Elegy for a Snail
By Esme Bell Whorl is a word that should be Licked. Nutty and round, nearly Hollow but rich things are tricked Underneath. Strange, how Someone
Esme Bell
March 5, 2024
By Esme Bell Whorl is a word that should be Licked. Nutty and round, nearly Hollow but rich things are tricked Underneath. Strange, how Someone
By Esme Bell On a train, it is easy To feel smooth and tubular As glass or fake air That has never breathed Freely;
By Daniel Ali for Her. I hate to be the poet that professes an undying love for a beautiful soul. By declaring her smile would
By Eve Messervy Manus, enclosed in her mind and four walls, staring out at the sky slowly changing shades as the world rests without her.
By Ludwig Hemel Ludwig Hemel is a poet and musician. Find him on Spotify under his artist name, IXMES. Sand Holy sights
By E. R Fletcher My empty ribs and sallow, sunk Eyes dart around my frescoed mind, and there you are. Dear, Confess! Just to hold
By Emma Large For my grandfather There was a ship on the starline Where the water met its flank, up And out and
By Jake Roberts An old statuette demands supremacy From the safety of the mantelpiece. Yours, up for good this time, you smile, This time
By Eve Messervy You are the face I saw in rain So fragile; melted sapphire seeps, Crying gushes rivers, sleep Through flooded webs of long
By Izzy Weinstein Loosely held in the palm of your hand, Your Midas touch I’d reprimand, But my impotence at your commands Cries insolence
What’s mine(d) is yours What’s mine is yours, a pact unseen, No question raised, a quest routine. In every touch, in every find, Yours
By Eve Messervy To be a woman is to be perfectly destructive; To be painted like Klimt Bleeding gold With a faint smile. I
By Emma Large Labouring against me in the sun-sucked twilight: our coolness and the cold empire of the cathedral, my own hurt grating against my
By Izzy Weinstein Oh what an art to draw that line And walk away with those washed eyes, A steady promise fixed in time,
By Rohan Scott An animated stillness slips off the awning Drip, splash, the gentle rattle of drizzle Raindrops splinter light, So forms the yellowed mist
By Celia Bate. Prologue On the thousandth Red Moon the world had seen, Three Witches bore Satan’s baby from a tiny bean. Marinated
By Emma Large. Twin Lantau houses swelter empty Most of the year round, even their walls Never touch. Named like siblings, Green and White Jade;
By Lianna De Bartolo Your denim pools out on the hardwoodAs you fall to your kneesTantalus sinks, for my hair has been washedAnd the beds
By Joseph Clayton Among the breeze, Twisting its way between A tangle of pebbles, windswept A snatch of laughter Half-chuckle, half-wheeze, Among that dry, ceaseless
Spring Sequence Emma Large We have wrestled hard into April, Through the bunched knuckles Of stonier-fisted months. Now, Spring takes us with
A song upon the autumn wind
that does float and call me to your side,
like a siren beckoning a sailor to his end;
this love is true, it cannot bend.
It begins with a certain wispy prince.
Perhaps a captain of the one of the ball sports, or the first lad to heave around a doorstop novel.
He starts being sheepish at show and tell.
rooftops and windowsills shoulder with
quiet acquiescence the flaky pinpricks
of icy ashes – and (look!) there is
an equal, fickle coating of the pavement –
When I bolt upright
And air still carries weight
It affirms something:
I am shattered.
Johanna catches up with her mother over the phone
and I could have been eavesdropping, if things had been different.
In Berlin I stutter, mit Sojamilch, bitte.
A packed station
A bustling sea of loneliness
Little dream bubbles collide
Cups of tea and roaring fires
Movement in the cold stasis.
A cat hugs a smattering of
Snow-capped graves, winding
Thoughtlessly past mourners, their
Eyes fixed to stagnant, waning feet.
Non poet, you don’t know how
maddening it is to bring back
and back and
back and back to
I see it’s Wednesday. The week will inherit
Me. I’d forgotten which day had me
(it was a cloud covered night)
Until Wednesday sprung and
Nudged me into her midweek march.
Wait for lights at the window;
It’s coffee morning at mine.
Once all meander home
The remnants trace lines
He spends the summer of ‘18 in Italy.
Returns with a tattoo of a cross,
cradled in the crook of his arm.
We argue about God until he cries.
Oh rolling hills, oh grassy glens,
thy power and beauty know no ends.
Where men are bold and yet more wise;
a land ne’r ‘fraid to punch above its size
Steam breaks the illusory seal
Of calm, leaking from room to room,
Touching, as it goes, the seated ghosts
Who laughed, drank and mused
I found you racing in the desert driving a work of art
And pulsing through your veins with the blood of the Lion Heart
Who are you to make demands
three girls
two grams
too old to die young
They sink into blue
Sweet remembered hue
Wet salt of our eyes
Cannot say our goodbyes.
In the old back garden
the apple tree is still in springtime
she forgets that autumn exists
now that she is only a memory –
old blood coursing through new veins.
Dear friend, you found me once again.
You feel like an embrace
A heavy coating on my being, you taste
So familiar
Try to catch
September
In the silent pools before you.
It’s there, I promise.
It made me want to cry…the kiss,
Grasped in claws of gold,
A marriage of palms and ivy,
An ode to a bent knee strengthened
Chase:
A buxom chest, and charm to boot,
she really does offer much but
her friend, a beauty I’ve never known.
Is that a door I wish to shut?
the Wind was lifted and drawn swiftly out.
Space roared,
‘what on Earth is going on here?’
(which, in its defence, was a good question.)
but Wind was gone, and the void was vast.
For my kindred spirit
white bathtub, underpants, matching bras
coloured concoctions in clear glass jars
and the Mother laughs
past the door with no lock.
It is a blistering Summer
as he strides into my house.
Doesn’t think twice
about my words, just my mouth.
Between the living room and the kitchen
There is a door.
Signatures of my siblings form a road map,
Stretching from top to bottom
Sporadic lines like signposts
Marking the miles of growth.
Love rots away in the footnotes
Of the heart’s biography —
A musty, damp-eaten, hardback book
In an obsolete library —
Time sits by, with an abject hand
Fingering a quarter-to-three —
The ceiling doesn’t brighten now
And my eyes can’t shut or see —
Would I still love you if you were a worm?
Your focus fixed on mine with headlight eyes
I am Schrodinger’s roadkill until I reply.
“Yes”.
To dream — the cold awakens, darkness berths
A strange delight. We beat on. Wings outstretched
At once there was a Sailing-Boat,
A chariot of swift oak frame,
Then skimming upon the river’s throat
They heard the voice proclaim:
Send yourself rip-roaring through me
why don’t you?
Rip-Roaring! Tearing through my
delicate, delicate, skin.
Armetis Lam
I stare down the barrel of my
Coffee cup, and understand what you said
About boats falling off the edge of the world.
Don’t – I beg – give me anything.
No hunch, no cliff’s edge:
Stay ever moving.
Keep me in the dark, my
Feet never finding solid ground lest
And look at us,
So beautiful and so disgraced.
Alex Kramskaya
Let all footpaths burn
Honeyed whiskey like a firestarter
Screaming Eden eternal.
They walk the wrong way
Jake Roberts
Check the phone, the time,
(I lost track of both tonight)
Pack up conversation:
The night is giving way
And we meant to greet its fall.
Catch the time, the colour,
The mass of hikers, climbing,
Pinning themselves to skies,
Willing the red welts groundward.
Meaning is let like blood, they drink
The air, naked, seen,
Sunken eyes dress it wildly.
We miss it often and curse
The casual joy that keeps us far
From scenes of living.
Living is compacted earth,
It sits outside our after-parties.
Beth Blackwell
If I were asked to describe you,
I would tell them you are breakfast
A cup of tea at the table
With sleep still in my eyes.
Toast,
Burnt at the edges
But soft with salted butter
I would tell them you are breakfast,
Because you are my first thought
Every morning.
Cosmo Adair
We live our comforts to their gentle ends:
The blue and the green and the sunbleached earth
Are, for us, the geographies of mirth;
Souvenirs of our follies and curbed bends.
Pebbles grate, like metronomes to laughter;
Evening sets, duskily; the crickets hiss.
Evening sets, and brings about a thousand pains.
We live our comforts, we die the same
With our thoughts on suffering like childish games.
Beth Blackwell
It’s 3:19 PM,
I’ve been on the can since
2:00
Staring at the walls,
That curl around my
Loo
I only came in here to piss.
God, I was so desperate
Didn’t even lock it.
Now I’m staring at my tiles,
Elbows on my knees,
Pants around my ankles.
I’m thinking about the pattern
And how repetitive it seems.
Black. White. Black. White. Red.
Poster child for extremes.
Black. White. Black. White. Red.
Bleeding dove amongst the dust.
My knees are hurting now,
Time for me to move.
Unpeel myself,
From this seat.
From that time.
Just 14.
I think I should get
My bathroom
Re-tiled.
Emma Large
I dreamed my brother was my grandfather
And his hand – white, limbless –
Stretched in front of him like a blued shadow.
He knew all the words to Fly Me to the Moon,
But the shape of my name tremored on his lip
and died, flat, smacked
Like a shutter in wind.
What I feel is falling off a train platform.
My frozen feet when they fizz numb and blind. Ice cubes
Clunking in my shoes.
When I walk home the ground feels like nothing,
So I just transcend into the air. This sorrow
Is soft white bread, fleshy and seeping
Like a sponge. It stales with time.
When I wake up, I grasp a moment of my father’s pain
And then I realise it will be mine.
Beth Blackwell
I am awoke in the dead of the night
By a weight at the end of my bed.
A dog.
With wire hair and kind eyes.
My duvet stays bunched
Around my feet,
Pinned down by four paws
With worn palms.
I think,
About this friend
And how it hogs my
Bed end.
How I hope it will forever.
But these things will not outlive us.
So I arrange myself around the statuette
And let sleeping dogs lie.
Alex Kramskaya
The lights dim slowly.
The silent shushing
The crushing feeling
Warm under cold fingertips –
Breaths that commingle
Are as unknown to me
As the perfect figures on the big screen
Brushing a palm against mine
Burning holes through film and wrist.
There’ll come a time I say
“I missed this”
But for now,
I’ll count up cardinal sins
And be damned before the curtain call.
Alex Kramskaya
Forgetting faintly
Loving embraces
Swept away in the wintry air of late June
That sweet summer chill
Aching with decay.
The lost moments
Falling away like a dream.
A cadaver lying at the bottom of the river
Drunk and dangerous
Joy spilling out of its mouth like stolen liqueur.
Find me a medium
“Bring it back!” I declare
“I’ll bring it all back!”
Anonymous
Do you remember the air of that Winter
Night in Oxford? We pressed against the wall,
One another, and let our hearts sinter
In that quiet side-street by Teddy Hall.
Some people passed; who were they, but taut
Commas, quick breaths of punctuation
In our paragraphs of love, our drawn out
Sentence of flame-edged feelings: the diction
We’d yet begun — end, still a lipless
Word, which our thoughts scarcely fingered at.
But Love, the illusionist, begat
Fine castles of sand from that tender press
And drove us through Time’s autumn meadow
To live our lives in a moment’s shadow.
Lot
Cosmo Adair
Now every word is a pillar of salt
stood nervously in the desert
of our silence. We salvaged each
other just to wear ourselves out. I
looked to our future but you turned
to the past. I could disprove History’s
inerrable way
of things, I thought — but, my darling,
History repeats and reverses and, all the
while, spares no thoughts for love or for
us.
Naive One
Cosmo Adair
If you should ever encounter
a castle which, suddenly, from a
hill you see: let not caution
invade
curiosity — and remember your
mother’s imperfect words, not the
cold, stiff
collared moanings of an antique man.
And if you should be quiet
and ask not questions of the mystic band — do not fear or worry
as that world dissolves
(the gold, the emerald, the smiling girls), but try again: for your father maimed and your mother faint require this
of you.
Orange
Ruth Harding-Brown
Emotions aren’t supposed to have colours
Maybe you feel hot
or cold
What colour is fear?
Vulnerability?
Perhaps it’s sad, that I only expected these
Maybe because I never believed
Never truly believed that I was like everyone else
Deserving.
Maybe, maybe not
But when it was my time,
I felt only Orange
I saw behind my eyelids only Orange
It’s better than what they say
I read the same story in his eyes that I knew mine were telling.
My chest didn’t swell
I didn’t see stars
But life never follows trope like story does
A warm,
Orange
hum
spreading through every inch of my body
That’s all I can tell you
Maybe emotions aren’t supposed to have colours,
But if i can love
and be loved
then not everything I’ve ever thought to be true
is really true.
Return to Crewe
Tom Pyle
Two years on
I watch a shadow
Lithe, bespectacled
Lounging
Through falling glass
On a shattered bench.
Dark
Time-rusted
Clouds hang
A minute passes.
Shooting a glance
Sly
He slaps both thighs
Clenches a tousled jaw
And saunters Northwards
Once more
From Crewe.
Before I can notice
The walk
I once knew.
One step at a time
Anonymous
if
i count
every drop as
it touches my head
and runs down my face
and wets my lips and store it
in my mind and count and count
and count then maybe one day after a
lot of counting I’ll look up to my head and touch
my face and move my lips and find my mind empty,
my count lost and my body drying in the sun that follows rain.
Beggarman Winter
Tom Pyle
All night,
The winter stalked us.
Shuffling through
Lamp-glossed pools
Of cobbled fire,
He came.
Bleak laughter
Filling our chimneys.
Sharp whispers
Coating our curtains.
Bitter breath
Hanging in our hallways,
An ancient and uninvited guest.
Frosted fingers
Brushed windowpanes
And entered dreams,
As the phantom drifted by.
Yet now, it seems,
The morning winds,
Have swept him back
Behind the bins.
He squats,
In puddles of the mind.
Chewing on crusts and bacon rind.
A wretched shadow of the season,
That once would turn down every reason,
To loosen the grip of his sceptred fist.
Now he sits begging,
Just to exist.
Against
the four walls of my mind,
a brutal consciousness
rebounds between each surface.
Collecting pieces of dust as it goes;
remnants of my past misdeeds.
Patterns shining upwards
from the tear dyed pillow
on which my head has been planted.
–
Within
the four walls of this room,
my reflection stares at me in chipped white paint.
I find foolish company in
echoes of nothingness,
listening like a deaf man, to the unfiltered silence.
I avoid eye contact with the sadness
that is curving inwards,
burning a cigarette sized hole into my soul.
–
Beyond
the four walls that encroach me,
are outstretching arms.
I see skin rolling like sand dunes,
of all the faces that will embrace me.
Striped without cruelty
and without tears
my bare feet
will be accepted by the grass on which I walk.
–
Through
the concrete,
I carve my way out. I feed myself a new life
where the air I breath
is no longer from a paper bag.
Yet, my back will ache
from the eyes beating after me
and before me
as though I am falling into a love that I expect to hurt.
–
Inside
these four walls,
I return to the comfortable torture.
It is easier to be lost
amongst a mess of other’s lostness
and hot, weighted sighs –
Where the ground beneath me is bruised
from all the broken souls
that have walked upon it.
Elizabeth Marney
What if I am half man half mouse?
Hiding in the tidy gutter I came from
wearing baggy armour of a
holiday abroad once a year
and food on the table every night.
The soles of my shoes
are covering the holes in theirs:
scuffed still in the home I never lived in,
skidding with them down staircases built on
hundreds of years of empty promises
skint, snicket shortcuts
into cigarette smoke down the pub
every night.
Now,
brushing elbows with the ket habit kids
who pick careers like accessories
because work has never been just to pay the bills.
The obsessed with the bonus
‘risk taking genius’
who just happens to know a guy
who knows a guy
who knows the right people
(the stick to their own type people)
who was a social butterfly
long before the chrysalis formed.
Take your cheap pint at spoons and shake
your head at the old man who sips on his
for he was never your future and he is not your past.
Piss up the walls of the people you defend over dinner,
tossing their lives in with your avocado salad and turmeric chips,
but walking by without a second glance or a spec of guilt
when their sisters and brothers are freezing in the streets.
Well intended belittlement and political fodder
sit nicely at the table, convinced they’re doing some good.
You talk so loudly
that when my grandma calls, I almost forget
how to speak in the language she breathes.
You think I speak like them?
They think I speak like you.