By Esme Bell
At first we might think kindly:
a warm sort of self-knowing
collective, paintable, obedient
to wind and errant sunbeams.
But it’s slippery still – unanswerable
really like a head tossed away –
and in midnight swathes might
creep pillow-wise and set to
its own knotted cartography,
using the stars to see.
Despite all best efforts,
nobody has caught it growing.
Scissors can work well
as a countermeasure –
although I’ve found
they won’t hold it for long.
By Saoirse Pira
Lately, it’s all felt like falling in love
and walks in the woods feel
like learning new names— where trees
are for climbing and knees always
grazed.
My hands are full with the feeling
that’s the living like the loving–
and then I’m falling in love
with that being alive.
And in that house by the sea
it stays always morning, the waves
beat their drum, folding foam against the shore.
Call it love, when they carry clams
and stones and sticks and dust
to the boy and the dog
that is always running, always returning, to
whom leaving always means being found.
Then call it love, when I wake
in this bed on my own,
and I fall fast in love
with that beat of my heart.
By Esme Bell
How like ants we must feel
to these green hands,
chapped and valleyed
in their kite-doting age.
Four paws and two boots
make six, but not enough
still to read, properly, your
grassy life line. Enough maybe
to walk home and dream
of an endless sky smile mirrored
in the earth, with sheep for teeth.
Enough to write a poem.
By Louis Meeks
My leather arms they hold you like poison oaks,
A broken wheeze of branches
I’ll hold you there, against that black door on the yellow road,
Just in sight of a listing scythe, Marked tightly to brushes of throaty wind.
My fingers strum the splinters, the shoots and wrinkles of old hands,
plastered, they shift along fading smiles,
The globe of hot light ring from cheek to eye,
Pouring deep pools of spiders through fingers, springing and winding, sprinting from us to the amber barley.
The fields cut the road, a deep groove into the stone of landscape,
It swings, the bloating wisps convex and sink, its twitchy strums rudding onto the grounds of oily tarmac, spiking around us like a wet fire.
The door stands strong in its rigor mortis, the slivers of brazened varnish pressed impression into my back,
A faint dip nested in my wired hair, where whispers of its name fall beside the wisp, wrapped and zipped in from the ring of winds,
The voice of the door muffled in folds of grasping arms,
Sidled between me and the scream of light trailing deep red, that whipped crack in the horizon,
Cushioning the door in its final pour of platinum quilt, whisking round the golden fields in the sinew’s glow.
I hold you there, planted into the fray, a prism in the crunch of desire,
I’ll fester there, in navy grey skin, in peels of memory, cast in shadows and stretched in shallow dents of my frame,
Scrunched and welded the screws of my brow, just cresting the pearl of eye, Creeping out to catch the final cast of earthly light, a twinkled tear screeching from the wind to the creek of the door where the monsters dwindle,
The night’s flag rattles against the still of the barley, whence the wind left with the day, the crackled mulch torn with the knife of the horse,
The knight’s horn cackles, presiding deeply into the road as the gold seeps into dark,
Leaving a glint of Its scolded armour, the spiked wilts of ashened steel pricked and twisted as It casts off Its horse, as still as a tower in the coarse heat of the twilight,
That great horn steams from Its taloned fingers, the tube funnelled deep into the basin of its helm, coursing flumes of thick calls to the nothing and to me.
As long as I hold you there, you’ll be spared, and swings open the door, brushed free of its dormant life to the scape of the dark,
The last bead of mine eye sealed in the drop of the horizon, slipping down and shifting into the road, like smashed glass carried from stream to ocean, like steam whipped into air,
The fall of the door, Just the splitting pump of the knights call,
The thick tune becomes the wet gel around me, encased in my iron lung, bled off all my colour and gaul,
Yearning for Its vices, hurling in queues of monsters, hurting me with ill will and witched blare,
It’s burned organs twirl drill bits in ears and coil the ooze of brain, wheeling around thin looms, the white of my fear,
And I’m unravelled in indifference, now I’m in metal and disrepair,
And my bead of light extinguished as I see you are not there.
By Lyra Button
I was dove;
you were air
and I was happy to fall
as you held me between fingers
Spreading my wings, setting me to fly.
You are gone.
And I am the jackal
piecing away at its own feathers.
Til I’m just a pile of bones,
strangely living.
Bright dead things, the stars of the night.
Old dreams preserved in the silver shadows
of the night’s scars.
A sadness is not always an ugly thing.
So I look to stars
find my north and fly.
And I remember you
as a smile
edging towards a tear.
A sadness is not always an ugly thing.
Now I am something beyond
the bones of being alive.
I am night:
tumour dark; still shining.
By Olivia Petrini
Spill it, and stare across a wine-dark sea
You, and me, in the rafters of the Old
Church, humming with weary hues and
The purple ring of this prohibited light.
We embrace on pointed toes, creaking
Heavy ones trembling in the honeyed winter night
You skim the spitting flame with icy glances,
Smile and crinkle golden foil.
You sip too quickly at the brim of the
Cut-glass gently crashing between your
Thumb and tactful finger. The dark
Wine weeping from your narrow wrists.
It’s not dawn and you’re outside in a duvet.
Soft bright ghost trailing sodden leaves
And sopping silver over
Gutters. Trampling the path to Cheam.
Blotting sleeves with bleeding mud and
Gleaming rain in thrumming white.
Put out the light!
And then put out the light!
Recall. Recast it all in pitiful bronze
Laid down, and up the swirling, steaming
Stage-light. You frighten me with your
Twitching lips and flick’ring hair.
By Esme Bell
Today at home I cut my nails
to the beat of Rickie Lee Jones
whilst my dad waged sense on Twitter
and my mum did a pagan ceremony
at the kitchen table, making a wreath
with wood and tissues of paper.
My sister tried on my clothes upstairs,
excited to be taller than I was then,
and peace lolled legless into me
like two hounds with silky ears –
feeling time brittled away, past, sullied.
In the valley it had rained but the sun
Came out, red-ringed, before dinner.
By Muna Mir
In the early morning
a sparrow was delivered to my doorstep.
Splayed on the stone tiles, it sits
feathered and still, cold
in the morning light.
I did not wish to look at it.
You know how I am
never wanting to look death in the eye,
only the underbelly
which I thought I could penetrate
before it penetrated me. Still it stuck.
Small god of thresholds,
staring straight,
surely a premonition
for something else,
something worse, I thought,
then grew quickly regretful.
Sorry for my neglect: willful negligence
of soft and easy death
laid bare at my feet, and which I wished
to leave my sight. Assuming providence,
I’d discarded the dead
for some portent of which it was not.
I urged it to withdraw
for fear of what it could do
even after it had done all it would.
It lay cold and quiet on my doorstep.
By Tatty Anton Smith
God is with us most in the space between moments.
He rests in doorframes as we move between rooms.
In the floor below a candle as it falls from a bedside table.
In the feathers of a bird’s wing as it flies over our heads.
In the heavy clouds that signal rain.
In the silent eye contact of lovers and the air between their skin.
By Toby Dossett
The forest holds the language of grief
With a fluency I am yet to master
Saplings bow under the weight of the sky
That speaks only in questions
A stag’s steps are forgotten promises
Moving like the edge of a dream
The shadow of a boy I once knew
Is he watching me like I want him to?
The hawk tears too
Crying, waiting
What does it hunt
If not the silence between us?
Like when I call the stag
But my voice is a stone that sinks
He tilts his head
I’ve stopped longing and he knows
The laughter we left hanging in the branches
Alike the memories we whispered to the fire
Now dust upon dust
Was it you who taught me
How to carry the weight of an empty clearing
Or was it the wind
Always pulling, always leaving
To become is to mourn
Still, the forest holds us
Roots tangled with absence
