Alan Fielden
Throw,
the first stone, lover.
Who brought me from nothing
and to whom I have given less.
If I lie and promise sunlight,
would you understand.
And when I flail, through glassy words and porous silence.
Can I smile and say,
“That wasn’t me”?
Whilst the moon, calm and bare, reflects the inferno so honestly?
That three-tier phrase, the pyrrhic one,
that means one to the mouth
and two to the ear,
how far can you throw it?
Trust it thus.
Before love there was a feeling that needed a name.
We gathered today to live and love;
ever after there will be nothing ever was …

Stephanie Yorke

Chemistry never rests. Something’s converted
each time, given time. I eroded
on the bench, under the organ pipes,
God’s own woofers and tweeters,
oxidizing lime tears,
sound’s empathetic breakdown.
Enter Miss Dennis, chiming: Mavis
check your posture. Straightening
my hymnal spine. Play
it open. Now stopped. Again,
stopped. Her fingering over mine:
a splint for weak music,
pacing the floor.
Now, from the top. Remember,
Jacob lost – despite his rock jaw
and herdsman’s fists –
his opponent had better wind.
Don’t slow down, she said.
The work’s like swimming,
or not drowning:
this stroke doesn’t count
without the next.

Joshua Roche
The largest pearl in the world was ruined when the shell was boiled open
– Prose note to Paterson, William Carlos Williams
‘Yes, yes, the salty Pleiades,
Language under your knuckles,
But there were hundreds of us.’
Toes deep, Tom, at the bottom of the fall;
Collecting dirt deep down in Paterson.
Sedimented grain by grain,
Echoes battered in the river bed among
Citizen body parts;
The eyes of Sam Patch, an ear from the Reverend’s wife.
Culled, hunting
For Pearls of the Passaic.
She squats, ladylike under thundering;
A cool American at four hundred
Grams just kissing Tom Carson’s big toe.
This was Solomon’s …

A Found Poem
By Anna McKerrow
Opposite a block of control / Him to make him / a woman / Crowded on a table / Protest that she is not /
In fact / A-real / And next door to / a garage! / She picks up smile /Says, help / Talking / Help with the papier mache /
She says, / It’s actually a dummy / Or at least that’s what I think / She says, / Actually made of rubber / Isn’t that interesting /
Dress, monkey, she says, / That does not …

Archie Davies
Feathers float down my mind
white drifts in.
heat-hazed memories of unforgotten mornings
like lemon-cake drizzle drip through my thoughts.
a softness unequalled.
a joy, joys, remembered.
Fathomable, I find I can see those
hours
as if written in the light they were filled with.
A
Sifting
thought
hovers lower,
lovers embracing
sleeping
and waking.
Now, as we turn into this well-trod street
long ago planted with strong trees to last
and outlast
lives, we still know the step of four feet –
our strides inchiming entwining,
each enriching each.
your laugh plays in the echo of mine
our shadows mirror our sounds in mime.
the sun is low and weak,
but higher, warmer …

Jeremy Clarke
i.m. Andrew Nicholson
Light as litter, rain’s empty containers are blowing away.
The sun’s sudden light is overwhelming. It’s everywhere
and all at once and every thing is an object of its desire.
A blackbird is singing in a jewelled city.
I’m walking to the sound of water running. Through a delicate mist
rewriting the air – the rain’s rebound. Its slow rewind, with smells.
A new wind is learning its vowels and whispers.
And the day, renewed, restarts. From the beginning,
with the smell of morning. The revelation of colours,
the resumption of sounds, and their timid first …

Scott Jamison
Walt Whitman is watching me piss,
And I am that far gone that for a split
Second I consider stealing him,
Fumbling him out of his glass-trap
And folding him into my pocket
Like a map.
It all started in a kitchen cupboard,
With the very American misconception
That Uisce Bethad flows through my veins
And that my dry lips’ reception
Would be like a drought’s for rain.
I pay for my lies
As whisky flows out of me,
Taking its damn sweet time
An up yours to my drunk knees.
Zipped and buttoned, I finish up
And walk home, a beery parade float,
Telling MM …

Teo Tewson-Bozic
What has two arms, two legs,
Two wheels, two wings,
And a flock above it?
The man who caught a seagull
By the neck, then rode with it
Held-out at the front of his bicycle
While it screamed and beat its wings.
Close above him its kind followed
In angry, helpless circles.

Eley Williams
We tug along the cats’ eyes, thinking of you.
Below us the roadkill is a pheasant rainbowfaced, and the radio and I
Are spaniel tenors, just bawlin’, darlin’:
Sit in on our traffic jamming.
We’ll sing you the hairpins, and the zebras, and the bottlenecks.
Crested beauties, breasted cuties; yeah, I’m-a gonna do that all day ‘til you roll those pretty amber eyes right out.
To think: all these pedestrians are allowed faces, but none of them are yours!
We got you all atomised, my piñata: we always drive singing from you,
But also, somehow, always, to …

There is a joy in realising
you are no longer
young, sitting in that chair
reading and smoking a beautiful cigarette
while your coffee cools
and the stovetop creaks.