Cremation
morning after your cremation I wake
no calls to make to stethoscopes or wreathes
your bones no longer at any postcode
watch black smoke clouds from neighbours’ chimneys ghosts
how can your blood now be this urn of ash
to lick my pinky to dab you up suck
pray saliva glues your burnt bone skin dust
back together inside my mouth until
you’re five foot ten my jaw widens and you
crawl out my head as if I’m open grave
James McDermott is widely published in journals and magazines including Poetry Wales, The North, Butcher’s Dog, Popshot Quarterly, Ink Sweat & Tears and 14 Poems. His poetry collections include ‘Wild Life’, published by Nine Arches Press, which was shortlisted for The East Anglian Book Award 2023, and the spoken word collection ‘Manatomy’, published by Burning Eye Books, which was longlisted for the Polari First Book Prize 2021.
Ponyo
You wake on a bubble,
blanched in the delivered promise of
another morning, this time
sprung off a new mattress
from farrago dreams.
And the sea is pouring in through the curtains,
flood on flood, bright blue –
the world
sketched again
in a heavily outlined wonder.
Edward Heathman was born in 1995 and grew up in South Wales. He studied English Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Manchester and has had writing published in The Manchester Anthology, The Manchester Review and The Visual Verse Anthology. He lives in Stockport.