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 You should be aged between 16 and 25 years, the work should be unpublished.
Madeleine Higgins
December on the 2 Train
like twin seashells
they are twisted,
arched in, legs crossed,
bundled in creased puffers.
like quicksand,
their skin sinks in
between their eyebrows,
and lashes skate the lower lids.
slouched with turtle’s grace,
like women who have calls to take, lives to make,
but still shiver
on the train.
the daughter’s face is reflected in
steel with unusual clarity
(the twist, the puffer, the crease),
creating a third woman, and perhaps more after.
x
Grisly Work
The artiste, with a trembling hand,
Drowns pencil-shapes in paint,
Twitching at the loss of that rough-draft promise.
Once finished, she isn’t quite—
Is that orange too yellow?
Is that line too sharp?
She trims and blots and razes until
A simple sunset becomes an entirely different
Beast. Just as a chicken goes from corpse
To table-topper under the blunt gutting of a butcher
On a chopping bench. Once the head and legs are lost,
This expert refines, refines, and refines.
The once-living thing is carved elegantly and fragmented
Until it looks never-lived, unrecognizable,
Something that can be consumed safely.
And the painter returns again, and again,
Scratching, honing, bleeding red suns—
And trying not to cut out the heart in the process.
Airplane Ride
Finally see the cloud-sheath from the opposite side,
The downy white so naked, so immaculate,
Like the behind-side of a penguin’s skin.
The clean blue stretches infinitely up and
Down and sideways; remember, our souls were
Stored here before us.
Try to feel the hundreds and thousands of feet,
The celestial touch of the weightless clouds,
The definitive fear of falling,
The impossible bigness. Like
Touching your ankles or toes,
Pinching with your fingers a singular blade
Of grass by a highway, having your head
Kissed by your grandmother’s mother.
Try to grasp it, that unsticky
Enigma, that intense self-awareness. But
It isn’t possible to hold (for long) the entire
Earth in the palm of the hand.
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 write
a poem about tarmac. I am thinking
of last summer; I am thinking
of Ada Limón, who will never
stop making everything / such
a big deal, and I am thinking
of the August evening four years
ago when I wrapped up
in a scarf and a girl in short
short shorts looked at me
strangely. I live to premeditate
the changing of the season; for ink-
blue atramentous nights over
the sea that will symbolise
what they need to. I am thinking
of morning February darkness, of
the steaming cups of tea at five
a.m. because it was the year
we all discovered time was a
construct and the days bled into one,
glissando. I am thinking of nights
knelt by water, summoning up
prose poems for the moon. I am
all of these moments, turgid
to bursting, amassed into one.
I am placing you into this life,
invisible beside me; I trace
your silver outline in the dusk.
You whisper when the
novelty falls still. We take
each other home.
xxxxx
Diptych
for Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich, of the 14th century, women who would have martyred themselves again and again for the one who held them when the world was blind to love.
I don’t think they talk about you much these days
but when they do you are always side by side:
chambered in a cavern close together, names scratched into
memory, twin candles on the altar. Tongues tie you
to each other in this world you walked alone, one in a hole
and one on the road, slipping your way through
the cruellest of hands and the sharpest of tongues
with your ink and your prayer and the language
you shared with your mother. I hope you know how I warm,
Julian, when I hear you call Jesus maternal.
I am glad that you never shied from heresy, both of you,
hands raw to the ground scrounging for scraps
and cocooning yourselves from the slaughter. And
seven centuries later, you feast on manna and
now we say history was written by the victors, by the victors —
Margery, Julian, warriors wielding peace as a sword
caressed in blood, perhaps you knew in your time how this
would come to pass. But this world chisels at
the faith, you see, so they never quite believed you
when you wrote all manner of things shall be well
and maybe we still don’t. I will not ask you to hold me,
your lives were built on holding other people and
your days of the suckling screaming children are through.
But know from beyond the firmament that I
am holding on to you, I am whispering your names,
they don’t talk about you much these days but
I won’t let them forget. I will chamber you together
in a cavern of the mind, and I will tell and tell
and tell them how you saved the world with love.
More Young Poets
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...
Audrey Hunter
This Is What I’m Thinking Rain on the window & the ground Everything is impermeable So we leave behind streetside streams & we leave in them I want to go home But I rue the journey Hate the water that drowns the roads Hate the water that ends up where I’m...
Saul Grenfell
Rain and cheer Innocence darted through streets alone,hair dancing in the rush of itamid dense smells and bids and cumin and saffronlittle lungs a-panting. Now, with top button stiffly done,greying hair flattened and...
Sidney Lawson
The First Affair I rinse my hands of the way your skin felt, Brush my teeth thinking of how you tasted. The soap’s scent is reminiscent of your Intense fragrance, something I won’t forget In a hurry. I remember the sight Of you in that red dress, the slight gasps you...
Emily Riley
till dawn do us part late night kisses behind closed doors no one has to know you’re mine for the night unwavering devotion you write novels on my skin then tear them to pieces leaving me severed and shattered your beautiful work destroyed no one has to know...
Charlotte Lebedeker
Josephine It’s been ten years of Josephine, and the world will give us decades more. But if that’s cut short by the gods above, I would upturn all our climbing trees, I would dry out all our oceans, I would leave no corner of the world unchecked searching for her. As...