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Saturday Night

Lavinia Greenlaw

‘Do they dance for those creatures / whose unmade selves / come unbuttoning out of the dark?’

Accidental

Sadaf Halai

‘Of the 36 views of Fuji, this one is the strangest: / the great wave off Kanagawa, frozen and tempestuous, / both sound and silence.’

Fortunate It Is If Her Skirts Do Not Catch Fire

Amy Gerstler

‘I must remember god is not my private / secretary.’

Inheritance

Sadaf Halai

‘It made the sound of / a small balloon dropping.’

Black Against the Sky, the Giant Mothers

Selima Hill

‘Black against the sky the giant mothers / are whispering together in the moonlight’

Yakisoba

Hiromi Itō

‘Who connects with the next woman / With tens and hundreds and thousands of women.’

PK 754

Yasmeen Hameed

‘Tell me, what is this cry of pain in the air?’

Remembered Summer

Troy Jollimore

‘Our conversations faltered, the celestial musicians / took a break between sets, and all the little engines / we had so painstakingly gathered and constructed / lapsed into stillness for a few brief moments.’

The Door Was Open and the House Was Dark

Seamus Heaney

‘I called his name, although I knew / The answer this time would be silence / That kept me standing listening while it grew.’

Seen

Fanny Howe

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

Two Poems

Jack Gilbert

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

Cyan

Paul Farley

‘I’m holding out. / I’m blue in the face.’