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 You should be aged between 16 and 25 years, the work should be unpublished.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

Arthur Lawson

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.

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

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

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.

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

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Madeleine Higgins

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Ella Pheasant

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Sidney Lawson

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