Four-Leaf Clover

We searched so long for that clover.
Every time the sun shone we scoured
the fields and woods, running past
the children playing with skipping ropes
and hula hoops. Then you came to me
and said you found one. The tape
transparent as water. I said
you hadn’t found one, you made it.
You said it was better to make something
than to find it. I wasn’t sure – too scared
to touch the tape, temporary as a bandage.

Eventually someone found one in the playground
and dropped it when break ended.
Our fingers wrestled. The school bell
rang like a gong. Your red face and hands.
The fourth leaf lay severed in my hands.

Heather Hughes is an English teacher who lives in the Lake District. She has a BA and MA in Literary Studies with Creative Writing from Lancaster University. She won the Foyle Young Poets of the Year award in 2019, and her poems have been published in Obsessed with Pipework, Flash, Dreamcatcher, and on Acumen’s young poets page. She writes a range of fiction and poetry and is currently working on a dark fairytale poetry collection about the female body.

Midsummers

pink plastic buckets
they try to lift the sun
from a rockpool

*

first kiss
behind the old lighthouse
burnt cheeks turn redder

*

after the rave
grains of sand in held hands
pulsing dawn

Laura Webb is a resident doctor near Brighton, UK, whose work explores themes of illness and healing, folklore and ecology. She co-edits the science poetry journal Consilience and is studying towards an MA at the Poetry School/Newcastle University.

Jude Brigley is Welsh. She has been a teacher, an editor and performance poet. She now writes more for the page. She is in her third age and is a woman in a hurry which is exemplified by having over twenty poems published this year. Publications in magazines include ‘Gyroscope’, “Alchemy Spoon’ and ‘High windows’.