Christmas Games

After the lunch he gets his folder
of Christmas games.
Ten copies he writes out each year.
The file is spilling
like a drooping accordion
that swings down and open
as he makes his way through rooms,
looking for people to play.
But the youngsters are not yet ready,
although they say they’ll play later.
I see him go and sit back down.
He gets tired earlier now
and this year wants to go home
mid-afternoon.
Later, when we realise
we haven’t played his game,
the evening feels easier –
lighter – but emptier.

Caroline Smith lives in Wembley. Her book, The Immigration Handbook (Seren) was shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award and translated into Italian. Bycatch will be published by Nine Arches in October 2025. She has been awarded a Hawthornden Fellowship for 2025. X : @csmithpoet

Approaching December

Winter hovers at the door with armfuls of lights
for unknotting. Soon, the evening will whisper
of an early thaw and, in the city, someone
will cajole a Christmas tree into a lift, home it
in the yellow glow of their living room.
Tables will prepare to swell or retreat
and my mother will always be taking something
from the oven. She’ll leave it on a rack to cool,
press it into the impenetrable logic
of her chest freezer, all the while hoping
for just one bulb not to light. She knows
one is all it would take to send the string down,
to snuff the whole thing out.

Bec Mackenzie grew up in Essex and now lives in East London. She completed her MA in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia and she was a member of the Southbank Centre’s New Poets Collective 2021-2022.

Another Nest Flown

On days I move home the sky is dirty white .
The van sets off between slantwise
sleet, Old Testament storms.

Road Sweeper in a high-vis jacket steps back,
black cat shelters under a waiting taxi,
silhouettes of friends I’ve mostly imagined wave.

A Coal Tit flies up to my balcony –
I mean my former balcony –
and claims the final crumbs,

it freezes in my memory
like a raven in the bony tree
of a Brueghel winter landscape.

The sky wears its work-day suit,
my vacated flat yawns and stretches
in its beloved silence,

it welcomes another who will
watch from the windowpane,
rain’s slow forgetting.

David Keyworth was born in West Bromwich but grew up in North Lincolnshire.  He was awarded a  New Poets Bursary in 2013 by the Northern Writers’ Awards (New Writing North).  He is also included in The Best Ever Book of Funny Poems (Pan Macmillan, 2021).  His debut pamphlet, The Twilight Shift, is published by Wild Pressed.