The Train   The concern, unspoken amongst us, was whether goodwill would hold. We’d been on the road for weeks; children walking alongside the wagons until they fell and were thrown on top. Last Monday, however, we made landfall. The ridge achieved and this small place found. We pitched at the river.…

    Waterland   There are still pike in Jesus Ditch. The length of three finger-joints, quicker than dactyls. Gone before you can say ‘Jack Pickerel.’ Drowned land, drained land, where earth is silt and blood and river. Fen Ditton stippled with pools, Milton’s vocal reeds. City built on water, don’t you know the Wash…

        Dear Mother You’re Dying   You are wasting away, you have cavernous sinuses and hollow flesh. Eat gracefully: there are those that are starving, you told us this and shoved our faces into Mother, ten years dead and veering further right. We held a wake while you overslept, I forgot your name,…

        Death of a Trophy Hunter   Over the kill the larvae loom she posted on Instagram before the blood congealed, paid in dollars for the fun. Trophy hunter with a smile, herself hunted down on the net they published her name, address. Not overheated reaction, not revenge not justice even, the vigilantes…

         Urban   Drawn to our open lawns and clipped verges, the spectral profusion of a well-stocked border or neat geometrical bed, they tiptoe across our phantom frontier. Too easily startled, they sniff an air that’s fraught with omen, their delicate ears twitching. Once spooked, they bounce on bony shanks beyond the…

Photo credit: Brian Fraser     The below poems appear in Pascale Petit’s new collection Tiger Girl, forthcoming from Bloodaxe in June.          Mongoose Brushes   After my father left, my grandmother called me her little mongoose – her Rikki-Tikki-Tavi – clever enough to kill the cobra under her bed, which is where…

  The below poem will appear in Katrina’s third collection, Wild Persistence, forthcoming from Seren this June.         House as Tent   You walk uphill to sleep, downhill early morning – and there’s a flush – it’s more complicated than slipping out, squatting in the chill, the moon keeping its eye on you.…

  The below poems are taken from Bob Beagrie’s new collection Civil Insolencies (Smokestack), which tells the story of the Civil War battle of Guisborough in North Yorkshire on 16 January 1643.         Lyke Wake   “Where am I hurried! What sanguine place Is this I breathe in, garnished with disgrace?” John Quarles…

        Back End   of February and the drifts are up to the eaves. On the old folks’ bungalows, startled faces at the glass shrink behind their curtains. Crazy! And we know it, painting in this, but it’s all the firm’s got on. We forearm snow from around the windows, haul the propane…

  The below poem is from Kim Moore’s forthcoming book-length sequence All the Men I Never Married.         All The Men I Never Married     No.21   Many years ago, I lived in a house in the woods. The woodcutter visited on nights when the moon hid itself behind the clouds. Sometimes I…

  This month Ruth Padel presents a major new work, Beethoven Variations: Poems on a Life, published in the 250th year of Beethoven’s birth. Below are two poems from it.         Idealising the Unattainable Can Begin Very Early   ‘Little Louis clung with great affection to his grandfather. Though he lost him so…

        Cults of Broadland   Fen raft spider   Let us venerate niche and otherness, local, patch-level occurrence – take the fen raft spider’s each simple eye, each leg hair sensing the water’s tension. All his drawn out care, a display of front legs in arcs across the meniscus, that moving slenderness, stop-start,…

        The Roseland Peninsula   Tell me now – how often do we live in our own description? (Charles Tomlinson)   Looking west, the hill has no house so you imagine one. Curved stone lintels. A deep-set door where you’d expect. Outside, an unassuming car with cassette tapes in the glovebox and on…

        Parable II   Here, lads, this song, No Eyes, reminds me when – this the common end to a normal night, being after, well in the new day, stooped but standing over a laptop, headphones at the end of their tethers, harsh pebbles on eardrum – I was dancing, the spasm done…

Miranda Boulton / Island Series 12, 2018 / monoprint with gouache 39 x 48cm     Victoria Best   For a year and a half, between January 2017 and July 2018, I witnessed and recorded an artistic collaboration between two sets of friends, one working and creating in the present, the other – because mortality…

      from Windows   In my head there are several windows, that I do know, but perhaps it is always the same one, open variously on the parading universe… Samuel Beckett       VII   i remember the expanses between winter the cyclic shifts the lying amongst sand dunes & flax fields i remember…

        Garden God   Easing her flip-flops and ectopic body down the lamp-post, this grasshopper of a girl fringed with electricity from São Paulo and the South Seas hangs with me at three a.m…. touches at herself publicly – and grants her charm in piecemeal at the postern earlier in the night in…

        Villa D’Este   More water, extravagant upshootings and downpourings of it, unbottled from the veins of a Borgia. Such force and power — though to what end other than to cool the minds of those overheating here in the future? Let it rush and hiss and chuckle and spray its optimistic excess…

        Small griefs,   like looking up from the page and realising that the train, for quite some time, has been moving through the kind of scene that feathers your body with desire. Border of buddleia and rosebay, foreground of inscrutable wheat. And how many hedged fields, billowing up and over the hillside,…