is a UK writer. Their work invites an intimacy into the digital and the absurd. Pieces can be found in Cringe mag and The Canvas Arts Magazine.
*
Martin Figura’s collection and show Whistle were shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award and won the 2013 Saboteur Award for Best Spoken Word Show. Shed (Gatehouse Press) and Dr Zeeman’s Catastrophe Machine (Cinnamon Press) were both published in 2016. In 2021 he was Salisbury NHS Writer in Residence; the resulting pamphlet My Name is Mercy (Fair Acre Press) won a national NHS award. A second pamphlet from Fair Acre Press Sixteen Sonnets for Care came out in October 2022. His latest collection The Remaining Men has just been published by Cinnamon Press and is shortlisted in The Norfolk Arts Awards. Website: martinfigura.co.uk
The back story to it can be found here.
*
What Might Have Been
There is a small white house
high on a green hill just south
of Scotland, an office bright
with books and a window
overlooking Magdalene,
and somewhere on a dirt road
between endless pastures
of strong red fescue, is a man
on a motorcycle—drenched
in the day’s sweat like a soldier
returning from battle, coming
home to me.
Marissa Glover lives in Florida, where she’s swatting bugs and dodging storms. Her poetry collections, Let Go of the Hands You Hold (2021) and Box Office Gospel (2023), are published by Mercer University Press.
*
palm trees on the edge of farewell
they are gathering seashells. the boy is shirtless and the girl is wearing a black dress
that exposes broad shoulders soaking up the morning light. her hair tumbles a fiery
orange down the length of her back. the same back bent with both their eyes twinkling
in furtive adventure looking to find seashells buried beneath the sand. they find tiny
white ones, large beige ones, gray ones the same shade as concrete; some cracked in
small places, some with pieces missing, some so eroded by the salt of seawater that
there is nothing to them but the skeletal frame of their disintegrating bodies. when you
know that your time with someone has almost run out, that is what you do. you look for
tiny things buried in the sand so that you do not have to look at the huge broken thing
standing between you both. they find a dozen. and still look for more. the ocean stirs
next to them, wave after wave crashing into the sandy shore, the early morning sun
kissing the water until it shines glasslike; an eternity of things we can never touch.
Mofiyinfoluwa O. is a Nigerian writer living between Lagos and London. She is a graduate of the Iowa Nonfiction Writing Program and The Founder of The Abebi AfroNonfiction Institute. Her work has appeared in Guernica, Black Warrior Review, Variant Lit, Pleiades, Ploughshares and elsewhere. Her work has been selected as Best American Essay Notable Entry (2022). She is currently at work on her debut memoir interrogating the body and its relationship with desire.
*
Then tragedy makes children of us all
and in that last moment
the dead shrug, shake
off their boots, shuffle off
jackets and shirts, watch astounded
as their dresses grow and drop to their feet.
Their bags, their glasses, car keys and phones
clatter far away
scatter in rings too far too reach.
They are all elbows and scuffed knees
naked but covered
in primary crayon-box colours.
Every one of them fidgets
in their little wooden box
skipping through their mother’s hearts
blowing out the birthday candles of her eyes
over and over.
This soft reduction leaves the rest of us open mouthed
too small to see over the counter, full
of questions that cannot be asked
cannot be answered.
Jennie E. Owen has been widely published online, in literary journals and anthologies. She is Pushcart, Best of the Net, and Forward Prize nominated. She is a Lecturer in Creative Writing for The Open University and lives in Lancashire with her husband and three children. Jennie is a PGR at MMU, focusing on traumascapes in the north-west of England.