Guest Poems
We love to read your poetry and, even though we receive over 1,000 poems per month, we always take time to read every single one.
A few of the poems we especially enjoyed and which were selected for publication in our Journal are reprinted below.
For more information, please see our Submissions page.
Guest Poems
Rachel Mann
England, Ice Fixed, White with Rage
From a train, always train, acres of whiteness, and I watch
Past or future, fields of time, seen/unseen, fields of it, the present
Refuses, I only want it more, and gods of modest means,
Not first rankers, not famous ones with monuments
Made to last, just simple ones who cling to earth
For all they’re worth, in hope of temporary displays,
Goldfinch drops kernel of grain, vole nuzzles closer in flesh
Of her flesh. Ordinary gods frantic for toe-hold in a hard frost,
Fearful of low pressure, storm, these gods, I know it, I know,
On the look-out for me. Such temptations, ironies, stillness,
I could make a painting of copse, ash, oak, seen/unseen,
But even if if if, no painting should dare still a living thing.
And poem? All the whiteness of page, its own kind of rage,
I cannot find a start worthy of devotion, an offering,
I too become slush, stains, soon enough, but still,
I should like to say categorical, just once, visibility so bad
Only getting worse. Or maybe just embrace fog, all blurs,
That too shall pass; tree, god, goldfinch, vole, window, glare,
All I cannot see/unsee lifted, a vapour, frost lost
In merest glimpse of sun, white light such, such damnation.
Philip Gross
Small Rain, the Sound of Breathing
The way a little too much caution
creaks the floorboards more than clumsiness –
so the rain, tonight, small spatters, all around the house…
The way I ease the body-weight
of last night’s sleep to the edge of the bed…
Its cartilages crackle at the shift. Love, the dream of deft,
of as-if-casual moving, may be beyond us from here on.
The skill will be consideration –
all I’ve learnt of the shapes of the dark, the heft
of a mattress, a chair, familiar as my own extremities,
the door’s slight stick and shudder
like my heart does sometimes… All I want
is to give you what’s left of the night. Considerations:
as if there was only one breathing between us
so that either might catch
the sound of the other’s, hold it, place it
back beside them in a still-warm imprint in the pillow
undisturbed; as bird migrations
in their season might pass over frontiers
with no more sound than small rain, a flickering
of not-quite-so-dark in the dark, while the border guards sleep.
More Guest Poems
Sue Spiers
Jealous of the Listening Air She tells me her deafness is more complete,no sound penetrates her ears, masks are difficulties. Imperfect silence of devices switched off but stilloutside chunters; car engines, birdsong, the wind. Conversation in another room with no...
Douglas Cole
The Lighthouse Keeper In this season he knowswe are smaller than wind,as the storm blast singsthrough the boarded glass. He opens his doorto the sting and stab of rain,making his way as he leansunder the arc-lamp light. In the radio house he listensto distress codes a...
Cathra Kelliher
we sat holding the lamb we sat holding the lambRichard and Ithe field soft about uscold coming on below the ash treesand the farm buildingssilent as flint through the arrow slits how slight it wasand how meagre the pullof its miniature mouth on my fingera smear of...
Anthony Lawrence
The Moonlit Lakes of John Atkinson Grimshaw have all the hallmarks of ice, when seen througha hawthorn hedge or drystone wall,and you’d be forgiven, the way a witness,driven to description, not of a man,but of animals on the surface of the moon,is forgiven for seeing...
Patrick Osada
Rooks Each evening they appear at duskin ones and twos –return from distant foraging.Flapping untidy wings in laboured flight,they circle,gathering as a cawing group,heading for their roost in Hazelwood. Today, nest building in the tallest treesthat screen the...
Yasmin A. Hussain
Treasure Chests Dad decides to give us pocket money.Mum decides it’s better saved. She buys tinmoney boxes with painted timber panels,crossbands of brass and a central padlock. She holds out the chests as cash is passedfrom Dad to us into the slots. Eventually,mum...
Leo Boix
A Latin American Sonnet CXCVI In a dense forest of the Gran Chaco stretch, ‘the hunting land’,Argentina’s largest known jaguar–the Qaramta–is on high patrol,it’s after giant anteaters, tapirs, capybaras, peccaries and standscrouched down by the riverbed, alert,...
Margaret Wilmot
The Butterfly Effect for Nick and his butterfly I heard Monarch for Monach as a sealrolled high in the curve of a wave, and marvelled that sea-battered islands far west of Scotlandshould share a name with butterfliesin another Far West. Do they still build cocoons in...
Anna Barker
When I think of my body as a crow We slide together:my flesh, your feather, your jet eye, the haw you draw across in sleep,the patient keel of your sternum,the steel of your rib your beak to stitch the vane, the silken ley,the tap of talons on glass,the hollow bone...
Jonathan Greenhause
Our Shrinking Plot of Earth Blue whales bathe in our birdbathcradling the Atlantic, our chilly attic the outer atmosphere,its drop-ceiling a cloak of altocumuli. Our footfallsextinguish species; Our breaths brew cyclonic storms;Each of our verses is a new...
Edward Ragg
Final Diner at the Banquet of Dreams Eight months of English sun and rain sifting through the shadows of towering cumulus billowing like ships’ sails in the northern wind have composted your remains in the uncaring earth. Never had imagination so vividly and swiftly...
Jennifer Johnson
Exposure So, you live in a magnificent duck house, a five-foot Swedish home complete with door, windows and roof, floating on a rich man’s pond. You kept that quiet, never mentioned it any of the times you quacked with us pretending you were no different. You just...
Bren Simmers
Once Beloved You hadn’t been diagnosed yet; days you couldn’t get out of bed. Took a semester off to transition from class three rapids to chronically ill. You’d make a meal in the back kitchen, row of single panes overlooking a raggedy tenant’s garden. Table pushed...
Steve Noyes
Mars Low in the southern sky, a coppery glint, Mars, planet of war. Across that distance a memory sifts in, of the Juan de Fuca Strait on a still evening, when an aircraft carrier, the Ronald Reagan, half a mile long, slate-grey, was sent by the Empire to demonstrate...
Nicki Griffin
Streetwise The pretty street is lined with gas lights convincing in their Victorian guise throwing down a mantle of respectability. Nothing to see in the shadows you know and that thing you noticed that slithered away wasn’t there. You can trust me. Look how the...