Guest Poems

Painting You There is a city in your face, I see it in the shadows this fierce light creates. You build a new one every day – Babylon was there, a shimmer of Jerusalem And many a smaller place. They will all fall but only one of them will rise again. Are your cities...

The Plants in a Skipton Concrete Yard The chives are xenophobes. They dig their roots in deeper every year and have taken over their tub. The courgette is an exchange student from France. She is blossoming as hard as she can. She has always wanted to be a ballerina,...

The Race The others had quit the track, I had no choice, I had to step up now. It was like a fight. I grabbed the baton in my shaking hand and clutched it tight. I hadn’t trained for this, and the race was tough, circuit after circuit on rough uneven ground. A jeering...

in real time a day comes when you don’t walk by the sea despite the lovely air of May but go back to the hotel to sleep all afternoon in a room gorging on sun a time comes when you don’t jump up to dance but watch from a corner as couples sway like wheat in the field...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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....

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?...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...