In the Mood for Stormy Weather It’s a Sunday for Etta James, jazz and storm clouds and weepy movies, indulgent bath with scented candles, smoky-eyed make-up and spending an afternoon selecting the right dress, the one that matches a colour of a broken heart and siren red lipstick with killer heels, but it’s Sunday so a night out will sabotage the coming…

Driving in the dark Daddy drives silently into the night. There are lights everywhere, all around the car, the lights that always seem to come out at night. Lights mean fairs, don’t you know. Fairs just like the one that comes to our town every year - the one with Helter Skelters and dodgem cars and haunted houses and candy floss…

Old Nabs Wood I emerge in a remembrance woodland of bluebells, ramson and dog's mercury, in the shadow of oak, sycamore branch ash and beech, a children's cemetery. I carry their memory as my quick shallow flow breaks out where sandstone and coal reach the surface. I carry pebbles slicked with chocolate brown film, local folk call okker. In flood I'm a manslaughterer,

Now He doesn't want it to end, wants summer to go on forever. Mid-July. The second wave. Wildfires in France, colonial fans, shoppers chilling in the freezer aisles of Tesco and Asda, nobody batting a single, singed eyelid. He wasn't different. Dreaded October, autumn schooling, "Goldengrove unleaving", the agitated trees of Belle Isle Park. September as threshold, as August in disguise, and if it isn't an Indian summer,

Inheritance In freckled summer, I take her hand, step off the gravel track, cut our own way. Under wispy cirrus, we sprawl meadow-deep, lark-listen, daisy-chain, spin tales about where the deer are. Cloud counting, she points out arrow planes. We hear their distant disturbance, see their extravagant contrails scar the blue. But soft, listen to the bee-busy clover creep. Finola Scott writes to try to unravel what is happening in the world.

I like looking in other people’s recycling bins we used to bury our waste / conceal it in a hastily dug shallow grave / auditioning for Crimewatch / now it lies in state in open caskets / I keep abreast of who’s eating what / who’s drunk all the milk / just one opal teardrop trickle left to shame the polyethylene / who’s all out of stain…

Closing In On this pine-scented coast civility survives. A booted stranger, looking to re-join the coast path, will get a nice “Good morning” from the locals (mostly retired) who walk their fluffy dogs along the tree-lined avenues of bungalows. Autumn is closing in and later, from the clifftop, darkness will swallow the sea view, leave only wavesound. Sometimes a sullen sea-fret loiters just offshore…

Unwon A scent of stale citrus as the agent unlocks the door to my first flat, aged forty. Both balding, we chat: wallpaper, limescaled taps, our lives before London. Same school, same year – but I can’t place him. As my trainers and his scuffed brogues part on the pavement, I recall a boy with brown curls and a creaseless satchel,

We Call That Good After months at sea, the ship is in my body. I still can’t tell stern from bow. Tuesday from death. Frances can’t either. We check the map. Check it again. Days blur into quizzes, naps, bulletins about nothing. There’s a capital of somewhere I used to know. It won’t come. In the cabin her blouses touch my shirts.

Thresholds Every bed needs a cold edge, a reminder of discomfort. Leave a naked ankle outside to feel what the future holds. Expose an upturned wrist to remember the distant past; sleep spreads from the core. Shelter has an open seam within the closest friend to embrace and protect; warming used-up promises, easing neglect and doubt. But chose a part to leave…

The Interlopers We traced the lazy patterns filtering the sun, lay upon our backs to inhale a sky of seeds. They didn’t seem to mind us gaping through their galleries of grass, Within their trellised city of stalk and nodding seed-head, we’d watch the beetles in their oil-slicked coats of armour and gaze at flutterers feeding on the flowers. Many a serious ant patrol…

Because after Emily Dickinson I could not stop doing the same same same, only myself to blame, I had to go on driving slow and shameless over that edgy edge, along a grid of roads slid striving into a ring of desolation. I put away my decades and my leisure too; the grain the fields, the setting sun were long gone…

All Those October Songs About Trains rattle around this empty road without echoes. I’m far from footsteps. If I knew words like jalopy I’d use them but instead I’ve folded my sandwich in my Rent-a-Wreck receipt and bop my head to mumbled bass which lacks as much definition as my memory of this week which has been long and empty,

When your body lets you down Remember that the skin rallies and heals, the bruises fade and the puffiness subsides. Even the big stuff, the overwhelmed pancreas, the stitches, the broken bones, resolve their differences with a little help and good fortune. But it’s pretty shocking, these interruptions to normal service. They disturb the story you’ve been telling yourself, the version…

Do not go to Romania for Georgina Harding, who cycled through Romania in 1988 Éva says to her. You know there is no food? No petrol? She shrugs, no petrol she can brave. Ferenc weighs in: Hungarians who live in Romania are afraid. He tells a story - a small girl waves at a car with Hungarian plates. But first she looks…

Biology teacher she took us to the park and she opened our eyes to the winter trees black buds of ash cherry’s banded bark oak all gangly elbows and craggy skin smooth beech with slender twigs and pointed buds yellow shoots of willow red of dogwood flakes of plane bark like islands peeling from a map elm’s long-laddered branches leaf-shaped outline of birch…

The Long Wave Goodbye Saturday 27 June 2026 While Big Ben strikes one this torpid heatwave night, Long Wave goes the way of mangles, luncheon vouchers, radiograms and video recorders. .......Never again a continuity announcer .......saying, ‘Over on Long Wave now, .......the shipping forecast, followed .......by the general weather synopsis.’ No more fuzzy reception in tooth fillings, like Chamberlain got inside his canines:

Hymn No song of joy. No choruses of harmony to make you cry. No stars exploding a million light years away. No angels, no orchestra of cherubs with their harps. No cupid firing fleets of golden arrows. No promises that this will last forever. No suggestion that it might. No, spend the night. No curl inside the bend of another body.

Hell is other people’s children As you enter, they’re gathered in the atrium; the last party’s overrun. You identify the hosting parents by the visible signs of panic; half their salaries on nursery fees, now they’ve had to invite the whole class with enough birthday cake for all. Inside the hall, shoes strewn everywhere. You keep your eyes on his, can’t afford…

Soul Erosion I blame a running tap, the boiler firing, as I washed up, for what the voice said on the radio. About an existential threat, for which, we are collectively to blame. Our top soul is being lost. This vital, fertile outer layer is all that lies between us and the end. Its priceless quality, corrupted and degraded, constantly abused.

The Gathering You could die in this place. You could spontaneously combust, and nobody would notice. This is a room in a big city. A tight, zipped-up city. A city with jagged teeth. I dare to share my thoughts out loud, and a pack of sure faces say— No way! What’s not to like? Honestly…. I climb back into my box, scolded, child-ed.

A Mystery They have felled the giant ash tree, guardian of the homeward path. One day it was in full flower, the next laid out, blocking the way. The smell of sap embalms. How quickly a chainsaw reduces a living tree to wood, the wounds still raw. For the life of me, I can't comprehend where its spirit has flown.

Overview Seen from the sixth floor the cars are toys and slow rain on the glass blurs them. There’s no noise because the windows are sealed shut, so I view the collision to the accompaniment of clacking keyboards, someone asking someone else what drink they’d like, the usual office hum on this dull over-warm, mid-winter mid-afternoon. People flock around below, as if they were…

Garden of Remembrance The cottage garden, verdant with grasses, ferns, montbretia, and nettles, is marked by several shrines: at the granite steps - a stone roller set vertical, mossed and scribed with parents' names. Near the ancient fougou - a conch shell for our friend swept away by cancer before the tide was due. In the far corner - a flower bed of memories…

Dawn Chorus Pipes click minutely expand air swells the plane’s wrinkles you cough the cough of the damned a bottle collection shingles upstairs four slippers scuff around trucks hum a flush’s fall dwindles you cough as though nearly drowned blood in my ears snaking a plane-pressed wake of sound a plane surges air caking the run run run of cars’ fuss…

Hymn for today A solo bird flits the fig, and I’m worrying this air: could it be emptying of wings, what if rain forgets to fall, sun rises some place else. The freezer’s hoar-humming excess of bao buns, the boiler’s grumbling, kittens are killing a pencil under the oven. A chainsaw’s hosannaing a hedge down the street, traffic trills a queue past my window.

When Enough Was Enough Not too bad, you replied, just a bit tired, didn’t mention a doctor had seen you, suggested a few days in hospital, for blood tests, but you refused. Perhaps you thought I’d try to change your mind, Mum; wouldn’t understand you’d had enough of bedside nurses tapping your arm to raise a vein. I knew you dozed, most afternoons,

Careers Advice Brenda didn't try for grammar school there was no point for a girl she’d only end up getting married her mother told mine and besides she’d never get in she left school at fifteen exams would be a waste of time her mother told mine young girls should be out having fun not sticking their noses in books…

The Dream Last night I dreamt of pigeons, common-or-garden pigeons - Columba livia forma urbana - frankly the most boring pigeons one could possibly imagine and I thought: What a waste! It would take precisely the same amount of brain power to dream of eagles or dragons. Jim Murdoch: Scot, gatophile, honorary woman, classical music aficionado, novelist, Whovian and producer of half-to-three-quarter-(and-occasionally-actually-fully)-decent poems for over half a century. Facebook - @Jimmy4559

Keepsakes She put them in a drawer: the spring storm that flung out bats, the Dutch-orange scarf of crepe-de-chine. The rushed trunk call that was overheard. She laid them flat: the slither of mica from northern lands, the going-along with it again, the staggered night when neither touched the other. A small cup of rain. She kept them all: the kink of a word misunderstood,

Quaker country Utopia’s as real as wet wood fringed with lichen, squelched leaves along a narrow track, rough sheep grazing in drizzle. The memory chapels keep when the last caretaker locks up. It’s the loop that holds an iron gate in place, a view across uneven fields towards hillsides contoured with fog. It’s slow: an alder’s readiness to stand with sodden feet.

Waving For and to Aidan & Fiona They are waving to me from the bus stop. Their smiles are so wide: I am loving it. My smile lives all the way home. Sometimes you just know things cannot be any better, today is one of those days: it just is. Jarrow-born writer Tom Kelly, now lives further up the Tyne at Blaydon. His second collection of poems and prose, These Are My Bounds, was published in March and is his fourteenth publication from Red Squirrel Press.

2-for-1 Took him with us just to get him out. We’ll leave if the film is a flop. We are at the cinema often enough to know that plot assumes but character confirms, and we’ll leave if the film is a flop. We have not seen any promising reports, assume he hasn’t either, which he confirms: she was the one who liked to read all that…

Unseaworthy My face is a creased skirt, my hands, crabby and stiff my brain, a shell rolled-in-and- out, in-and-out of the tideline. My eyes are grazed by morning’s razor-light. I must have walked ten miles through dunes and rock pools until tangled in drift nets and bottom-trawled to oblivion. Today brings tasks I am not fit for – lists to obey, deadlines to gather.

old hippy beach at Paleochora at the end of the track an effort to arrive rock campervan 40 going on 50 GB plates right-hand drive mesh of tamarisk figs perhaps a pilgrimage back to youth long hair and beard white now kaftan beads skin wrinkled under many suns smoke soon rising Richard Devereux lives in Bristol. His great interest in life is Greece.

Elevation Barcelona Your new home’s an elevation: a remote edge of city before hills that stretch away to wilderness as locals compare song birds warbling from tiny metal cages and sun sends shadows over stone. Roaming through narrow streets we cross a park where people cram a marquee, applaud dancers and spill outside with champagne. We sample tapas somewhere in a buzz of bars and restaurants,

Girl, Do You Ever picture yourself three decades from now, obscured in a brown checked midi coat, sloping off to the bingo, and weep? Do You Ever Go Clothes Shopping and arrive home with six outfits when you went for one—none of them right, and your purse empty? Do you count the cash in your emergency jar, half-hoping there's enough, half-hoping there isn't.

I am fish and chips with mushy peas, onion rings and a teacake please, overnight outs, stevia drops, kefir dopiaza, bhajis, poppadom fat-free yoghurt, air-dried kale with humous, pan fried spam with a huge green salad—lightly dressed in Balsamic, chocolate cake with diet Pepsi, topped with Chantilly cream, size fourteen, eighteen, twenty-two, ten. I am working on it. A riot of colours and jolly hats—crocheted, knitted, vintage,

May sparrows inherit the city The sky in Somerset is blue today, mum says, like a true Jerusalem morning, milky blue at dawn above the spires and minarets the hidden Armenian courtyards. We talk of Jerusalem sparrows, how they’ve bounced bright chirps against those walls for centuries, at peace with their neighbours. Shall we live like them, small pragmatic souls…

School Tour It was one of those days when the sun almost shone and the teachers looked for ways to escape routine. They took us on a bus to unfamiliar places like Bray and Glendalough. It was educational, they said, but it was fun too to be abroad, away from school on those end-of-year slow days. Perched up on the seat looking out over a sea of cars,

Charles G. Lauder, Jr, is an American poet who's lived in the UK for over twenty-five years. He's the author of one collection, The Aesthetics of Breath (V. Press, 2019), and three pamphlets, the latest of which is Year of the Rat (Blueprint Poetry, 2025). His website can be found at charleslauderjr.com

How To Make an Absolutely Perfect Baked Potato Titles are important. If you call your six hundred page novel ‘How To Make an Absolutely Perfect Baked Potato,’ you can’t expect people to believe that it’s all going to be about baking a potato. Either it’s about something different entirely or else you’re going to end up with a really, and I mean really, good potato.

Orderly He checks the cleaner's cupboard over and over again opens the door, looks inside, presses it shut. Each day at the same time he sweeps the floor, bags up rubbish from bins - been inside so long even his eyes are pale. Once he asked me to explain the word recycling. They have to do that now, out there?

Return from maternity leave Black-backed jackals tend to keep to their family groups: the mother of the department and her prodigies, the team on the most prestigious and demanding client. They’re not welcoming to new comers, especially pregnant females, who they push down the corridor to fend for themselves, scavenging whatever work can be found, and who object to others seeking…

By Belfast Lough March 2020 As coronavirus reaches our town, we search for sea glass on the sun-washed shore. You believe the briny air protects body and soul. I believe the wind and waves bring these words. Tim Dwyer’s debut full collection, Accepting The Call (Templar Poetry, 2025), won the Straid Collection Award. His poetry appears regularly in Irish, UK and international journals and anthologies, and previously to Black Nore Review. Raised by Irish immigrant parents in Brooklyn, since 2019 he has lived in Bangor, Northern Ireland.

South Devon/The English Channel Two little girls play on the beach. They garland drapes of weed around each other's necks, they pop with glee, smell briny the succulent sacs. They prod at jellyfish as well with mock fright yelling as the sea-sand sucks at ankles and waves creep up their knees. A tanker squeezes into sight from behind the head-land...

A slighted castle An incomplete set of tea towels pressed and folded in a closed drawer. How much does it matter in the long run whether they get used an equal amount or if one city-state fades before the others? The medieval citadel with family banners on yours is neither better nor worse than any of the others. I prefer this one—

Spring Spring again and they’re all out: washing, blossom, tulips, birds, things we’ve had to do without It makes us sing, it makes us shout, it makes the kids act all absurd Spring again and they’re all out! So, what is all the fuss about? A blackbird’s song at dawn, I’ve heard, things we’ve had to do without. Now the pear tree starts to sprout,

Sweeping leaves If you could rewind, and I’m not saying this would be easy, but if you could, then the leaves, which you, your back a question mark, carefully swept into a bronzed pile, would turn into a golden whirlpool and the dog would bark at them again, chase them in pointless circles, fail to catch them as they slowly wound upwards, unaware…

Sea Monkeys At barely eight Their strange world - Promised in a three-inch square: Primary yellows, neon pinks, aqueous blues Block-printed, gaudily seductive- Seemed real. They lived in a castle, Lazed happily on the seabed; Wore crowns, blew bubbles - All scales, fins, weird tails, And easy smiles. Buy us, the ad pleaded; We will be your bowl of happiness -