Christmas Eve
‘I was all hers and we peeled potatoes’ – Clearances III, Seamus Heaney

we set about our tasks. I
was called to the kitchen where she was
ribboning their freckled skin, the fall
of my knife steady like hers,
they hit the cold pan and
thudded with the beat of the carols we
sang as we peeled:
our own hymns, tasting of potatoes.

Leusa Lloyd is a Welsh writer. She was long listed for the Mslexia Pamphlet Competition 2023. Her poetry and short stories can be found in Cardiff 75: Contemporary Writings from the City, Moon Water, Everscribe, and is forthcoming in Mugwort.

It’s nearly Christmas at the NICU

and there are fairy lights on the incubators, and a room full of nurses looking up at screens,
checking cables that tell me your heart rate and oxygen level and you’re there in your nappy,
and the tube in your nose down into belly and cords on your ankles and cannulas on your wrists
and your heels already pin cushioned from tests to check, to check, and they’ve brought us a screen,
a privacy screen of tropical beach scene and I’m behind it now, top off and to the beep of your heart
monitor you’re lifted out of the plastic and sheets and placed, warm body, curved, to lie on me,
on my newly swelling breast, and you’re nil by mouth but if we carefully move the cables and keep
the velcro strips on your wrists and ankles and don’t disturb the cannulas and the nurse silences
the monitor which is panicked now with all the movement, and then you lie on me, rest on me, sleep
on me baby and we can pretend this is us at home in bed, by your crib, with the wind outside
and the Christmas lights flickering in the window.

Lydia Benson (she/her) is a Folkestone based writer. Her poems have been placed in the Aurora and Ginkgo prizes and published in various magazines.

It is always Christmas in the loft

That one year, when it all went wrong on Christmas Eve and
the whole thing got cancelled, it just sat there for a few days before
Christmas was piled on itself in a corner of the loft.
No meticulous wrapping of lights and tree ornaments
And a whole herd of silver reindeer were lobbed on top with
the odd stray unChristmassing into the background.

No one could face unravelling it so Christmas was left to fester
while around it suitcases stockpiled
and sandals were swapped out for boots and back again.
Occasionally a little JOY would glitter a trajectory into a spare duvet
encouraged by a tinsel envoy. The clatch of cabling
crushing tin-foil stars weighed heavy above our heads.

When we were collectively tall enough to release the hatch
we sat crosslegged and unwrapped Christmas, shushing ourselves
as fairies with broken wings were brought into the light,
cottonwool snowmen crafted in unremembered times
our names in teacher’s handwriting on the back
We used to make Christmas, didn’t we?

A paper chain, remarkably, holding itself together
laid over boxes (contents unknown), crackers recovered,
pulled, plundered, our heads light with it all
as we reunited JOY with a still glittering PEACE.

Charlotte Johnson is a Scottish poet who lives in Reading. She was one of Apples and Snakes’ Future Voices in 2024 and created a flmpoem to celebrate their 40th Anniversary.  She LOVES Christmas.