Dear Reader

When a body backfires, spits tar doesn’t work for you, take it off. Pack it with no light the shiniest ribbon, or it might whistle, start singing for escape. Now wait. Move away slowly, stop all clocks and listen − feel the mould, feel the surface of nothing. Know you’re safe. Take four glides and don’t look back open the door to outside, sail through, enjoy the release swing with it. --- Julie Stevens  writes poems that cover many themes, but often engages with the problems of disability.  She is widely published in places such as  Ink Sweat & Tears ,  Fly on the Wall Press  and  Acropolis Journal .  She has two published pamphlets:  Quicksand  (Dreich, 2020) and a Stickleback  Balancing Act  (The Hedgehog Poetry Press, 2021).  Her next collection  Step into the Dark  will be published by The Hedgehog Poetry Press later this year.  www.jumpingjulespoetry.com

Funny how neither of us chose to mention  the mizzle lightly spritzing our shoulders as we queued for a train long delayed by - so the Tannoy explained - leaves on the rails.  I thought better of drawing attention  to the mascara trails inching southwards, and you politely paid no heed to my fringe,  serrated as a split seam and pasted  to my forehead by the unyielding rain.  I regaled the air, by now thick and grey,  with tales of my inane day job while you chatted about your neurotic dog then slyly put up your umbrella: cherry red  with a wooden handle shaped like a duck’s head.  You winced as the wind blew it inside out - canopy clapping in the gale like a sail,  rib tape snapping and runners splintering -  as I struggled to remain upright while  the squall howled the loose words from our mouths. --- Ross Thompson is a writer and Arts Council award recipient from Bangor, Northern Ireland. His debut poetry collection Threadin...

"I'm still not sure when my want is enough, how to know I won't get bored." - Pink Coat The above couplet is taken from Demi Anter's Write Bloody collection, Small Machine . I read it aloud to a friend, across twin beds in a hotel room, and we both lay there in silence for a second or two before my friend eventually said, 'Oh my god.' It's been weeks, and I'm still thinking about that couplet - and if that isn't the sign of impactful writing, then I don't know what is.  Small Machine  is Anter's debut collection, though it reads with the style and polish of an experienced poet from the start. In many ways, the work reads as a love letter to Berlin (among other things), which features heavily throughout. Evidently inspired by the author's time there - Anter spent five years living in Berlin before moving back to London - there is a delicious use of psycho-geography here as Anter discusses the feelings and mental connections that root...

Before you know it you're dead and then you   move on from there, according to the Good Book, to Heaven to get your immortal  soul judged but I could be wrong, that could be just the gospel according to our church and Sunday School and sometimes I think that they don't want us ten-year-olds to read too much religion or we'll become a lot less religious but that's what grownups do, they not only lose their innocence but want their kids to lose theirs, too, it's power's at stake more than what's right and when we hold a carwash to raise cash it's the deacons who drive through first and never pay--I hope they all go to Hell with the windows open.

I’m older now. More winters have clawed my bones than Beowulf or Hrothgar ever weathered. When they speak of me, if they speak of me at all, little boys snicker and point:  dragon-raiser, cup-pincher! I’m that old story. Before the ashes were cool they’d whizzed up a new hall –bone-strong, iron-belted, just like the last one– but they don’t see the shadow  of my dragon crackling in the  hearth, hissing up the chimney. They say my mind wanders, but in truth I send it out  into the forest to ask the trees if I did right in my youth. When it returns, pilgrim-swift, bringing talk of sisterlands, of raven goddesses and dragon-queens, I am certain. I couldn’t have done anything else. --- Laura Varnam is the Lecturer in Old and Middle English Literature at University College, Oxford. Her poetry is inspired by the medieval texts that she teaches and her poems have been published in Acropolis Journal, Atrium, Crow of Minerva, Dreich, Green Ink Poetry, Ink Sweat & Tears, T...

Sage ( Salvia officinalis )  From salveo : ‘I am well’ Not statement, but prayer.           Suck the poison from my marrow,                        purify with the wisdom                      that this has all been lived before. Betony ( Stachys officinalis ) To cure chilly need        Your side of the bed, greater than emptiness –           somehow     emitting  your  absence. Comfrey ( Symphytum officinale )                      Also known as ‘Boneset’ The removal of a demon     will inevitably cause        ...

You ask me how I recognise the first sky of summer: I don’t know, I use the term to satisfy an obsession   with detecting the season’s start. Each day we explain it away,  whether because of an errant shower that flashes through in late afternoon or a wind, measured as more than a puff on the Beaufort Scale. By September the waiting will be over and we will know that summer has passed, hot, sunny days, already forgotten, another victim of hazy childhood memories.   --- A past winner of the Trocaire/Poetry Ireland and Poems for Patience competitions, he published his debut collection, ‘Growing Up in Colour’, with Doire Press in 2018. His poems have been nominated for Pushcart, Forward and Best of the Net prizes and his Pushcart-nominated poem,  ‘The Lion Tamer Dreams of Office Work’, was the title poem of an anthology published by Hibernian Writers in 2015. He is  curator of the Irish Centre for Poetry Studies site.