A Quidam I’d been casualised again, High ChurchAssignations likely the cause. No free lunches.Only fans. I let them watch me researchLatinity in poetry today. My hunch was Quantity callously tugged us, like beads toldOr bowels, unravelled in the Grand GuignolAs we passed nights racked on Théophile Gautier’s fourfold:Verse, onyx, marble, email. But deep work is…

Yes In our uniforms, blue dress and white blouse, we climbed the school wall under the poinciana tree, until we could see inside the station grounds. I wasn’t sure what we were looking for. I had imagined we were going to tease the prisoners again whose long sorrowful faces stared out from behind their steel…

          And the award for best actress goes to   The days bleed into each other like a radiator. I have trained myself to not think of you, it is my special talent. I sing with Molly in the kitchen and pretend I have always been fatherless. Waking up in someone…

Gone Everywhere The news was Luke – through my fingers. Out of my fists. Beyond me then, but there in every room. He’d caught the ball and thrown it back a bird. We saw it prismed out, heirs to each other’s confounded love. Knocked in, shock’s bruise budded in the chest, tangled the stomach, bore…

          Crimsons   Bobolinko packs his basket with fried chicken, croutons, lime-aid, cherry pie and a Big Boy tomato, finds a private spot by the river, where oaks and maples have a quiet leaf chat. It’s delicious to sit alone, but with trees you’re never fully alone. Dusk crimsons the fading…

Photo by Alicia Healey           Veteran Beech   ‘I see a picture that thy fate displays / And learn a lesson from thy destiny’ – John Clare, ‘To a Fallen Elm’   We call it ‘the tree field’, where my sister and I walk her dog. Surrounded by nothing stands a…

Image by Shruti Khanna from Pixabay           Work of Forgetting   I travel by a stagecoach often down adventurous avenues, wool -gathering a landscape through which stagecoaches arrive and go. This is what I see today: – a wide-eyed traveller; the ground turning to mud streaked with the furrows of a…

Image by Pech Frantisek from Pixabay           In Every House Nobody Sleeps   nocturnal out here     in wild escape the gauzy texture of extreme heat Walthamstow and Leyton beyond     arguments sheltered by hedgerows swallowing benches we know it’s light pollution smouldering the East London fresco but think this stifling…

      Hollywood Africans   The only thing that was certain was that it was June and we had spilt a pepperoni pizza between us. An ultraviolet light set the room: Basquiat channel surfing looking for cartoons, while Icarus prodded a canvas to see if the image fitted precisely in the frame. He was…

Image by chin1031 from Pixabay           Him   Our wonderful man with metal hands, his huge heart physical inside us. Our tiny steps in his shoes. Our cleaning his reading glasses, filing his petrol nails, perched on his shoulders combing his silver hair. Our trips to the beach in his resprayed…

Photo by Viktor Forgacs on Unsplash       Michael writes: Both the title and tone of this poem are inspired by Michèle Lalonde’s famous 1974 macaronic poem ‘Speak White’ which expresses Francophone anger at English-language arrogance and dominance in Quebec Province. I first heard the poem performed by French-Canadian dramatist Robert LePage in the…

  The poem below appears in Christopher Horton’s pamphlet, Perfect Timing, published by tall-lighthouse and available to purchase here. ‘Cabbages’ ruminates on the speaker’s grandfather and a series of wartime memories.             Cabbages   As often retold, my grandfather stood on a battered frigate two days after D-Day. Food was scarce…

  Photo by Yves Alarie on Unsplash           Blue Mountain   We had passed halfway point. Every muscle in my body was singing, brimming with lactic acid. We’d been arguing, arguing as we climbed, about the best way to climb a mountain, though I’d never climbed a mountain before and you’d…

Photo by Erik Mclean on Unsplash           An Away Match   One long and wide hall filled with dancers limbering and jostling at each of three crowded bars, while a band in suits got ready on an unlit stage, lean among the sequined drapes and shadows. A padded door on the…

  The poem below appears in Rebecca Farmer’s new pamphlet, A Separate Appointment, published by New Walk Editions on 16th November. Rebecca will be launching A Separate Appointment jointly on Zoom with William Thompson and his pamphlet, After Clare, at 7pm UK time on the 16th. Register here. ‘Meeting Cary Grant in St Ives’ first…

Photo by Ahmed Zayan on Unsplash       from Five Poems for Mushrooms         Collared Earth Star   Undeterred by lax mornings of noiseless rain. I renew an infatuation with the wild plum and the amanita, trudging through the forest floor searching for the revelation of a shared frailty. Allow me…

Photo by Krišjānis Kazaks on Unsplash           Chris’s Room   When Auden bought his first home- a farmhouse in Kirchstetten- he wept tears of happiness for the days of impermanence he was able to relinquish, the simple anticipation of place. And I have never been far from the routine of cheap…

  Photo by 青 晨 on Unsplash           CT Scan   When x-rayed in slices, at least an idea of wholeness shrinks into blatant meat: bone, blood, thickenings and masses, shunted back and forth. Once, you smelt how surgical holes in childish skin reduced us to mortal. Fascinating raw depths: but…

Photo of Tbilisi by Eugene Chystiakov on Unsplash       Climbing Tbilisi   Above the brick-domed baths of Abanotubani, rare trees ache with invasion and enemy grab. City spreads, leavened and rising like khachapuri, its rooftops woven, a red and brown kilim. In the butterflied grasses, local teens lay about making out in telescopic…