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 You should be aged between 16 and 25 years, the work should be unpublished. 

More information about submitting your poetry

Cassie Whyte

Cassie Whyte

Pynchon Paranoia & Prose (Comp)

As I watch the rainbow disappear through four collapsing windows

The apartments fold algorithmically

Apocalyptic origami

Looking straight up at the sky

Like a period on paper

A doll gazing from her bedroom

A die spinning on its nose

I think of Pynchon and paranoia and prose

Burnt-amber on the brickside

Scraps of prisms on the floor

Eye Hauntology

The eye of the ceiling fan pulsing through its circular momentum, the black hole eye, the loose-sketch eye on notebook paper—red lines receding over white and charcoal-gray—daydreamed by a schoolgirl in a bored fugue, nowhere else to look but inward

The eyes on the back of my head, the concave teaspoon eye: the evil, the benevolent, the always observant eye—from above, all-around, within; the star-chart eye, the eye as cycle and spiral and prophecy and fate; the flying eye of the biblical angel; the pregnant eye, teeming with life—little red egg eyes

The eye of death and rebirth and empty man in the middle, the human race’s eye, the stranger eye, the eye of predator and prey. The earth as eye, and sun gazing down blinkless, the moon eye: the eye which winks at us as soon we look away, the eye of the dare, of the State’s dare, of a monkey paw

The clock eye ticking restlessly, inverted, a routine spasm. The apple eye. The ink blot eye. The eye of love winces in a flicker, opening anew with envy. The blossom eye, porcelain eye, the eye piercing the eye called the iris. The atomic eye mushrooming in its onlooking apotheosis—the bullet eye’s flitting immediacy, burrowing in chests

The eye-womb of mother, the eye of the empty void, the million-eyed abyss. The unseen camera eye, the screen eye, the abstracted, filmic, oppressive eye. The eye in the palm of the hand, the churning eye of industry. The alien eye, the eye of God, the telescope eye, through which we are watched, cheered on, derided by the dead

The tattling eye of younger siblings, the disapproving eye of the father. The imperceptible eyes of molecules, infinitesimal, virulent, amorous. The absent eye of night. The scandalous eye of day. The eye of the coiled snake, the vain eye in the mirror, the docile eye turned downward, elusive eye of the other—eye of the law.

The wound eye, the gash eye. The birth-mark eye of idiosyncrasy, the black eye of clogged pores. The fatal and the fertile eye. The eye of erection, of volcanic eruption, of grace, of gravity, of horror all too familiar, all too base. The forgetting eye. The pearl eye. The eye of return, returning. The eye of irony: the eye of all-consuming irony.

Emma Ingledew

Emma Ingledew

Moving On

The last plate broke today. It was nothing special.

Cheap, temporary junk that fills a flat,

a home, a life. I’ve always had a fear of losing

things before their time. I kept every card she wrote

even as her handwriting deteriorated and

she could no longer remember my name.

She downsized and downsized and downsized until

her whole life became impossibly small.

When your very mind turns against you

even a room of ones own becomes a trap.

She moved into the hospital and we moved her life into a skip.

I washed my hands and moved away. But

I kept her plates until life smashed them one by one.

I broke her last plate today. I’ve already packed the broom

so I pick up the pieces with my bare hands. Despite my caution

I started losing things before our time. I became too old

to climb onto her lap, she became too sick for Christmas.

When I did visit she had to ask for my name.

Before I even noticed it I had broken all her plates.

My hands are full of broken shards now and

I can no longer remember the way she’d

press her palms to my cheeks and watch me smile.

To Grow

The plant was a promise of things to grow
now rootbound and starved it refuses to grow


His Dad loved his lawn. Cut the grass every spring.
He taught him to love is to cut. You can’t let it grow.


Locked in a dark room a plant still dreams of the sun
though twisted and warped, towards the light it will grow.


I rehearsed for our dates by gripping hot stoves
all for a gash on my palm where the skin won’t regrow.


The sunrise colours my room in shades of pink and hope,
only not on the left behind plant that can’t grow.


On our last fight he played dumb, um ah ing as he cried,
yet to the smallest crack of sunlight, I made myself grow.

The Overlook

If these walls could talk, they’d bitch.
When I first came here I scattered breadcrumbs
as I went. Now I just go forward.
The only way out of the maze is through.
Silence is neither peaceful nor quiet.
I have dreams of dying that feel
like memories. If I died
would you remember?


He doesn’t answer, he’s spotting
ghosts through the lens of his bottle,
arguing with his memories.
They fight back with their teeth.
I don’t think I ever lived anywhere else,
my memories of otherwise are only dreams.
I wake up here every time.

More Young Poets

Sophie Johnsen

love poem you want a love poem? (“yeah,” you say, confidently).okay, I’ll give you a love poem.I love –(wind crackles in the trees, the light bulbs flicker,paint continues its residence under my fingernails.time stops, but only for a second.)– well actually, the point...

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...

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...

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:...