John Bartlett, Awake at 3 a.m.

I lie Down

At night I lie down

and dream of love,

wrapped tight

in the muscled arms of men.

On crowded railway platforms

men with olive skin

smile at me with green eyes.

In low-lit back streets

men in linen suits

pass me messages,

written on café napkins,

stained with red wine

or is it blood?

A man with hair alive

like electric snakes

passes close to me,

touches my elbow, then

stands in a doorway waiting,

his breath on my neck.

Men stamped with tattoos

of skulls and knives

whisper in my ear words

that can never be understood.

Love is a perilous country.

Innuendo lurks everywhere.

I still remember the orange sunlight

scorched in strips across white sheets

and your limbs arranged

an impassable mountain range,

the humid air carrying promises

of kisses more articulate than words

Each night I lie down expecting.

Further details

Neil Fulwood, Service Cancelled

Symptom

Drunk and in charge

of an iPad: the only symptom

you exhibited during the quarantine.

the maudlin Facebook posts,

the middle-aged embarrassment

you made of yourself on TikTok.

The things you ordered online.

The delivery vans growling to a stop,

the rat-a-tat-tat door knocks,

the parcels left on the welcome mat

and you raising a puzzled hand

to another retreating driver,

wondering

what the hell you bought this time.

Further details

Julie Maclean, Mirage: a journey into the red heart

String Theory in the Outback

from my rooftop cot

engines of a plane drawl north

breaking the loneliness

of constellations

my own separations

and connections

I hear sounds about

the tent       a dingo

trying her luck

and when I go to piss

a salt bush shivers

but as soon as I disappear

under canvas again

she is back

searching for crumbs

         random scatterings

like black holes

         across the cosmos

Further details

Sally Naker, Kindness in Winter

Saying Goodbye

If my heart arrests, let it keep arresting.

I kept thinking of your willed words

as I walked one last time that spring  

to your summerhouse. Birds

hopped and sang in the thickets on either side

of Veery Lane. The green

world trembled so bright I cried.

At the end of the long lane

the small, screened-in wood

house stood. Something fluttered inside it

like a large moth, or could

it be a bird, I thought

as I came closer. I saw then—

its nervous movement through the screen—

a little brown house wren.

I propped the door open between

the green world and the world inside,

stepped in, and drew

close to the frightened thing, tried

to guide it toward and through

the opening. I could tell

the wren’s small heart was beating

wildly, could see its little eyes, so gentle.

Then off it flew into the trembling.

Further details

Sonya Smith, Every Robin I Never Quite Saw

Sonnet for a twelve year old

My daughter’s childhood just fell from the sky.

No damage to see, its wings still unfold;

a marsh tit, on the road’s white middle line,

its head gently lolls in my hands as it’s rolled, 

each feather inspected, edge, barb, row.

I smooth the black crest, close a shining eye, 

can see clearly how the air must’ve flowed 

beneath her, how it could be trapped inside; 

warmed – a secret in the cold of the night.

I hear song, blown bright through tiny spaces. 

Now blood is allowed to seep from my child; 

do the work of women, leave womb traces, 

so she brings down birds and tears from the sky,

mourns them, transforms them, relearns how to fly.

Further details

Simon Williams, The Magpie Almanack

Naming Them

           A four-foot box, a foot for every year

                                                Seamus Heaney

Nicholas and Alexandra,

because she read Dr Zhivago,

along with Valley of the Dolls and Peyton Place.

Elizabeth and Robert;

she would quote them on occasion

and was fond of King Charles Spaniels.

Abelade and Héloise

would be too la-di-da intellectual;

a sight too French and monks and nuns.

Jack and Jill, perhaps,

because the names had yet to be firmed up,

too soon for a visit to the Registry.

Perhaps she asked her sisters

or her brothers for suggestions, or had

scoured a small red book of names.

Whatever she may have called them,

they were the twins through all the time I knew her,

came and went two years before my birth.

I never caught her crying over photos

with a glass of wine. By Heaney’s measure, they would

have fitted in a case of Reisling, in no time.

Further details