Tom Betteridge

‘held at the curve of the eye / for a dream of shared life’

Jill Bialosky

‘Sometimes we could not see / anything before us. That’s what it / required.’

Issue 118

Sophie Cabot Black

‘I can only do what is here. But you / Have an entire congregation of choice’

Issue 124

Rachael Boast

Issue 118

Paula Bohince

‘At thirty, I fled from my life / in a hailstorm and firestorm’

Paula Bohince

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

Ida Börjel

‘You know about my / emotional drinking, and my night walks and my / fragmented heart-to-heart conversations.’

Sean Borodale

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

Andrea Brady

‘When we’re close to weaning / ourselves history gives us its reasons / to return’

Issue 141

Dionne Brand

‘Now you are sounding like me, the clerk says. I am you, the author says.’

Victoria Adukwei Bulley

‘create a national holiday in your namelessness, in my head.’

Poems from the author’s debut collection Quiet.

John Burnside

‘Shoeboxes lined with eggs and empty / pomegranates drying in a bowl, / mousebones and wicker, chess pieces, muddled coats.’

John Burnside

‘I was marking a stack of essays / on Frank O’Hara / and each had a Wiki- / paragraph to say / who Genet was.’

Issue 122

John Burnside

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