Issue 131

John Ashbery

‘This is my outfit. / Government spooks did the rest. Didn’t you know?’

Sean Borodale

‘To be honest, this is dark stuff; mud, tang / of bitter battery-tasting honey. The woods are in it.’

Paula Bohince

‘What sparrows come, / come briefly, briefly displacing / the nothingness.’

Eric Anderson

‘Wanting to get it all in, like / Xerxes tipping his army’s arrows / with saltpeter / so to ignite the Grecian sky.’

Issue 103

Carol Ann Duffy

‘Darlings, I write to you from the moon’

Anne Carson

‘hang up your blood cell phone mr white slaver’

Kazim Ali

‘Me always untorn and enslaved / Weird notions of gender and ground / Nothing but you between me and god.’

Issue 124

Rachael Boast

Issue 129

Mark Doty

‘an orange plastic basket of compost / down from the top of the garden – sweet dark, / fibrous rot, promising’

Issue 122

John Burnside

'the trees / are slender in the way that things / are almost, though not quite / absent'

Issue 130

Tishani Doshi

‘Rain at three splits the bed in half, / cracks at windows like horsemen blistering / through a century of hibernation.’

Diego Báez

‘But really, your disappearance / has never been a question of whether.’

Michael Dickman

‘A cloudless sky and I’m back / an ice-cold sky-blue rag / for my eyes’

Emily Berry

‘And I'm / cranking out oodles of love the way an old spaghetti machine / cranks out spaghetti.’