The below poem is taken from William Wootten’s new pamphlet, Looking at the Horsemen, published by New Walk Editions on 4th May. On the same day, it will be launched online in a co-launch with Lisa Kelly. For more information and to register to attend, click here.  Reading Walter de la Mare, William’s…

        – Bal Maiden I –     Morning Rain   ‘I ain’t complaining’ she hugs herself in the thin light before the sun is properly up A chilly wind wraps wet skirts round short legs pain in her flat chest She’s cold as the bucking iron she holds in small strong hands Staring…

        A Magpie on a Downpipe   I sweep white blossoms from the path, hard bristles unbending on each stroke; it is not till months later, when the owner of the house returns, that I learn the tree overhanging the fence is an apple tree. We sit outside in the sun, get to…

Picture credit: Stephen Wells         In Concert   We were sitting in a crowded hall, waiting for the lights to dim – before the halls were emptied – strangers sharing breath, breathing as one when the music began. How strange to be silent together, listening as sound filled the air; shallow breathing of…

        Chocolate Factory   for Andrew McDonald   Like a natural outsider over listed cobblestones to this once mews-like stable block, then chocolate factory, hence its name, on a visit to your studio, I’m late – caught in the rain. It’s accessed by some iron steps and walkways to the farther end, narrow,…

        Vital Organs   ICU, Easter, 2020   An outsider looking in might imagine they were seeing the interior of a space ship; ventilators, dialysis machines, monitors surrounded a station full of computers and strange-looking creatures, indistinguishable from one another. In gowns, masks, goggles and gloves with only a scribble like a tattoo…

  Emily and Jo write: “What follows is a six-poem sequence taken from the manuscript of a collaborative poetry collection, The Conversation. This collection follows a conversation held between three muses/lovers of Picasso: Marie-Thérèse Walter, Dora Maar and Françoise Gilot, as well as between ourselves: Emily Cooper and Jo Burns. The themes discussed are fidelity,…

          Dates with the Fates     i) Clotho   Her last date? Some chump called Pelops. She gave him the cold shoulder. With her men, she likes them older and she dines on them like scallops. You can see why I’d be nervous. I asked to try the Sauvignon while she…

        Cakes by Carol   It brought a strange comfort; somewhere in the folds of fondant she felt she had stowed away dreams she had held on to for too long, dreams she was too tired to carry any further. She was happiest when the show was on, in worlds lit up briefly…

Image: detail from cover of San Francisco Poems by Lawrence Ferlinghetti (City Lights Foundation, 2003)     John Gohorry       Lights   Poetry is the shadow cast by our streetlight imaginations. – Lawrence Ferlinghetti   What happens to time on the mind’s Coney Island? It’s sixty years since the first trip I hitched in…

        Swimming   Jaan to meri jaan, my life. The ghosts of language sit at the tip of my tongue and sing meri jaan. There’s a tale about two lovers, Sohni and Mahiwal. Sohni the daughter of potter Tulla and Izzat Baig of Bukhara a trader who became a buffalo herder known as…

          Icarus’s Mother   Missing from the Musee des Beaux Arts, a portrait of the slave girl, her name unimportant or forgotten, who gave birth to Icarus when she was just fifteen. The old Masters never painted this; a table littered with feathers, beads of wax, wood shavings and string, and at…

        ‘Honeymoon’   from the memoirs of Helen, widow of the poet Edward Thomas   They fled, by train, to a poacher Edward named ‘Dad’. His own father made the Civil Service, rather than risky Dad’s wood-cottage. Green lit thatch like oaks, the emerald sheen of pheasants’ necks Dad wrung, unseen. Helen woke…

Photo by Daniel Burka on Unsplash              The Kill   In your room, holding the cartridge, you imagined flames packed like petals in a bud, poppy red. Uncrimped, the hull revealed, instead, only seeds. Having tasted saltpetre and sulfur, ingested chemistry, mimed stock, action and barrel, linked vital spark in hunter,…

    Neighbours   Grant was exhausted. I leaned over the shrub and watched him trying to hit a five-foot high stake into the ground. He isn’t a tall man and this was hampering his progress. This, combined with the fact that he would be better off using a long-handled roughneck sledgehammer rather than his…

    Photo by Paweł Czerwiński on Unsplash         Those days   There was always a simpleton as far back as I can remember her shit-covered hand through the broken glass of a small window high in the gable wall above the hoarding for Woodbine cigarettes as though she were asking for one, or…

  The below poem is taken from Colin Falck’s final poetry collection, Leni’s Triumph, published by Shoestring Press shortly before his death in December at the age of 86. Copies are available to purchase online here.          Peace in East Sussex   These old joiners’-wood trees, beech and oak and ash, have stood…