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 You should be aged between 16 and 25 years, the work should be unpublished.
Sylvie Jane Lewis
I Meet Your Friends at the Gallery Opening
and one asks how we met and the answer is Hinge, but I’m not sure
you want me saying so. Instead we have a back-and-forth of ums
and wells and he drops the question. We circle round displays
of plastic fruit, films of the sea projected on the walls, collages
of dogs in caravans, new-age hippy moon-gazing hares.
It’s the art of young people, it’s warm art, art unafraid to be
cute. Sometimes there’s something daring in being cute, lovely,
girlish. I think but don’t say this. A bad idea to share too many
thoughts with new people, too many chances to be trapped.
With mild regret I purchase several overpriced flutes of white,
stand around in circular groups while people who already know
each other do the talking. We’ve only met a few times. You hold
my hand and ask what I think of it all. I tell you that each time
we loop around, I’m scared I’ll knock the fruit down with my bag.
The Lady and the Unicorn
We saw it in Paris, an escape from the derelict Airbnb plastered
with signs warning of rats and lead paint. A mistake to book it
without scrolling to the one-star reviews, really. On one such
excursion, we found ourselves in a shadow-room of tapestry,
one taking up each wall, named after touch, smell and desire.
The robed woman and her horned companion at the centre
delighted in earthly pleasures of birdsong, perfume, mirrors.
In the background, various creatures floated without place or
dimension: dog, lamb, rabbits cleaning their paws, white as
a hare’s stomach, faultless among a thousand woven flowers.
With her falconer’s glove, the lady waited for wildness to find her.
We sat in the dark, studying the details, wondered where we’d next
bide time before braving the crumbling apartment again,
those sights and sounds and scents of earthly displeasure.
The Difficulty of Hare-Watching
Once you’ve found her
she’s gone
in a cartoon cloud
of smoke, her feet
conjuring dust
with a skedaddle
sound effect. Like that,
she becomes the space
that is not a hare.
Once you’ve found her,
she’s gone.
Painting a Blue Hare
and considering Picasso, who took time
between preying on teen girls
to capture the world’s sorrows,
poor widows and addicts.
My hare lives in different depths of
blue, her startled eye a rock pool,
her variations of fur a tumbling field.
My hare too is mournful, in her case
mourning what life could have been
if she were free to sit un-preyed upon.
Scarlett Smith
Silence
Cocaine-tipped
tragedy
carved with gold-
plated
powder,
sniffing dandruff
like the sun
cracks
for
her.
Addicted to the lies.
Eaten by mice
and Trojan skies.
Bereft of belief.
Delightful
yellowing
teeth.
Fire-torn creature.
The child with bruised eyes.
His
cadmium
concubine.
Soon to be
slaughtered
by substance.
By silence.
Severed
tongue
but
her mouth’s
a river.
No mother.
Now watch
the demise
of his
cracked-
lipped
concubine.
Fists
Six eagles’ feet
and hands upon hands surround my lungs.
This is the birth of a punished son
who only wanted love.
The earth is an unknown bed.
Fire is
resurrection
is my mother peeling oranges again.
Fire is
hope
again.
The price of flesh
is a river of blood.
The price of fire is every boy pointing at my liver and running home to his
father,
crying.
I want you to know what it means to be the mouse in the house of eagles.
I want you to know what it means to perceive father and receive claws.
So that when the earth is
hope
again
it can heal my gutteral scars.
Six eagles feet
and hands upon hands surround my lungs.
There’s nowhere to run
when father is tearing your bed sheets
and mother is peeling your tongue.
There is
pain.
There was always going to be pain.
Pain of asking for love
and getting fists.
My Ribs (Like Knives)
We are born
with knives for fingers.
A cycle of violence
starting with dinner, ending with table.
Orestes,
brother,
there are no words I won’t speak to save you.
(No bodies I won’t burn to keep you alive.)
Find the forest to escape.
The path
a convoluted vein.
A path that promises grief
and drawn blades.
Run, brother.
The trees that rooted us
want to kill us.
I count the grapes.
I count my ribs.
My fig drips purple juice; the family’s curse.
(One truth I am certain of: dinner eats me.)
The past has its claws in me.
This skeleton gnawed by hope
for sunrise. For mother’s arms.
(Sorry for staying quiet for so long.)
The past has its claws in me.
His hands: Troy’s finest forks.
His corpse: a wrinkled grape.
(Sorry for not saving Him from the knives.)
Revenge is the call to dinner.
It is too late for Him now but
I’ll tie her hands with ropes.
See what her corpse makes of
my retching throat.
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...
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...
Daphne Harris
dinner party ‘conversation’ It has a haunting quality, does it not? How shadows leave the table when lights flicker on, but their presence is constant and reminded when birthday candles are blown out. The way a sour aftertaste an be remembered for days on end, but the...