John Balaban

‘Her mother planted a garden in Manhattan. / In that garden is a tree. Some look on it and feel restored. / Others, when the wind lifts its leaves, want to scream.’

Michael Dickman

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

Ghassan Zaqtan

‘Nothing’s left to say between us / everything went / into the train that hid its whistle.’

Eric Anderson

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

Issue 122

John Burnside

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

Saïd Sayrafiezadeh

‘my apartment is neither over / nor under the sidewalk, / but both at once’

Issue 119

Jamie McKendrick

Lorraine Mariner

‘The psychiatrist’s wife / has a dress the colour / of that bottle of claret / you shouldn’t have drunk / last night.’

John Kinsella

‘What locked-away / state of unawareness, other life form, / brings desire to combust / out of rock exposed to flame’

Issue 120

Ben Lerner

‘My role in the slaughter doesn’t disqualify the beauty I find in all / forms of sheltered flame.’

Issue 120

Angela Carter

‘I believed I had defined the problem. / With which the picked skull had presented me.’

Issue 120

Kay Ryan

‘Reminding us / again that live things / can be flat.’

Issue 120

James Lasdun

‘I thought I’d do it while I still could.’