Fiona Benson

‘I head down the path hoping she’ll come / but when I look back she’s gone and my own voice / snags at her name like barbed wire on skin.’

Issue 118

Paula Bohince

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

Issue 132

Rae Armantrout

An exciton consists / of the escaped negative / (electron) / and the positive hole / it left behind.

Gillian Clarke

‘Let’s do this again, ground the planes for a while and leave the runways to the racing hare.’

Issue 126

Fiona Benson

‘What would I give / to be one of those swimmers in all this snow, / swallowed by the cold and the night’s strange radiance?’

Issue 118

Sophie Cabot Black

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

Anne Carson

‘Funny to end up here you may think, in this line of work, did I back into it, well more or less.’

Issue 119

Simon Armitage

It’s too late now to start collecting football shirts,/bringing them back from trips abroad as souvenirs:

Kaddy Benyon

‘Sometimes I am so afraid my envy / will hack at your figs, strawberries, / or full-bellied beans, I dig my fists / into my pockets and nip myself.’

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.’