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ONE HAND CLAPPING
Bex Hainsworth: a poem
Nocturne for a Closed Spiritualist Church After Jane Burn I pass by every day on my journey home. Its curved bricks are squeezed between...
Catherine Balaq: a poem
Riddle I am the colour of sand, when sand's been pound to slutch. Ochre, yellow, brown, mottled and cross hatched, ground by years of...
Daniel Gooding: a poem
Descended from Bellringers It feels like calling on God at his former address, pulling on the sally. A great-great grandfather or...
Philip Gross: a poem
from Entries: Exits (2019) 2. A tingling drone, a melancholy tinnitus, behind the troubadour voice...
Will Eaves: two poems
Photograph by John Cairns Omen After the wind stops, we are sloshed to and fro in the silence like drowned ducklings or a photograph...
Louise Peterkin: a poem
Photograph by Scott Barron Photography The Queen of Hearts All hail the squat impossible; fury cubed. We bow to the imperial purple:...
Alan Humm: a poem
Léa and Christine Papin were two French sisters who, when they were working as live-in maids, were convicted of murdering their...
Stuart McPherson: a poem
Beautifully Coloured Taiwanese Film “...all my life, I have believed... if I mind my own business, no one would pay attention to me” Rob...
Rob A. MacKenzie: a poem
© Ryan McGoverne Adventures “We have heard of such towns – Aberdeen, Grimsby, London” (George Mackay Brown, Vikings: Two Harp Songs)...
Maggie Mackay: a poem
The Radio Officer Encounters a Maelstrom The wrecking spiral drags him under, down, down. Birling like a spinning top, he coils and...
Jane Lovell: a poem
Reasons for Sanderlings Their presence in winter defines land that Sea will claim. Imagine its rising swell submerging banks of shingle,...
Sue Finch: a poem
Baking for Harvest It started with a plain and simple loaf. Next came a scored round with a well baked crust, then a twisted plait. She...
Rebecca Johnson-Bista: a poem
Shell-shock I walked the sand alone and found a shell, Untwinned, a scoop lacking ice-cream; Tiny, pink-ringed, pearled eggshell pale As...
John Burnside: a poem
Quiet City Turn of the year, the mind becomes apocryphal, a chambered nautilus of light and air suspended in the night sky, where the...
Alan Humm: a poem
Anchorite Do not think that I am ignorant of the body nor that these walls are an analogy. They do not represent God's love, nor are they...
Jo Balmer: a poem
Photograph of Priest's Cove, Cape Cornwall ©Alistair Common Star So we come full circle to falling dusk. Above Priest's Cove, the sky is...
Tess Gallagher: a poem
In the Company of Flowers all day, coming away like an ordinary person who might have been at a till. Thinking as I dug into earth of my...
Fran Lock: two poems
"the courage to be repulsive" Fragments after Claude Cahun our dead rivers blacken the satellites. like ambergris swabbing a model's...
Dickon Bevington: a poem
Mud Soup and Babble Just where water and flat mud meet, there's a line without any edge where water insinuates infinity in sediment. That...
Steve Shepherd: a poem
everything how many times has my last act of the day been to place my lips on your right shoulder blade? always the right. it must be...
Mark Russell: three poems
Vahni Capildeo I am in the outer office of the Desert Island Discs studio waiting to record my episode. One of the young producers comes...
Louise Peterkin: a poem
Photograph by Scott Barron Photography The Hole Trick There seems to be a surplus of those which look like lupus Incantation evoked by...
Hélène Demetriades: a poem
Minotaur Beetle Typhaeus typhoeus Black scarab jewel noseying November leaf litter: you tip over with a cargo of pink podded mites...
Paul Fenn: a poem
Footnote After my heels split and almost leave me hobbled in early summer, I take myself in hand and with a knife begin to pare the...
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