Sharmistha Mohanty

‘And the evening wind from over the sea makes that threadbare self billow like a tattered sail, all that resisted it now become the air on which it rises.’

Issue 132

Rae Armantrout

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

Les Murray

‘Rice in bowl with chopsticks / denotes food. Figure 1 lying prone equals other.’

Jack Gilbert

‘Loneliness is the mother’s milk of America. / The heart is a foreign country whose language none / of us is good at. ’

John Burnside

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

Greg Alan Brownderville & Zach Savich

‘Time trapped me in this canyon, this dark jar — / jabbed holes in the sky to spare me light and air.’

Issue 106

Fanny Howe

‘Every cupboard is old, / every glass and cup / wiped clean.’

Megan Levad

‘Out of the Zeitgeist / and onto the party barge.’

Jynne Martin

‘It is the hour for farewells. It is the hour.’

Issue 128

Mary Ruefle

‘Red sadness never appears sad . . . it appears in flashes of passion, anger, fear, inspiration and courage, in dark unsellable visions; it is an upside down penny concealed beneath a tea cosy.’

Issue 114

Juan Felipe Herrera

Ben Okri

‘On a night when my soul was damp / I found in the street a dark lamp. / The moon was cold and green, / The sky had a sinister sheen’

Helen Mort

‘Stall here and let the world / go past, the way / the world well might / on heather-coloured days like this,’

Silvina Ocampo

‘Oh, nothing, nothing is mine. / I am like the reflections of a gloomy lake / or the echo of voices at the bottom of a blue / well when it has rained.’