Category: Poetry

By Noor Al Huda Younes

I think of you everyday.
My body’s receptors ache for the overwhelming sensation
of your stimulating sounds and smells.
My face has never felt the reviving glow of the sun
except in your presence,
my hair has never been so lovingly brushed by the wind
except with you.
Colours are not as breathtakingly vibrant,
the sky is not a brilliant shade of cloudless blue,
fruit is not a luscious explosion of sweet and sour,
except with you.

My body has memorised the rhythms of the repetitive movement
of your palm trees,
the harmonious beeps
of cars in post-Maghreb traffic,
the indescribable smell
of the Damascus air;
a combination of humidity, of jasmine, of energy, of home.
The complexity of the diaspora struggle.
How difficult it is to be with you,
how difficult it is to be apart from you.
The push-and-pull mimics that of two lovers intertwined in an emotionally burdensome union.
Yet,
I would always choose to belong to you.

Through the pain, the loss, the heartbreak, the distance.
I will only
belong to you.

Featured Image: Honor Adams

By Serena

I have been thinking about your dreams.

I want to be America like I want to be beautiful

I know I am England– 

I am sorry as England is sorry, I am small as England is small 

with its unfashionable hat and its aversion to genitalia

I watch you in the mirror – you are all lingerie and cellulite

Marilyn’s mandibles and tobacco blondes

My England looks in the mirror and sees only its own eyes

We would never work

You are always writing songs about Travis Kelce–

I, elegies for the Daily Mail.

You are waiting for me in Hooters and I seem to be a chicken bake in the Greggs display fridge.

You are the Kardashians and

outside of London I am mainly Croydon.

I cannot keep up with your pyrotechnic televangelists, 

Your pharmaceutical genius, jam-filled centre,

your endless campaign that insists upon itself.

America is dilated and eager

Licking your lips, where is your shame?

I do not understand how you can chew your mouth is so full of teeth

The sun never sets. 

I am just as red as Florida and I am with you always in Rockland–

We both know it is not enough!

Featured Image – BOAC

By Racy Huang

Jades of exploit and diamonds of orient:
An antagonistic pair still yet attuned.
Say ‘feign me a geisha, an idol, a porcelain doll’
And you shall hear the jade crack, the silk rip, my chest heave.
Found, not forged they hope
But impurities are collated and considered,
Caressed through knowing hands in consequence.
Finger my ridges, moisten my craters, buff me right even.
File me down, maintain the purity, oh a chink at my discretion!
Carbon lattices stand fixed though; a resounding frigidity
Yet
You siphon my value,
Melded into frocks of organza so deftly torn apart for this momentary warmth.

Infantry was adorned with those hues of green,
A basque of tongue-ties, of brown eyes, of hushed mires.
The rabbit on the moon blows me a draughty kiss,
My untainted pride all but sealed and so tragically for naught.
Childhood exchanged those colours of mine
For crystals of salt unravelled my tongue;
And balls of aquamarine bludgeoned me petrified,
Those bellies of laughter estranging the forlorn chick.
Slumber laid the palette to rest –
After all, an artisan works not at night!
Here black conquered gold,
Here lines struck curves,
Here diamond and jade became deities alike.

Oysters pierced into adolescence.
Their putrid, faecal husk offering an unsightly match
Against my mother-of-pearl.
A murk so ubiquitous they summoned mines to encrust me whole.
Diamonds.
Only diamonds.
Serrated was the exterior
And a pathetic taste to the interior:
“Lap me up like fools’ gold”
Unacquainted with my exotic flush or unfeigned touch.
My viridian became thus vanquished
But carve him an eighth wonder,
Mask those fissures
And deem her palatable.
She’s hardly fragile once bejewelled.

I am older now.
Strangely these days they prise me open,
Caress this carcass of emerald so desirable
And I am cradled.
Warmth.
So now penetrate me,
Permeate my crevices,
Plough into my core
For I am not pungent nor marred anymore!
Strip my carats
And exhibit me for the voyeur –
Ascertain his preference
And I shall deliver:
Submit.
Conform.

Predictably a shrapnel remains;
Declare me wanton at best
But never have such tender gazes nested in green.
Pry into muted chambers
And engorge those fractures,
Again, again, again.
Festering wounds but behold me still
I’ll plead and render the heavens for this.
But he knows not of certainty
Instead forgotten is the ink, the crescents, the onyx.
Turn to that of amber, of sapphire, of moonstone.
Misshapen as it was this vessel had harboured hope:
Beyond gemstones of allegory
Beyond tormented verse.
What to do but remould these splinters of glass
Or resume one’s seat at the gouache?
Tears will garnish this commodity again I am sure –
My attributes to be thus converged:
An antagonistic pair still yet attuned,
Diamonds of orient and jades of exploit.

Featured Image: “Philosopher’s Repose” Jade Mountain, British Museum

By Toby Dossett

A bell-clear Sunday, elbows lodged strut firm 
On the top bar of a gate, inspecting livestock.
Elms gold and half-leafed 
Early autumn morning, hesitated
Rain-flirt leaves, guttering
Snub and clot of the last brown cones
When speaking of birches,
The white of their bark
As cool and suffused as a satin dress

Head on hip and hand on heel
I took the path to settle myself
November prospects
Matter in its planetary stand-off,
Dulled dark argent, roundly wrapped
And pigeon-collared in the drifting light, 
Aporia, reticence, deleterious thoughts
Wielded thin as wind

A passing year, wily dovetailing
The way swans coax you into deep water
There was never a moment
When I had it out with myself or with another,
The loss occurred offstage
And yet I cannot disavow words like 
Host, or prayer or gratitude
They have an undying tremor and draw
Like well water far down

A cold clutch, a whole nestful 
All but hidden
In the starting autumn leaf mould
And I knew
By the mattress and the stillness of them, rotten
Making death sweat of the morning dew
That didn’t so much shine their shell
As damp them 
I was on my hands and knees down there in the wet
Breath beaten and rapt in resquiescat

Featured Image: Toby Dossett

By Isobel Duncan

small lessons we learn as children—
don’t let them see you cry,
and some foods are good,
and some foods are bad,
and laziness is the bane of productivity,
and if he hits you it means he likes you, and don’t snitch, don’t tattletale, not ever—

are, in many ways, damning.

but the one that chased me 
the furthest through the tunnels
of this unsolvable labyrinth
that we call growing up, is that
‘the most humane thing you can do for 
a firefly is to poke holes in the lid
of the jar you caught it in.’

i thought i was so charitable
to shove a toothpick through the tinfoil
cinched atop the jar keeping it captive.
and i would call it kindness.
so, it is only natural that as i grew,
i became content with semi-suffocation,
so long as i was offered
a few gulps of fresh air every now and then.
it is only natural that i thought
the people who fed me
oxygen through straws,
like a jar-bound firefly,
were saints for being so kind
as to even let me breathe.

for the most humane thing 
you can do for a firefly
is to not catch it
at all.

Featured Image: Toby Dossett

By Toby Dossett

now the light is cantaloupe and terminal.
a city smells of rain and resignation,
lying on the grass,
unmade and unmaking
i face the cathedral’s spine
the bruised sky is left
beneath the pretext of haste,
rapture and longing,
a blacksmith’s bookmark,
those water-burning words,
shyness at newness, 
an emptiness behind,
whom I cleave to, hew to,
he’ll wait a while 
before he kills the light.
and politely we both 
pretended, performing sincerity,
then dismantling it for your comfort.
who rearranges silence into affection?
there is no honesty left to ask for,
he’d drive through aspiration
and pretence, for instruction,
keeping us together when together,
all declarations deemed outspokenness.
angry at something
how many hours were we rain-swept?
what did he wish for then?
revealed but better hidden
during those hours when we lose interest 
in what needs to be done
so, one of us became the forsaken lover
who might wave from a subtitled dream
at the outskirts of a particular kind of writing
covert during a tender alliance
like hidden stairs down into a pond.
more and more, this last look 
of the forged wet
shine of the place is what means most to him.

Featured Image: Toby Dossett

By Orla Cowan

let me give you reason to run rhyming down the beach
horizon your eyeline: claggy timeline of sea over sky
gulls like gills flit with waves so rousing
seas right through you, all you know
is now – thrown off towel

succumb sparring lungs with every, each –
sandy second of the upturned
hourglass, momentary
motionless ocean

enclosed in a conch, an echoed Irish ‘ach’
rush of a last wave goodbye
salt-pinched toes meet

shell-shocked sand with a crun ‘ch’ –
hold hand up to face

breathe out, aspired ‘h’ –

Featured Image: Honor Adams

By Saoirse Pira

It’s all the city, the smile that’s
plastered, the spring in my step
and the heart on my sleeve—
it’s the moving from one country

to the city, finding me. It’s the
street-clocks and the cheap beer,
and the drinking too much wine. 
Then it’s the people and the tramlines
and in Prague, I am alive.

In the city, I wake dreaming
and then I’m moving with the crowds
and I’m learning and I’m breathing;
it’s the city, I think in rhyme. 

Featured Image: Saoirse Pira

By Lottie Roddis

and it could end on the day it 

sinks with thunder. wheat an ashen shade of 

green, your hands callused and 

raw on the plough, gripping my forearm

as the water slinks down.

warm with damp, the sheets don’t 

dry on the rafters; instead, you bottle plums, i swallow my

syntax, the books fall apart on 

our shelf. we are on opposite sides of the dining table: 

there is something unspoken in the steam from my tea. 

you call the doctor, i tell you

he can’t fix this. there is ash and there is 

swelling, the last time we talked about it, i said i loved you, 

but you just say it started with the vodka, you’re starving with 

a scream. 

there might be a funeral, 

you could walk the course of the 

graveyard, debate your striding, all

smoke and mirrors of a run-on

sentence, a machine;

you could open the gates: let the dogs churn

the ground like butter, like a fight. you 

could pick up the phone, 

flick the match, light up

something you’re trying to quit. it is the 

day of endings, the reckonings, 

the day of myths and magic, the day 

of making amends and making a bed to lie in, 

to wake up in. to bring coffee 

and a newspaper to. 

one second-best call and a hailstorm, 

is all it could take, 

to make it to the end of harvest season.

Featured Image : Toby Dossett