Young Poets
Published here are some of the excellent poems we receive from our gifted young writers.
You can submit poems either by post (please enclose a stamped address envelope for reply), via our on-line portal, or by email to acumeneditor@gmail.com. Please mark the contents ‘Young Poet Submission’, put this in the subject line if you are submitting by email, and put your name, age and address on each page of the submitted document below your poems. We would prefer a word file for the submission please.
Please submit no more than four poems. You should be aged between 16 and 25 years, the work should be unpublished.
Anna King
Hurrah for the Danes
It didn’t take long, after quitting the metropolis, for
the bandwagon flags to appear, slung
greyly above the motorways and shining like platinum
in country-windows; else wrong way up but numerous
or suspiciously uniform, down the main road leading into
my hometown. I haven’t seen such precision since the forties.
There are perhaps well-meaning innocents here,
caught up in convenient timing; and there are
colour-blind Vikings armed with chalk, who have forgotten
the sight of their balaclavas. Not enough white is the problem –
is the pitch at which these ship-sails buffer
and snap, for all you would call yourselves “patriots”.
KST
It costs so much to watch the sun
on days like this, to trace its long-legged slope
across kind-keeping rooves, or follow an
errant seagull charting a washed-blue hope
troubling peace with excessive beauty for just one –
x
There are more crackles than words; more
missing than there, and the dialling notes cut
snow-patterns in meaning. Texted love wanes insincere
when one is nine and noon is eight, and
when soft wee hour aches meet brusque day-out ardour –
x
When a wet dawn pours through emptying trees
and I fear I’m less loveable than the sunshine
still gracing each shot from Sokcho, I pray this
trade-off won’t clang too harshly; let in
weary morning, and try not to match you to people’s faces.
Shoreditch, late April
Just look at this room, with its rented furniture,
prison-striped by the late great afternoon sun.
A whole day on the fourth storey;
my feet haven’t won’t touch the ground.
Cast an eye over this accumulation
of employment progression and finance history
books, and the standing desk, stilled –
your brother’s been away for weeks –
and not once have I risen early to write.
I have taken my work laptop to bed
and staggered through reports,
tasting stale retainer,
and smelling a little of semen.
There is no poetry in this place,
or I am not brave enough to excavate it.
Harry Ledgerwood
Lighthouse
Where has it gone?
That little lighthouse on the horizon
twirling like a boyhood barber pole
where inside the men chat wares and ends,
odds and past fair plays of the weekend
before their hair thins further and falls
to be swept under a Persian rug
bought with a tourist’s haggle. I squint
to see deeper into the distance, nothing.
My buoy rocks. A still sea. I tend
to its growing rot, its fiery rust, its little lies,
slow bobs, fungal calm.
Finally, I see the light
flicker like a rolling eight ball –
dark and white,
shine and black and back
into the gutter
to wait for the next penny drop.
Halfways
It was a body dying
on the road, they said
cycling past. Not just
a body – at first
it was an ambulance
and a crowd come to
glance and some bikes.
Then it was a paramedic
puffing pulses into a chest
lest she should be able
to snatch the body from
the vice claw of death.
And I curved my head,
my sickle neck flicking
round a crowded bend
but could only see half
a body, half up to the end.
There is a bullring in Spain
carved into the edge of
an Andalusian mountain
like a pore or volcano’s ash
pushing puss into the air.
I remember I saw a man
painting the spectator’s steps
white, he was shining under
the arch as I stood at the step
and waited by a shrine
at the old entrance
where the matadors would
pray before Mary and the bull.
I left before I could see
the wearing steps completely
white. Seeing the ambulance whir,
a blur over tarmac streets,
I imagined the bull
shining his nose ring
and praying.
Kerby
To learn a thing or two about the indecision of memory
I tore a piece of pink petal from my skin & chomped down
on its already curling, yellowing edges. It tasted like rubber or
tarmac trodden upon by a boy racer’s car or a little like leather
from a deflated football from when we were boys, the days
when we would stand on either sides of the road and raise
our arms high above our heads, World Cup 2012 footballs in
our palms, eyes bricked upon the thin strip of concrete
at the opposite set of trainers, taking it in turns to throw,
waiting for one of us to land, to have the leather returned
to us & we could finally go home under streetlight moons.
More Young Poets
Zelda Cahill-Patten
Burial poem, for my ex In the end you have a ship burial. I lay out your body in a longboat’s prow and fill the hull with everything you’ll need. x You are laid to rest on a bed of clean socks. Ibuprofen, dental floss, dishwasher tablets: all the things required in...
Chloé Parekh
The Disease Womanhood and all the iron teethOf its hairbrush.Womanhood a disease;Hot tumors growing under the taut skin and call attention andCraving pretty sheep coats instead of our own leathery and hair prickled skinNo matter its upright disposition.Running hands...
Sreeja Naskar
the country breaks, but only in one direction my mother says never leave your chopsticks standing in rice,says it looks too much like incense for the dead. (i press my hands together & pray...
Maya Elphick
Notes on a Harvest I. I am not the child you wanted. I am the seed and the apple too. the call and the response. your baby ...
Lola Dekhuijzen
play me like a piano squiggly hooked linescrawl across the yellowed,crumpled sheets like hesitantfingers on out-of-tune keys,forming and deforming wordsof a language neither of usspeaks there is a little hiding spotbetween the G and the G sharp,the singular subspace...
Jingxuan William Zhuang
On Faith A sudden want of it this morning,preceding coffee, shouldersto stretch my right arm over.It disturbs me.Artificial coloring disturbs me. Rattle of heating pipesstraining to keep me content disturbs me. Baby talkdisturbs me. Pharmaceutical advertising ending...
Delilah Dennett
Memoria Pappy bundles me into Coat scarf hat gloves winter boots Mummy doesn’t like me wearing those Pappy’s good lady friend got me them All white and brown, I’m a plump Christmas pudding Ready for eating A steaming dumpling An egg on legs! Come on come on Pappy says...
Aman Alam
:this is not a poem it’s a warning label — there is no title because titles are for books that finish — the ceiling coughs again // someone’s frying onions downstairs / or burning memory — hard to tell these days (i asked my mother when she stopped praying: she said...
Sylvie Jane Lewis
I Meet Your Friends at the Gallery Opening and one asks how we met and the answer is Hinge, but I’m not sure you want me saying so. Instead we have a back-and-forth of ums and wells and he drops the question. We circle round displays of plastic fruit, films of the sea...
Scarlett Smith
Silence Cocaine-tipped tragedy carved with gold- plated powder, sniffing dandruff like the sun cracks for her. Addicted to the lies. Eaten by mice and Trojan skies. Bereft of belief. Delightful yellowing teeth. Fire-torn creature. The child with bruised eyes....
George Tidmore
Pre-American Elegy I dug graves in the first century before America. Most mornings I carried the shovel to the verge of tears. I summoned my friends and the rain cloud, gushing ...
Natasha Morris
Manicure One week after my rape I decide to get my nails done for the first time. Him and I divided by cloudy Perspex, a small hole in the bottom for our hands to slip through. We talk in hands, pointing to ballerina shape, shade 317, a blushing pink from a wheel of...
Jayant Kashyap
Some bioluminescence “ale-brown algae / that exclusively blushed / luminescent blue” — Isabel Galleymore, 'Luminescent' here, blue may also mean toxic, and means a defence mechanism for when a predator nears—as if the many whips attached weren’t enough already—the...
Cassie Whyte
Pynchon Paranoia & Prose (Comp) As I watch the rainbow disappear through four collapsing windows The apartments fold algorithmically Apocalyptic origami Looking straight up at the sky Like a period on paper A doll gazing from her bedroom A die spinning on its nose...
Emma Ingledew
Moving On The last plate broke today. It was nothing special. Cheap, temporary junk that fills a flat, a home, a life. I’ve always had a fear of losing things before their time. I kept every card she wrote even as her handwriting deteriorated and she could no longer...