Issue 100

Jamie McKendrick

‘greener / for an alien crop of hogweed higher / than us’

Rowan Ricardo Phillips

‘I once had had a thought / About a thought I once had had.’

Issue 2

David Katz

‘Ever notice the change that comes over / your gentle wife the minute she sets / foot in a grocery store?’

Paula Bohince

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

Issue 103

Carol Ann Duffy

‘Darlings, I write to you from the moon’

Amy Gerstler

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

Paul Farley

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

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,’