Today’s choice

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Julia Webb for International Women’s Day

 

 

 

 

Julia Webb is a neurodiverse writer from a working-class background who lives in Norwich. She has three poetry collections with Nine Arches Press: Bird Sisters (2016), Threat (2019) and The Telling (2022).  She is a poetry editor for Lighthouse – a journal for new writers. Her fourth collection Grey Time comes out with Nine Arches Press in July 2025.

(first published in ‘Atrium’ September 2024)

Marie Papier

      A Jar of Honey Would Give the Poem Away instead let’s ponder the idea    stay silent let the flowers of the fields come into your vision lavender   thyme   verbena breathe in their scents    let them speak to your senses    tease your nostrils   ...

Claire Allen

      Now She can't remember why she started recording their FaceTime calls. Now, when she's lonely, she scrolls through this small library of conversations and chooses one. It took a whole February weekend to transcribe and learn her lines before...

Anna Chorlton

      The Act Summer began with a bike, its frame painted red, one thin wheel. The focus was balance, hours of clinging to walls and doors; fences and fingertips, pigtails and ears. It became about a clown; greasepaint mouth sadways striped dungarees,...

Millie Light

      Ballet audition Bent, a teapot, arthritic neck its handle, lips protruding from the spout she’s irked because I fail to retain the enchaînements. She sees a lazy teen – she doesn’t see a girl walking London each night, imagining death more...

Jonathan Kinsman

      45rpm heart block is a slowness or abnormality in the heart’s rhythm due to a fault in its electrical conduction system. tread wrong here and the needle jumps — skrt-skrt-skrt. iggy pop plays the songs on christmas day, picks from discs wrinkled...

John Chinaka Onyeche

      Portrait of a country   What is your country in a definition? When the first ship anchored on the shore of the Atlantic. My country became an experiment of - forced marriage. As with guns, plough and religious wars, they wedded three adults...

Sapphire Allard

      Memory of Water  When you told me once that grief comes in waves, were you referring to your own death? All of us still living trying to dissect our own meaning as if it were pooled in our hands, slipping through the cracks of our fingers. Perhaps...

Jake Wild Hall

      Alanis Morissette small dark speck on the window looks at me says you are lonely small dark speck on the window laughs says you are surrounded by joy small dark speck on the window stares at me how it stares small dark speck on the window refuses...

Anne Symons

      Golden Shovel after Gwendolyn Brooks ‘We real cool’ A tribute to Khadija Saye 1992 – 2017 Gambian-British artist and photographer She bubbles laughter and we are captivated, caught by real joy in her happiness. So cool – I’m an artist! Rock my...