2026

 

 

FEBRUARY

 

 

Clive Donovan, Tom Kelly, Andy Humphrey, Fish Lu, Dana Holley Maloney, Bruach Mhor, Kate Noakes, Fred Pollack, Fiona Sincliar, Rachel Wild.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

CLIVE DONOVAN

 

Chains

 

Those early precious flexi-links drove buckets back and forth

to irrigate the terraces above the plains:

Egypt...China...Roma...with peaceful metal ropes got rich...

Who first in bondage groaned and rattled chains, we cannot know,

but slighter ones of gold were forged to decorate the chests

of top gentlemen and wives

—reminder of the force by which they ruled.

Then, that great time hopper, Da Vinci, sketches pictures

of a classic leaf chain with pins and plates,

centuries before bicycles.

 

Meanwhile, as we danced the brutal jig of Time,

cog chains turned machinery like looms and elevators,

thus kick-starting the industrial revolution,

which in turn exploited thousands of female chainmakers,

whose craft, at penny a yard, helped transport whole fleets of slaves.

Soundly welded in the Shires of the Black Country;

impossible to break with feeble hands, those iron bonds.

Far, far from rich and delicate gold and silver were they

—yet so linked, so black and bleakly linked,

so supple in their solid linkage.

 

Archaeologists in Crete

 

I have re-entered a world of very real stone:

A city of rocks jointed

As if by sweating giants

And as I walk, admiring logical streets,

 

I see how copper and gold is brought by ships to be shaped,

Hammered and granulated;

Factories spin clay, cut gems,

The writers carve their ideograms.

 

A quiet ghetto of mansions hoards light,

Courtyards hide where bare-breasted girls play

And mirror-pools invite small votive acts

 – A nod to the Goddess – a libation.

 

It has all tumbled down now, grass has grown

To smother the slab-paved streets.

Frescoes of ecstatic dance and feast have crumbled.

Olive trees, with strangling roots, distort.

 

We scrape it all off, our delicate trowels

Burrow into ancient grit

Where lodge compressed the drifted flakes of evidence.

We collate numerous bucket-loads

 

To see how they lived;

Those short, brown, energetic Minoans,

Determined to rebuild after each tragical earthquake;

Not giants at all, it seems, but dauntless

 

And, for a brilliant age, stubbornly enduring,

With their daring, triumphant bull-leapers

And conical cups that had to be held unspilled

Even as the buildings shook.

 

Clive Donovan has three poetry collections, The Taste of Glass [Cinnamon Press 2021], Wound Up With Love [Lapwing 2022] and Movement of People [Dempsey&Windle 2024] and is published in many magazines including Acumen, Crannog, Popshot, Prole, Stand and The Lake. He was a Pushcart and Forward Prize nominee for 2022’s best individual poems.

 

Back to POETRY ARCHIVE

 

ANDY HUMPHREY

 

Conchology for Beginners

 

The book was very clear

this wasn’t the way to do it.

Each specimen needs

its label, its where and when.

There was no scientific value

in boyish dredging

across acres of wet Welsh shingle,

cramming the pockets

of a sodden blue cagoule.

Limpets, topshells, tellins. Winkles

the colour of holiday breakfasts:

ketchup, egg yolk, bacon.

 

Nearly forty years later

those shoe-box treasures

wash up again: the flotsam

of a forgotten cupboard, an empty loft.

Mussels, dog whelks,

razor-shells

higgledy-piggledy,

out of context

and miles from where they belong.

They smell of chalk and Germolene.

 

I picture myself

walking those shores

shoe-box in hand,

briny indents in my wake.

With each step I’ll choose a shell

putting each one back

in the place that seems most natural.

I’ll follow that wrack-strewn tideline –

Ty Goch, Cow Cove, Abersoch sands –

to the peninsula’s end.

Offer my empty box

to the grateful sea.

 

Watch it soak.

Sink. Slide under.

 

Litanies, October 1982

 

The angel of the Lord

declared unto Mary

                                      Those days were bounded

                                      in ritual:

                                      League division one:

                                      Arsenal 2, West Bromwich Albion nil

and she conceived

by the Holy Ghost.

                                      the final whistle,

                                      the twelve o’clock bell,

                                      Aston Villa 3, Watford nil

Behold the handmaid

of the Lord.

                                      standing to recite the prayer

                                      while a man in black presided,

                                      Coventry City 1, Notts County nil

Be it done unto me

according to Thy Word.

                                      altar-marble austere. Later,

                                      homework, bed. Saturdays

                                      Liverpool nil, Manchester United nil

And the Word was made flesh

and dwelt among us.

                                      the lights of the Mersey Tunnel,

                                      the dock road smells, my Nan’s.

                                      Luton Town versus Ipswich Town

                                      is a late kick-off

Pray for us,

o Holy Mother of God,

                                      Dad, tired from I didn’t

                                      know what, and half asleep

                                      Norwich City nil, Tottenham Hotspur nil

that we may be made worthy

of the promises of Christ.

                                      in Nan’s armchair

                                      until the pools news

                                      Nottingham Forest 1, Birmingham City 1

Pour forth, we beseech thee,

o Lord, thy grace into our hearts

                                      and never enough

                                      score draws.

                                      Stoke City 3, Brighton & Hove Albion nil

that we, to whom the incarnation

of Christ thy Son was made known

by the message of an angel

                                      Sundays were Mass,

                                      and roasts, and baths,

                                      Swansea City nil, Everton 3

may by His passion and cross

                                      uneasy sleep until

                                      the Monday-morning rush:

                                      League Division 4

                                      Chester City 1, Mansfield Town 3

be brought to the glory

of His resurrection

                                      cereal, toast and tea, brush teeth,

                                      cheese butties for later,

                                      Tranmere Rovers 1, Peterborough United nil

through the same Christ

our Lord. Amen.

                                      and the Angelus-bell

                                      ringing again.

                                      York City 1, Wimbledon 4

 

Andy Humphrey has published two collections of original poetry, A Long Way to Fall (Lapwing Press, ISBN 978-1-909252-40-0, 2013) and Satires (Stairwell Books, ISBN 978-1-939269-16-4, 2015). He lives in York and works as a solicitor. https://www.writeoutloud.net/profiles/andyhumphrey.

 

Back to POETRY ARCHIVE

 

TOM KELLY

 

I am that boy

 

at 17, inadequate, uncertain, dragging cheap shoes to a job,

demanding nothing but my time. For too many years I ordered nuts, bolts,

cement, not necessarily on the same order:

feint lines filled with names and numbers.

 

I see myself sitting among strangers,
even though close family they are miles away.
There’s too much sock showing in short trousers,
revealing everything and still no glasses
to make anything clearer.
Hear them talking: it is so utterly lost on me.

Looking at this photo a lifetime later,
knowing the years before I see anything.

I blotted mini-ink bubbles, spreading blue-black blood.

The door beside me shivered draughts,

lasting until the harsh ceiling lights came painfully back on.

These were my days in a shirt, tired turned-up collar, battered jacket
at the Mercantile Dry Dock, Jarrow.

 

 I knew this was work after a month or so.

At first it was like school,

I thought it would soon pass. I was wrong.

Twenty-odd years of jobs along the river,

breaking the frost,

hands deep inside me pockets.

 

Don’t be sorry for him. I am not certain how he really feels.

How is he on this day in 1964? All I do know is I am that boy.

 

Tom Kelly is a Jarrow-born writer now living happily further up the Tyne at Blaydon. He has written many plays and musicals. His fourteenth collection of poems and prose These Are My Bounds will be published in March 2026 once again by Red Squirrel Press.

 

Back to POETRY ARCHIVE

 

FISH LU (鲁鱼)

            Translated by Xi Nan (西楠)

 

Fire Hydrant

 

47. 

 

A red fire hydrant

in a rainy day—

the red looks showier

I know this wording

is very vulgar but

before finding a better and

more accurate wording

I can only say

a red fire hydrant

in a rainy day—

the red looks showier

 

92. 

 

To move a snail that is in the middle

of a road

onto the concrete floor beside the grass

or on top of a red fire hydrant

in the grass

It just rained

the black asphalt road

and the fire hydrant are both very wet

I didn't do it out of compassion

This is just a performance art of

changing a snail's destiny

 

Fish Lu (鲁鱼) is a Chinese poet born in Henan. He practiced medicine for twenty years while simultaneously dedicating himself to experimental poetry. His work is known for skillfully uncovering and restoring poetic resonance from the mundane and trivial aspects of daily life. The author of numerous collections, he currently lives in the United Kingdom.

 

Xi Nan (西楠) is a writer, journalist, and translator. Her work focuses on cross-linguistic literary creation in English, Spanish, and Chinese. Her style blends tradition and modernity, exploring the intersections of memory, the body, and displacement.

 

Back to POETRY ARCHIVE

 

DANA HOLLEY MALONEY

 

Sign Painter

 

Near the Métro stop Gare Saint-Lazare, some American girls I knew,

students like me, lived beside their madame in an adjoining apartment

and kept boxed milk outside the window in winter, as Parisians had done

 

for decades. The three of them cuddled like sisters on single beds

to fend off the cold and crossed the hall at dinner for some casual French

conversation and laughter with the mother and her daughter.

 

On this same block, the sign painter kept his shop. We watched him

in the window or on the sidewalk when it was warm. Whenever

we went by, he was at work, making words. Meditative and meticulous

 

in his lines, his articulation of the alphabet, each shape enunciated

with his brushes. While we tried to form more perfect French vowels

with our mouths, our accents fell forever short of his exactitude.

 

We studied beauty inside the museums and the monuments but learned

the most about a life well lived from him, a man whose métier was his art.

 

Easter Sunday

 

Too much the hypocrite for Mass today,

I thought all morning about death and resurrection,

how we stand at the intersection of the two.

In the garden yesterday, I raked away the old growth

to make way for daffodils just starting to rise,

found green around the roots of old annuals

that had survived the winter. I only needed

to cut what had withered. What’s so hard to imagine

then? The old plants, once on the compost heap,

will feed the new year’s growth, will be alive inside

what will return. Oddly, my faith’s intact, even

without walking through the oaken doors of our old

church, where it was dark inside and we passed

as through a garden into another fragrant state.

 

Dana Holley Maloney is a native New Jerseyan who lives and writes in midcoast Maine. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Tar River Poetry, Pine Hills Review, Paterson Literary Review, Chiron Review, and elsewhere. She teaches English at Montclair State University. More at danamaloney.com.  

 

Back to POETRY ARCHIVE

 

BRUACH MHOR

 

After Song

 

The last to remember us

might be a puzzled bluetit, 

pausing on an empty feeder,

briefly moored by the thought:

something happened here.

 

Eventually, somewhere on Coll,

a gang of starlings may,

after a few generations,

stop their imitation of the sound

of a two-stroke engine,

 

losing the sense of purpose,

no longer landing on its rusting frame

for the congregation song,

like villagers no longer turning up

to dance around the standing stones.

 

Bruach Mhor is a fan of sea slugs. His poems have appeared in such places as Gutter, Causeway, Dream Catcher, The Journal, Black Box Manifold, The Interpreter's House, The Lake.

 

Back to POETRY ARCHIVE

 

KATE NOAKES

 

Outrunning jackals

 

I fancy the punk quill plumage

of the all-legs Secretary bird,

but obviously this won’t do

in the office or at clients.

No-one would take me remotely

seriously, and its strut is not

the firm’s image. Hence

the lunchtime seminar on how

to dress for professional life –

women only need attend.

 

No dangly earrings or jangly

bracelets, and, of course,

you must wear a grey suit,

no matter your shape.

You’re meant to be tailored

as much like a man as possible.

Don’t apply too much make up.

Reconsider those painted nails.

If on Reception, do the opposite,

and you must have heels.

 

Under my Jaeger disguise I have

a vest of fluffed feathers. My skill

to strike a snake with one stomp

and clasp of my talons, one swift

blow from my stab-bill, has not

evaded me. I am raptor still.

 

The title comes from a Xhosa folk tale on the great intelligence of the Secretary bird.

 

Kate Noakes has published ten books of poetry and one of non-fiction. Sublime Lungs will be published by Two Rivers Press in April 2026, and a pamphlet, Bog Queens is due from Green Bottle Press in June 2026. Kate moved from London to Bristol in 2024 where she is one third of the poetry performance group, Braid.

 

Back to POETRY ARCHIVE

 

FRED POLLACK

 

Romance and Mystery

 

Mother, somewhat under

a century ago, is reading

an article in the Saturday Review

or perhaps the New Masses clarifying

Einstein. Yet why should she

be doing this? The kids she’ll

soon face are young and she

must teach them cursive and arithmetic,

not that stuff. Well, she thought

she should know. It’s hot

in the park. The breadline

on the next block slowly approaches

the Polish church. Either magazine

assures her that Hitler’s

brutalities as yet are greater

towards Communists than Jews.

At the speed of light, mass becomes infinite.

But what can that possibly mean?

She imagines herself skimpily,

futuristically dressed in some

Flash Gordon vehicle, and she and

the vehicle, moving impossibly fast,

swelling. At the edges

of the fantasy, before, aghast,

she shuts it down, it

squeezes aside her father, mother,

sisters, brothers, grandmother and

the three men who are interested

in her. Two are poets.

One is in love with himself:

he keeps half-written poems in

his typewriter, you see them when you enter

his flat. The second is in love with her,

but the Party wants him to move back

to St. Paul. She wonders what, in Freudian terms,

the drowsy vision meant.

Walks over to a stone

drinking fountain, moistens a hankie,

wipes her brow. The breadline progresses.

Kids from that block used to beat her up

when she was a kid because she

killed Christ. She remembers how

afraid she was of them. They were fear itself.

 

Fred Pollack, author of The Adventure, Happiness (Story Line Press; the former reissued 2022 by Red Hen Press), A Poverty of Words (Prolific Press, 2015), Landscape with Mutant (Smokestack Books, UK, 2018), The Beautiful Losses (Better Than Starbucks Books, 2023), and The Liberator (Survision Books, Ireland, 2024). Many other poems in print and online journals. Website: www.frederickpollack.com

 

Back to POETRY ARCHIVE

 

FIONA SINCLAIR

 

A sign of the times 

 

Eschewing shop doors fragrant with piss,

on monopoly board street names,

potential has been spotted 

in concrete scrub, size of a double grave.

Two small domed tents have,

tidied themselves into the plot

exactly filled its contours, as if by design.

Only neighbours’ hospitals and office blocks 

so footfall blind to everything except 

email and cancer’s imperative . 

 

As to the structure’s residents,

single or double occupancy, 

they are tight lipped,

nocturnal perhaps, evading detection

like coy animals, their comings and goings caught

possibly on CCTV cameras.

Significantly no makeshift appeal for pocket or purse dregs,

preferring instead to grow roots that drill down

through the concrete fast as Pampas.

Evinced by a small handmade sign, 

reminiscent of those fashioned for the fallen.

‘This is my world’ accosts the observer

like an art installation 

with its multiple meanings-

 

Fiona Sinclair has had several collections published by small presses in the UK. The most recent is Dining with the dead published by Erbacce Press Liverpool,

 

Back to POETRY ARCHIVE

 

RACHEL WILD

 

Paper

 

catches me

I’ve swum in paper

used it as a bandage

a shrink.

My computer screen blinks

nothing to say

but paper wraps me in its

gold,

reminds me of

salty food.

Paper travels hard,

I don’t leave paper

behind

I have multitudes

of pages,

Stacks, bricks,

colour coded (once)

books filled

with handwriting

some chaotic,

the occasional paragraph

a gift.

Lists of days,

what I did, what we did,

how I felt at home

with my girls

a kind of ecstasy

mushrooming

from the floorboards.

 

I could cut the spines

of my books

use them to paper

the walls.

Imagine,

a time might come

when we burn books

for warmth,

when the web

has crashed

and kindness has

been vanquished

 

Rachel Wild is based in London. Her writing is published in The Honest Ulsterman, Ellipsis Zine, Ink, Sweat and Tears, Virtual Zine, Versification and elsewhere. She is an editor at The Forge Literary Magazine and is addicted to reading.

 

Back to POETRY ARCHIVE