By Annie Fisher They‘re all along my path today, trumpeting their purity— a flawless, beaming sisterhood. But I know how they clutch and...

By Carmella de Keyser If you are male You aren’t a producer. As soon as you break through the mother shell Into the beckoning light of...

By Donna Faulkner He and I are well acquainted. I hear the knuckles of his finger crack. See his breath blow...

By Ells It's her, The dancing monkey- Clutching rusted tamberines, From when she performs her suppositions On bruising, red knees- She...

By Freya Metcalfe When I die In twenty seventy five When my lungs have had their share Of dust and tar Skin scarred and burned and...

By Alberto Arecchi Birds flying above death chimneys recall an era that will never return. Men fighting under a thousand flags whose...

By Charlotte Mary Smith I want to eat the lilt in your tongue, Curl my fingernails round your ringlets till they snag And I can’t get...

By D. E. Johnston The woods display a chilly light when blanketed in icy white. In sleep, they portend the silence of eternal...

By Glyn Matthews Lightning in the wires welds their bodies, fries their silly brains to scrambled eggs in cranial pans. Pompeiian arms...

By Martin R. Vidal Having selected the equipment, The proper field and hour of the night, Go now in the thing’s proper season. Go now, in...

By Arron Potts Each pinch. Punch. Pin. Piercing flesh, digging in. Running stitch of ink through skin. Dots of colour to begin, this...

By Marie Lee I cauterise my heart and feel vibrations of crowing. Scrabbling, drowning fingers raw and numb powerless to creeping holes...

By P. Mari Death dared not defile you. Never did that vain power extinguish the essence of your beauty. It tried to suck your blood, a...

By Kate Hamilton the first time a grown man wants to fuck you is a baptism soaked in your mother’s blood. you are pimple-skinned on the...

By Richard Humphries When first I loved you it was too soon And I had no heart to steal a rose that was yet to bloom When next I saw...

By James Everest …the earth, full of roads, opened under her… Yes, my darling, turn, degraded, To the darkness you have seen, To the...

By Peter Kay Unmistakably a crow, dark wingbeat, all portent and doom, hope riven out of the day, forcing studied reflections on a...

By Hetta Jones The autumn night is cold and damp The souls are quiet in their graves In churchyard and cemetery, at ease While somnolent...

By Robin Hutton Under siege from glossy girls With lips that plump in good time For others to desire but never attain And drive the...

By Duncan Abel The scars are not literal, still they catch the corner of a glance that politely looks away – and so does not see the...