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
Tytti Heikkinen
Big Morning in Rome
In the hot magenta of a dark alley,
a photoallergic inamorato sees the lady of his life
and wants nothing more.
He rushes through porticos and tourist crowds
who wave positive cardio images
in the chiaroscuro of endless fog.
The lady waits on the imperial staircase,
standing still like the thick water of the flower vases,
dressed in festering wounds.
The eternal city is drowned,
or alternatively lowered as the first volunteer
into melted ruby chocolate.
Meanwhile in the fifth-floor suite of Hotel Eden,
curtains move back and forth,
as if searching for their why
in the woven paradise lost
in the rich brocade.
Under the weathered layers of history,
you trace the corners of my mouth
and the eyelids, almost undamaged.
Without pity or forgiveness,
show me everything
as steps in the drifting sand
until there’s nothing
but a big morning in Rome
set to quaver
as an indication of sacrifice.
Martyn Crucefix
Salisbury (short let)
In the year of the election, in early June,
the third year of the war, the four of us
woken – we thought – by the whinnying
of horses; architecture with a sense of irony:
we discover the best (least obstructed)
view of the famous cathedral is from
the top deck of the multistorey: through
the wall, the shrieking of women; beyond
the wooden lap fence, the grumbling
of working men with shovels; an oak tree.
Once, coming back, two deer in the field
below the house: that look (of being looked at),
that stiffening of muscle (sensing
the stiffening of muscle); the horses, too,
turned out to be real, though why they cried
we never knew – maybe, being fed,
or a whip being taken to them, not really
apocalyptic, but a distant rhyme
with the world as it appeared that year.
In bed, later, you said we should think
of the deer as heralds of hope, at once,
walking off into the green of growing maize.
More Guest Poems
Lynne Hjelmgaard
Night Journey: On the Greyhound Bus I trusted the soft-spoken driver, the sound of his foot on the pedal, humming of the engine once we reached the highway, cocooned by other passengers, coaxing me into a dreamless sleep. When we were further south, past midnight, we...
Colin Bell
20/20 The wall was warm and red it hummed with bees a private place away from the schoolhouse. That’s how it was before glasses natural Impressionism knowing nothing of art or hard lines. Then concave lenses in plastic frames were like the leg irons on my friend who...
Lenora Steele
Day Dreaming It is mid-January. The forecasters are forecasting snow. A woman is lying atop of her made-up bed. There’s a single electric candle in the window, a left-over from Christmas. Across the street in the growing dark, the neighbours’ lights come on and a...
Mantz Yorke
A Gambler’s Lot For now, he’s got water – enough to keep the grass green – though no permit to sprinkle his lawn in daytime’s heat. Las Vegas as a whole is less accommodating: to save water, grass is being gouged from its medians and roundabouts and further...
Lori Drummond-Mundal
Rooks Over Mariupol Rooks raise a complaint, but cannot erase the blinding mist. I live in the mist of a distant land. The sun is veiled yet I know it exists. Raucous rooks tear from branch tips, black into squall. Tempest of wings rip at seams, imagined and real....
Huw Gwynn-Jones
Say her Name Not the physical boy but the masculine shadow, cruciform over the family. Geraldine Clarkson Sometimes I see his ageing face, that stare, pained and cold as a codfish. Is this how it was, Uncle, the incessant hunger, your mother’s belly, trial by fire?...
Kathy Miles
Fallout rain fell differently that year air hung on its chains clothed in a plume of ions it lay beneath the ground bitter as history or a buried tongue some said the sheep were glowing in the dark ghosting fields with blue light their hooves dusted with stars lambs...
Sydney Lea
Violence 4 August, 2020 We once longed to have bald eagles back. And back they came, from poisons that doomed so many over the years. At last, they’re common again. This morning, I saw two wrangle over a hatchling loon in the crown of a pine. Their little war shivered...
John Muro
Sea Drift Something of this place stays with me still and the hand-cloth of memory will not allow me to wipe it away. It’s pinned beneath a world that’s beyond forgetting and smelling always of salted brume and rusted metal and the nearly sweet scent of diesel fuel...
Greta Stoddart
A Glass of Water So many ways of looking at a glass of water – why is one clearly not enough? Because there are many ways to look and it’s a different kind of sustenance we’re after when we look at a glass of water and maybe there’s no such thing as failure when we...
Rosie Jackson
Grief: A User’s Guide Follow the instructions carefully. Do not use your grief for purposes other than the one for which it is intended. Extreme caution must be taken. Lift your grief, do not drag. If you find any resistance, cut into pieces. Gently shake if...
Doreen Hinchliffe
Memento Mori at an exhibition of Victorian photographs of the dead Posed and dressed in Sunday best, their heads clamped tight in a metal vice, their bodies propped on stands or chairs, they stare at us across the years and fix us with their unreal eyes, inviting us...
Geoffrey Winch
In this Silence To her the silence had been in itself a prayer, the deepest, the holiest, the most illuminating. T. F. Powys: Mister Tasker’s Gods its utter depth and width can only leave one standing on this canyon’s rim entirely without speech its walls stacked so...
Barbara Cumbers
Of all the stars, the loveliest ... Sappho: Fragments on love and desire ... are the Pleiades for they are blue like the sparkles of ice in the coldness of air for they cluster like buds of angelica for the glow that surrounds them is the birthplace of stars for they...
Isabel S. Miles
Sunflower Potatoes, cherry trees and wheat begin in darkness, as sunflowers do, rooted in dank clay, eating ochre, seeking light. With brush for bow and canvases for instruments, in colours only he had vision clean enough to see, he played sonatas filled with blossoms...