Today’s choice
Previous poems
B. Anne Adriaens
Fancy etymology for a vacant lot
The French term terrain vague enfolds
a plot of land I thought at first was vague,
undefined and malleable. As a noun,
this vague echoes on the edge of its meaning:
perhaps a patch of earth evoking a wave,
capable of conjuring the sea.
I’d picture the nettles, brambles,
dandelions and daisies swaying in the breeze
that precedes the first tide,
that would inch its way in from nowhere
to gently wet the grit and salt the rubble—
until the smell of brittle paper,
old ink and dust, rises from a dictionary:
this is an empty space, a new start. For rubbish
and weeds are matter too, however dismal and
dismissed. We can build a dream on rubble.
B. Anne Adriaens’ work has appeared in various publications, including Poetry Ireland Review, Abridged, Poetry Scotland, Stand Magazine and A New Ulster. Her pamphlet Haunt was highly commended in the Fool for Poetry Chapbook Competition 2024.
Kitty Coles
The moon is a cannibal: she consumes her own body. Flat-footed in her fatness, she sweats and lumbers, ashamed, in the pure of night, of her vast heft. She nibbles her flesh: the taste is oily, repellant, but she swallows it down: the gulps rise...
Lucy Dixcart
Princess Alexandra and the Glass Piano I was a child when I swallowed the piano. My jaw unhinged and down it slid: keys, strings, pins. A dream, I imagined, until a crunch punctuated my footsteps and hammers chinked holes in my thoughts. Rules to...
Steph Morris
Three halves Help yourselves, Alex says, places chocolate on the table, and opens the wrapper, silver wings on all four sides. Three of them, at one end of the table. Charlie cracks a chunk free, one whole end of the bar at a jaunty angle, and...
Janet Rogerson
Ghost I was outside in the square dull of garden when I realised I couldn't draw a ghost. The page waited patiently like the future and my eye held what was supposed to fill it. The narrow path which didn't deserve its name was an appropriate...
UEA Poetry MA Scholars Memoona Zahid and Konstantin Rega
In 2011, IS&T publisher Kate Birch established the The Ink Sweat & Tears Poetry Writing Scholarship (MA) at the University of East Anglia (UEA); Konstantin Nicholas Rega is its ninth recipient. Memoona Zahid is the second student to be awarded The Birch Family...
Lydia Harris
Eliza Traill All her names The hare. A long way from blue. What is the third thing? Twelve snow buntings in a shadow house. What she sees A large stone lintel. A hollow enclosed in a curved wall. Small white bones. A now completed circle. The...
Shelby Stephenson
Meditation on Your Bare Feet In the fruit-apple crimp of glamour and fizzing pressures I found your feet, your painted nails, So Much Fawn, a rose-colored soul, flagrance of motions, though you were miles away; the image of a small rose on the...
Attracta Fahy
Dinner in the Fields I remember you arriving to the fields when we saved the hay, bringing the sweet taste of dinners, encased in Tupperware, sitting sheltered under haycocks, in the warm sun. We rested our young bodies from sweating our work,...
Elizabeth Kemball
Pied Piper Your voice echoes through my body rumbling into veins and curves. Turns me into wood; stiff and tied to your tongue - your lungs - your vibrating throat - every hum is a drum beating me into your shadow, copying every movement,...