By S.J. Wildling You said I reminded you of birds. Curiosity curled upon my chewed lip Hopeful you had made some complimentary association with grace. Your eyes gathered storm clouds  as you glared up at me Eagle eyed and menacing. “You remind me of birds” you said “how they do as they please, How they just up and leave. How they make a fucking mess. And all that fucking noise How you'd Shit on me from a height, Flap and squawk and take flight, If I gave you a chance I know y

By Madeleine Dale Walk me to the covered bridge – that far, at least. Under green rush & heather thatch there is no snowfall, or dead leaves gathered. Skin flashes in the dark river and I cannot say my own rites – our prayers have been stolen from our mouths. We must reconstruct the ritual by hand. This will be like opening a bruise – old blood on the altar knife, a new language of mourning inherited from whorls of dead timber. Summons of salt and evergreen. I watch you leave

By Phoebe Owen We walked the bracken paths, stumbling through rotten bark and crimson leaves. She breathed the earth, her 80 years ad blissful infinitum. I swept away the gnats and brambles clawing at my swaddled limbs.   She asked me, through her cradle walls, held firmly by the world’s wide arms which forest path I’d wandered most to scratch for blackberries, track for badgers, spar the oak trunk knights of castles past; I said: “My bushes bore white plastic fruit, and the

By Lena Mante I made a bet with Pascal that you exist. Yet I was wrong. This appearance is the most infernal salvation, and repetition: the most merciless lesson, after which you never learn anything. That’s why you are given the freedom to walk the same roads, to drive the same hospital-white car, to be a servant to the same meaningless gestures. To drag a body, seething with hope for life: back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, while outside the world remains asthm

By Jeremy Keighley The acid rain falls outside a tiny room of bare white bricks, almost dawn when a flock of red cranes takes flight all colour bleached out by the night-light iced aqua blue which freezes my tears as I call ‘take me in your arms, in your arms as you did in the lake, then.’   But my voice is only a smoker’s croak too faint   under the rattle of death trains by the window a lightning bolt above my eyes, you slip further into the darkness where the sheet envelop

By Katy Cossham Had my feet been dipped in cool paint as I descended the stairs that Sunday morning? I couldn’t explain it away By the time I reached the hall, “It’s MS - I’ve got MS” Like a stopped clock, a worrier is sometimes right The strangeness spread; my fur rubbed backwards Within days a firestorm blazed in my personal substation My body waged war with itself At night whole sections were wiped out I revived, Lazarus-like, in the morning With frayed live wires in my mi

By Helen Laycock Water-thin, silver-hemmed figures bloom and fade like failing lighthouses in the between-   world as they search for barren heartwrecks. They are soft-light,   starved moths long-crept from castle-dank and hospital-rust to this griefsea,   powdering crepuscule with the blown chalk of doused lives.   Sibilant-whisperers, they sing in minor keys, transient laments wheedling into the shells of the sleeping stricken.   Snowbreath-featherers, hair-lifters, they ti

By Ingrid Leonard In the coal-shed By Ingrid Leonard   Posh Paws sits in a basket with all her newborns, which lately have been soft, indiscernible things, snug-suckling at their mother’s underside; now they watch me without moving, their eyes bluer than the sea and all its sparkles, greener than the rain-splashed grass, five pairs on beds of glowing fur; black, silver-splodged and their tortoiseshell mother, who watches me without moving, quiet and content with her queening,

By Dom Armstrong I return to my garden, expecting roses, and a neat order of beds, Life .   Instead: a massacre. Death .   The tulips are snapped like broken necks. The hedges scalped. The sunflowers look like they’ve been interrogated, their petals confessing to crimes they did not commit.   The pond is gone, too. Not drained, but beaten. Smashed flat with a brick as though someone thought water was showing off.   The grass is no longer grass. It is a green smear. Even the s

By Grá Saol The Crackling is instilled in effect. Only quieting at full throttle, When all apprehensive attitudes are made null and void.   The Glass refracts glimpses of an Organic green. Slowly cut off by the ever moving Mechanism I’m confined to.   I am not alone on this journey. In front of me lie 50 or so people, All are waiting to depart the vessel. None intrigued by the other's journey.   The river sparkles brown and blue. I’d have rather been left off there, But that

By BV Lawson You watch the bird fly overhead and think it had a name once. It soars so beautifully and comes down to land in front of that woman right over there. You wish you knew who she was.   You think she had a name once.   The sun-colored flowers blow back and forth in the wind, and you reach down to touch one. Smooth, soft, fragile.   Did you grow them once?   This garden seems so strange yet so familiar, and the house, the sun-colored house, you think you know it.   Y

By Corridors of sleep Black flowers Grow wild From inside the Decaying memory   Just another gift That you gave me   I am the anomaly The pointless apology The heartfelt liturgy After the tragedy   The softest kiss Just Before surgery   Before the angels in white Come to take me And Put their hands Deep inside me   Milena If I don’t wake up You will know exactly Where to find me   #DarkPoetsClub

By Aidan Ashton in the deepening grey of a solitary winter the house waits by the water holding us within its teeth. it is a cruelty to call it a house; it is a hulking shadow torn from bones of the world and forced into the falsehood of a home; slate excised from fractured mountains; beams dragged from mutilated forests; all laid to rest beside the drowning darkness of the lake. it is not meant for us. the wilderness lingers still within its halls like the scent of blood on

By Salem Youngblood I slit my skin to keep myself alive. Pain was a promise. The blade, a language.  Every slash a prayer that said, I am here. I am here.  The metal became fluent when my tongue failed. Its whisper  held my trembling hands. Its sting reminded me  that I had not yet faded away.    At first, it was only blood—  that faithful flood, warm and certain.  But then, petals. Pale and trembling.  Blooming through the red, as if grief could flower. They smelled faintly

By Rosa Christian Do you ever ponder the evil things                                           we see on the tele, hear on the radio? Recoil from the horror image they bring declare, self-righteously, 'I could never do that.'?   Couldn't you? Are you really sure? Look inside au fond primitive instincts endure foul things hide on the haunted, oozing floor of a darkling well we keep hid from luminance our own private hell.   Where animal essence still rules supreme impulse crie

By Rhian Elizabeth when i was a child my sleepwalking was an almost nightly occurrence. my mother would find me standing on the bottom step of our garden, a little lost ghost in a nightgown, paper thin against the elements on those welsh valleys nights. then there was the time she caught me pissing in the living room plant pot, the time i toppled books and shelves and chairs during a rare stay with my older brother in his fancy windsor apartment, and i was once rescued by a n

By Virginie Bernard You betrayed me, made me a nomad Lied to my face, for more than a year Stole from me, money I never had All to pretend we were both clean Just before my gut-wrenching departure I needed to shock your sedated routine I ran through my memories to capture The one you still care about, our everything I wanted you to find her stabbed on the floor Figure out what to do with her lifeless body Lonely, burdened, yet selfish when you score But she came closer, eye t

By S.D Gould I was hungover the day of your funeral. And so many after that. Grief came in bottles, and left in apologies I never sent. They said the service was beautiful— I don’t remember the lilies or the suits, the priest reciting a name that no longer sounded like yours. I’m sure I mouthed along, tasting the syllables like ash. When they lowered you down, the world didn’t break. That offended me. The sun was obscene in its persistence. The sky had the audacity to stay bl

By Sharon Marie Hier The forest shows its truest face only after the sun abandons it— when the last streak of gold dissolves and the earth exhales its deeper, older breath. In that hour, the wildness wakes. Not the soft, green gentleness of day, but the feral heart beneath it: roots twisted like clenched fists, brambles sharpened into threats, and the night creatures stepping out of their hunger. The darkness here is not empty. It roars. It sings. Its beauty is carved from to

By Megan Cartwright Broken blood vessel blooms, sprouts in tendrils that snake across my eyeball; a white orb moon. I drive nameless roads, consumed by history, shed rust, flakes of a broken blood vessel’s bloom. Map lines spread like veins, plumes beating blue with the heart’s pace, rapid beneath the white orb moon while the cigarette lighter socket looms at the edge of my vision, aches red; blur of blood vessels in bloom, mind and mouth of cotton wool. I exhale dragon’s bre