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 You should be aged between 16 and 25 years, the work should be unpublished.
Arthur Lawson
depth charge and surfacing
home has become like a submarine
and I know you’re waiting for an answer,
but I can’t stop obsessing over how
these four walls might be the only thing
between me and fifty fathoms
of crushing – you’ll tell me to breathe,
help me remember we’re not trapped
in an airlock, then we’ll talk and I’ll try my best
not to confuse you again with the woman
from the adverts channel selling Chanel
as I read your lips refracted through water,
hearing you in halves in the lull
of sea sounds, distracted by the idea
of whales breaching and leaving early
before sound slips slowly back from sonar
and I forget for a while about the bends,
underwater caves and surfacing. Then,
remembering how home has become like a submarine,
words will grow strangely oblong again
and we’ll share the dumb quality of anglerfish.
x
whale falls
He remembers how his brothers
were trawled out one after the other,
then left in the wrong waters to sink,
given for five months to the opportunists,
fifty years to the deep and then sand.
They followed their mother, beautiful
and blue, shortcutting to sediment and land
as she beached herself, her plastic lungs
heaving flesh that cried for the sea,
martyred and dazed. He cannot forget
how impossibly gentle grief and sleep can be,
folded around each other like sailcloth
after the magnitude of bursting
for he too will sink, slow
x
snow globes
The day after and none of it really matters –
packing peanuts are hysterical, boxing my sick
snoring cat could be a farce and I know
climate change is killing the river dolphin
and that the coral reefs are going grey,
but I’m watching milk separate and thinking
how lonely the little islands look, stirring
them slowly and getting distracted
by my power over all those flat-pack hurricanes,
waiting for someone to come home
and remind me that the clocks haven’t thrown it in
and that people aren’t just an idea I thought up,
an absurdity to amuse myself, bored
in my snow globe, finding the wrong things
hilarious. I’ve been laughing for half an hour
at the way the newsreader’s head bobs
like a cormorant – I can hear him talking
about an oil spill, the gulf stream and the contamination
of something, but I can’t shift myself
that far when the pigeons out of my window
have such a knack for parody and I haven’t seen
any other sign of life since nine o’clock
last Thursday, so I’m thinking maybe
it’s just me and them and the man on the TV
and that none of it really matters.
Heather Chapman
Dog Days
Your lips make a clicking sound
as you pull them across your teeth.
You tune your flesh towards visitation:
your joints labour over their arrangement;
a plane of light swells shoulders,
surface for eating. Strung out
across several summers, we suffer
for our conversions, each shift of subject.
You hold ice to your ankle. I miss
my hands, busy in Greece, clutching
someone’s collar. Arrogant in strange sinew,
one version of you sits in a plastic chair,
king of all the land. Double doors open
like lips, everything like lips. In July
the temperature rises 13 degrees
and you lie sweating, all Greco-Roman.
An arrowhead’s tongue nuzzles
the vulnerability under your ribs. I eat
your leftover steak; think of the soft bones
in your ear; visit the piece of you buried
by the river, your chin a bulb of heat. I go
to bed early, wake to find three of my ribs
kicking at your door. My mildewed Eden,
all the hinges scabbed with rust. I will make you:
again, and again, and again.
x
Rat Dissection Love Poem
Its fur chemically silked, a brown like
creationism: God grinding pigment in a pestle.
A fable’s hard edge in its bone-propped
skin. I think of Victorian scientists,
callous in white coats, twitching
frogs into neon life. A prey animal’s pulse
gnaws my neck, something of a blood sport.
You turn me brutalist – a bubble of blood
at my knuckles, a weight to my hands.
Last Sunday I knelt on Victorian silk
and wished for us together like vein clutches
tendon. In chapel, you stumbled
over description of Jacob’s ladder’s
sinew-pink rungs, and blushed. I am afraid
of my ulterior motives, of the kind
right hand of God. I urge my crisis of faith
to form a ragged silhouette and billow
down the wall. I want a haunting,
the way poltergeist loves the broken
glass, for its honesty and for the sound
of light passing through it. I am good
at making martyrs. A splinter
of sun, skinned through stained glass,
congeals a hamartia at your collar.
The scalpel baptised in pink Virkon.
The head of John the Baptist on a silver platter.
The unfolding of organs. The kindness
of a sharp knife in a familiar hand.
More Young Poets
Millie Woodrow
Burial We buried his guns in the garden a year after he’d been burnt in his best jumper. Rifles and a double-eyed shotgun, sawn barrel, heavy cartridge, no licence. A stock that lay cold against the heat of his cheek, felt the misting of his breath. A trigger that...
Adonis Anderson
Feast One day, this dog ripped into my flesh and got so deep we both saw bone and that excited him and surprised me as I was also excited. While he gnawed away, I wondered, what kept him going? he’d already gotten what he wanted… what else could he be after? And as if...
Kata Brown
The Law of Salvage flotsam. what i think of first isbuoyancy.my awe whenthe whole surface of the sea isjostling with driftwood. it iswhat my father calls BRACKISH WATER. although actuallythat is notwhat the word means BRACKISH really meansa salinity between sea and...
Madeleine Higgins
December on the 2 Train like twin seashellsthey are twisted,arched in, legs crossed,bundled in creased puffers. like quicksand,their skin sinks inbetween their eyebrows,and lashes skate the lower lids. slouched with turtle’s grace,like women who have calls to take,...
Dawn Sands
intimations of a change in weather March, and the evening light tickles the throat and taunts of summer. Telegraph wires silhouette the sunset like a zip-line for the soul: I can describe it no other way and believe me, I have tried. It is the time of day when I could...
Amanda Allbert
Fish I wish I was a fresh fishalready cut open and meattender and bareand my heart still beatingand minein the calloused fingers of thefisherman holding the knifehe sliced me open witheveryone can come take a lookat the strong little bodyand light bones and...
Lottie Roddis
In the Year of the Barbie Movie Waking up, soft black liner, bite of toast; tying the world outside in ribbons. Flowers shoved in gunshot wounds, climbing the walls with fury. Slut, says a spiking grin, below the ceilings see through, above the louboutin soles like...
Emily Rushing
I’m From I’m from camo four wheelers, From driving through mud and my grandad’s teasing I’m from tall, arching, protective trees Making the roadway magically dark I’m from spanish moss, vines and weeds I’m from a one-story house on a lane named after a fish, Blue...
Erin Poppy Koronis
Ghost of her She still haunts those streets her best friends and her walked every day for seven years on their way to school, dressed in green with kingdom keys sewn onto their golden crest. Past yellowing council flats, eight o’clock dog walkers, occasional drifts of...
Robin Kathaas
Ha Long Something as mountainous as a mountain ought not to have a shadow shivering on the waters. It is too obvious a lie. When their father falls, the shadows will not survive. Like many of us, they are already teetering on the border of what is real and what we...
Angelin Lee
Makeup i. Foundation Layers, cracking: You will get good grades get into a prestigious university Bachelors get a masters, maybe a PhD You must become a doctor or a lawyer or an engineer or what am I going to tell Jason-who-went-to-Harvard’s mom? that my daughter...
Lily Finch
David and Goliath Story So you, unperturbed, let me weep on your marvellous stomach– hallowed ground, ribbed by the sleeping mounds of nested muscles– and when I am done, wrung out, washed in, belly-up on the sand like a beached jelly, you gift me a Stanley Hammer:...
Michael Liu
Hunan Teeth, the bones I clean, bite into this pillow. This bed is not mine, it is perhaps my late grandfather’s; or just another metaphor left in this parcel of land that could have belonged to my grandfather. Inside my eyelids: two melting balls of chocolate....
Ella Pheasant
Gabriel’s Harley Your old Harley rusts next to a broken ATM, gum-tacked mirror smashed in by the church’s poker iron, your fingers bloody and buried inside me, before dawn daubed its collared black puff over your thick, stained-glass lids. x I want you to know that...
Sidney Lawson
Anecdote I’d like to have her laugh / Which erupts like a broken hose / Fixing at the wrong time, or his shoulders / Which people love to lay their head on. (from The Party by Sinéad O’Reilly) In dizzy rooms awash with eyes of green, The air is smoke, the water...