2025

 

 

NOVEMBER

 

 

Hua Ai, Phil Kirby, Celia Lawren, Martina Maria Mancassola, Gabrielle Munslow,

Bethany Pope, Hannah Stone, Rowan Tate, Sarah White.

 

 

 

 

 

HUA AI

 

Still Lovesick

 

Sunlight backs out of the courtyard, slowly,

with pauses that sound like sobs.

 

On the stove the clay pot mutters.

Bitter steam rises,

herb scent striking the thin shield of her body.

 

She gathers herself on the stone,

a single leaf making its own shade.

Inside her a blade has curled.

She strokes it flatter,

trying to pare away a silver of old love.

 

Each winter the stitched sickness opens.

These roots warm the limbs and hush the noise,

yet the cause sits deeper than the brew.

 

Still, by fragrance she names them all,

twelve leaves and barks and seeds.

From the circle she chooses 当归, Danggui,

its name speaking of return,

and lets it slip 

into the pile of last year’s leaves.

 

Hua Ai (also published as Nikolina) is a Shanghai-born, London-based ESL writer whose work spans prose poetry and fiction. Her writing—bridging Chinese imagistic intensity, Slavic gravitas, and English restraint—has appeared in journals across five continents. A Best of the Net nominee and multiple international award recipient, she is releasing her debut UK chapbook with Carcazan Publishing.

 

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PHIL KIRBY

 

The Light Of The World

(a ghazal)

 

Let there be stars, their distant light

shining in the absence of that light.

 

And let there be a spin, an orbit,

a chance to see the lifting of light,

 

the bent horizon as it blushes for

recurring dreams, exposed to the light.

 

Here’s a dream of dark, entangled

ways, of hoping to see the light;

 

another of the maelstrom-sea , one

beam across raw waves a saving light.

 

And see the mariner’s burden: how

there seems no way of making light –

 

or sense – of why, as the world revolves,

each voyage west resolves in half-light.

 

Phil Kirby’s collections are Watermarks, The Third History and a chapbook, Towards A Theory of Being Human. Work also recently appeared in Sampler Two from Mariscat Press. Poems in Acumen, Poetry Birmingham, Poetry Ireland, Stand, amongst others. Writing as P.K. Kirby, a teen novella, Hidden Depths, is on Kindle.

 

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CELIA LAWREN

 

Metaphysical questions posed to my newborn granddaughter

for Frankie

 

While you still taste stars…

 

Do you float like dreams in a world where dreams are reality?

Are you in a twin galaxy linked by a silver thread?

 

Do you feel like the shearing of ice from its sheet?

Or are you enveloped in Earth’s deep unifying Om?

 

If you only know brine and breath as one, does the breath of air

   burn your throat?

Does the song of creation still bubble through your veins?

 

Are you sparkling Venus that hangs from the crescent moon

   outside the hospital window?

Or a handful of salt offered as a covenant with humanity?

 

Are you the first thought of god?

Or is your god the cord that nourished you?

 

Will you remember me by my voice cooing these questions?

Or are your memories more like birdsong at the end of day?

 

I want to know these things because I can’t remember.

 

Celia Lawren is the author of the poetry chapbook, Among Dead Things, a chronicle of tragedy and resilience, published by Finishing Line Press. She is the winner of the 2021 Poetry Prize awarded by the Knoxville Writers Guild. Her poems have been published in Catamaran, Caesura, Tule Review, She Speaks: An Anthology of Women of Appalachia, 2021-22, and Colossus: Freedom: An Anthology of Voices Across the Carceral Wasteland 2022. Lawren resides in Knoxville, Tennessee after living many years in the San Francisco Bay Area.           

 

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JOSEPH LONG

 

For all the daughters (that stick around)

 

In an effort to know, she jemmies me

from my wing back and I am bored a little more,

sooner each day. But she gets me out. Out

 

to the estuary, to beat the bounds,

to be bodied by sheet rock breeze

when day shakes out its hair. Where we become cordon

 

in the kettling winds, things fall from my hands

(so I’m told) – but not hers; the eternal daughter.

She clasps her Father like I clasp rail

 

as we make old talk and watch the rival county

across an estuary veiled in a gauze

of field hospitals. Me, her and the sandpiper

 

who pricks the silt sutures which snake out to the pale.

Where timid flashes of dust cart, vaulting carks of crow

serve as a reminder and I hide big water –

 

tell her that I am nearing vespertine,

and civil twilight, but must remain

to see our alchemy through. Yet

 

for all the parchment and lead spent

I have nothing to offer her, my heir

but my clean name to take into her middle eight.

 

I tell her; I am Prospero, Hokusai, Dee

and she; she is the eternal daughter.

My Miranda, Katherine, my Katsushika.

 

My championship season and ever present

in bone damp days; where she shall remain

until my marrow wonders aloud, to no one.

 

Joseph Long lives and works on the Medway as a father and Engineer, writing poetry between shifts. He has a passion for works which reflect working class life & culture and his main influences are John Cooper Clarke, Christopher Reid, John Burnside, Seamus Heaney, Ian Hamilton & Douglas Dunn. Joseph has been published by Stand, The Dawntreader (Indigo Dreams), Blackbox Manifold, Snakeskin Poetry, Littoral and shortlisted for the Bridport Prize for Poetry in 2025.

 

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MARTINA MARIA MANCASSOLA

 

The Sky Draws the Curtains

 

The sky draws the curtains

as if ashamed

of its nakedness,

then starts to shout

like my mother

when I came home with a D in physics.

 

It opens its mouth

and hits a middle C,

like a tenor

contemptuous of silence.

 

It splits the city in two,

and the hearts of the weak.

Windows queue up

with their drums—

boom-boom, the rain

shatters on the panes;

 

its smell—traveller’s perfume—

is the new interpreter,

the voice the desperate need

to believe that

elsewhere

there is sun.

 

Then it all ends.

The curtain falls.

Applause.

Translated from Italian by Martina Maria Mancassola.

 

Martina Maria Mancassola (1992) is an Italian poet and therapeutic-writing facilitator. Author of Quando il mattino apre gli occhi (Eretica Edizioni, 2025). Her work appears in Altrove, Poeti Oggi, and is forthcoming in the Journal of Italian Translation(NYC, Nov 2025). She lives in Verona.

 

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GABRIELLE MUNSLOW

 

Adam’s Ale

the old name for water, the first drink, the simplest thirst.

 

Bougainvillea, thorn-armored bloom,

plankton drifting—algae, crustaceans—

a hidden kingdom in an inland basin,

non-oceanic water breathing its own tides.

 

I splash my face in the reservoir,

Adam’s ale cooling my skin,

while light bends and scatters—

I am refracted,

a prism made of flesh and ache,

splintering into the many rays of sun.

 

I sit beneath an arboreal sky,

ceiling woven from foliage and verdure,

cathedral of green where shadows

keep their soft liturgy.

 

Saudade gnaws the marrow of light,

and my sunlit heart caves inward.

I hunger for your presence,

for the echo of your breath in the leaves.

 

If the day could linger—

just one more turn of the earth—

I would not ask for forever.

 

But even plankton drift toward dark,

their glow extinguished in the basin’s hush;

so too my heart, without your light.

 

The Temporary Arrangement of Stardust Cosplaying as the Cosmos

 

I am not boring.
Every atom in me has a history far older than the Earth itself.
I am not just alive;
I’m an ancient constellation
briefly taking human form.

 

I am the flutter of a baby’s eyelash.
The hint of petrichor—
a combination of plant oils and a chemical called geosmin,
produced by bacteria in the soil.
When rain falls on dry earth,
it releases these compounds into the air—
and I am that first breath you take when it happens.

 

I am Mesopotamia.
I am the 6th to 5th millennium BC.
I am Ancient Egypt,
the Indus Valley Civilization,
and I lived in the Yellow River valley in China
before I existed as me.

 

I have been carbon in a dinosaur’s rib,
salt in a prehistoric sea,
iron in the blood of a mammoth’s heart.
I have cycled through volcanoes and orchids,
coiled in the DNA of wolves and women.
I am a temporary arrangement of stardust—
and still,
I worry about my weight and parking tickets

 

I am cosplaying as the cosmos.
My eyes are deep pools of stars,
my body a galaxy in passing.
One day my atoms will scatter again—
but for now,
they have chosen to be me.

 

Gabrielle Munslow is a UK poet whose work appears in Neon, Origami, Bristol Noir, The Ekphrastic Review, and NHS News, among others. She balances her nursing career with a growing body of lyric and narrative poetry, often exploring memory, myth, and resilience.

 

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BETHANY POPE

 

A Visit to a Mountain Shrine

 

Hot scrim of fine, white dust, but at least the stench is gone1

A steaming puddle of vomit, buried on the flank of one of the Longhu Mountains.2

Reeling, from the heat and my own incipient drunkenness, and drowning in the mystic,

Spectral beauty of escarpments buried in the smoky mist (America

Holds no secrets like these) I pick up my son. We're heading to a Taoist temple on the river,

Perched high above the water, on a narrow cliff. A set of worn, marble stairs leads up,

Unwinding from the bank to the carved gates, shrines hidden by them. This land is wet from

Rain, and the ancient soil exhales mist. I'm still dizzy from drinking the

Ill-advised coconut (purchased from a roadside hawker) but you won't carry our son,

Finding him, at two, too heavy, so I stagger upwards with him, following The Way. Hot,

Yearning for water, I stumble off the path and into a cave — a cool shrine to Magu.3 Her nails Inserted into the tender skin of some pilgrim’s offering of fruit, left behind on their hajj. Now I kneel in the mud at her stone feet, asking a blessing, or maybe just faith. You

Groan, swatting mosquitos, impatient to journey up to where the tourists wait.

 

 

1 The appearance of the Lapis at the end of the second stage is thus described. It was essential that all moisture be boiled away in order for the transformation to proceed.

2 Dragon-Tiger mountain was the birthplace of Taoism.

3 A Taoist goddess, associated with the Elixir of Life, and protector of infants, mothers, and children. She is depicted as a young woman, dressed in hemp leaves, with long, birdlike fingernails.

 

Bethany W Pope has won many literary awards and published several novels and collections of poetry. Nicholas Lezard, writing for The Guardian, described Bethany’s latest collection as 'poetry as salvation'.....'This harrowing collection drawn from a youth spent in an orphanage delights in language as a place of private escape.' Bethany has recently returned to the UK after spending seven years teaching in China. 

 

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HANNAH STONE

 

Armistice remembrance, Waitrose.

 

When the tannoy sounded, everyone froze,

like the moment in a pantomime

before the transformation scene;

hands suspended in the act of tapping payment;

packets hovering between shelf and trolley.

Yet still the escalator delivered bodies

from the underworld, warning:

‘Caution! You are approaching the end of the conveyor!’

 

When the coffee queue reanimates,

a youth in half-mast jeans enquires

‘what was that two minutes silence for?’

There’s a question for those khaki-clad lads

holding a final breath in the moment

between explosion and impact.

 

Hannah Stone is the author of Lodestone (Stairwell Books, 2016), Missing Miles (Indigo Dreams Publishing, 2017), Swn y Morloi (Maytree Press, 2019) and several collaborations, including Fit to Bust with Pamela Scobie (Runcible Spoon, 2020). She convenes the poets/composers forum for Leeds Leider, curates Nowt but Verse for Leeds Library, is poet theologian in Virtual Residence for Leeds Church Institute and editor of the literary journal Dream Catcher. Contact her on hannahstone14@hotmail.com for readings, workshops or book purchases.

 

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ROWAN TATE

 

Gara de Nord

 

A woman with two pink plastic bags

stills in the middle of the platform,

as if time briefly forgot

to carry her forward.

 

The crowd

spills around her

like water around a stone.

 

One of the bags tears slightly,

stretched too thin.

She shifts her weight

like something small inside her

made a different decision.

 

I watch the next train arrive

and think about missing it

on purpose.

 

Before the World Arrives When Light Learns the Floorplan

 

        Fog slips its milk

through the hinge of morning—

        that narrow hour

when nothing has quite begun.

 

        Streetlights still lit,

unnecessary, left propped up

        like hands raised

after the question’s been answered.

 

        The kitchen kettle hisses

its small argument. This hinge of quiet:

        bread thawing

on the counter, day pools,

 

        the butter softens.

The knives rest cold in their drawer.

        I sip what’s warm

and wait to be opened.

 

Rowan Tate is a Romanian creative and curator of beauty. Her writing appears in the Stinging Fly, the Shore, Josephine Quarterly, and Meniscus Literary Journal, among others. She reads nonfiction nature books, the backs of shampoo bottles, and sometimes minds. 

 

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SARAH WHITE

 

Decameron

 

Boccaccio hoped his book

would be read by lovely women alone in their beds.

Each of his tales would leap like a cat

onto a lady’s coverlet, then twist this way and that

to invite her caresses on its belly and back.

 

Like the story on Day 2 of Paganino da Monaco,

a pirate so attractive and sexually active

that the young bride he steals,

 “rescued” by her elderly husband, chooses

to stay with Paganino on his illegal ship. 

 

Lately, the work of a poet sweet

on me, as I on him, has been waiting

on my nightstand.

Any minute now, a poem may land

on my covers and begin to purr.

 

In Syria

 

The prison was so dark

that God couldn’t see

what was happening there,

 

            couldn’t see the mold

            on the half-cup of meal

            the prisoners got to eat each day,

            couldn’t see Ahmed seated in a chair

            on a platform, a cord around his wasted

neck, couldn’t see the chair

            kicked from under him so he swung

            side to side until a guard pulled him down

            and just before his neck snapped

 

he whispered “God couldn’t see what

was happening here but soon I will meet

Him and tell him what you did.”
 

Sarah White's most recent book is a memoir, The Poem Has Reasons: a Story of Far Love (Dos Madres, 2022). She lives in a retirement community in Western Massachusetts,

 

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