Kelli Allen, "Otherwise, Soft White Ash"

 

Kelli Allen’s work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies in the US and internationally. Allen is the co-Founding Editor of Book of Matches literary journal. She is an award-wining poet, editor, and dancer. Her fiction has appeared in The Best Small Fictions 2022 and she is the recipient of the 2018 Magpie Award for Poetry. Her chapbook, Some Animals, won the 2016 Etchings Press Prize. Her chapbook, How We Disappear, won the 2016 Damfino Press award. Her collections include Otherwise, Soft White Ash (2012), Imagine Not Drowning (C&R Press 2017), Banjo’s Inside Coyote (C&R Press 2019), and  Leaving the Skin on the Bear (C&R Press, 2022). Her book, Otherwise, Soft White Ash, was rereleased Fall 2026 by C&R Press. She currently teaches writing and literature in North Carolina. Her website is here. 

About Otherwise, Soft White Ash, by Kelli Allen
In this rerelease of Kelli Allen’s first collection of poetry and short fiction, with a new foreword by Brian Turner, readers are asked to consider how grief and longing continuously occupy the same hut. Allen’s work explores how loss, myth, sexual desire, and the wild journey inward come to shape capital S-Story.

You can read more about Otherwise, Soft White Ash on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read two sample poems from the collection. 

From Otherwise, Soft White Ash

Clearing Materials of Exile 

Hunter and hermit both dissolve bitter with sugar cubes stolen 

from cut glass jars, though neither always remembers the theft.

Each extends then wraps dirt dried fingers around the weak sweet crystals,

mouths diminished in the metal mirror hanging loose in the old barn.

Humiliation is an Easter horse moving directly behind us like some brutal,

selfish child whispering I want my supper while chewing weeds and apples.

We cross one border to move closer to another, as the dark crow 

in our coat pocket closes his eyes, and we are allowed to sleep.

The priest ignores the ark in his woods because he is busy absorbing his shadow,

and the animals know their work is to hide every egg like dark stones meant for the river.

Noon, Like Whiplash 

          

Every episode of self-imposed solitude, 

the moments when she would lock herself 

into a room sometimes for hours, often 

for days, would always be followed 

by extravagant gestures meant to breed 

forgetfulness.  My closets were alive 

with texture and ocular romance.  

I was treated to shopping trips, 

which included purchasing original 

designs from the best shops 

in whatever city we happened to be living 

at the time.  There were expensive chocolates, 

gorgeous piles of books, cosmetics, shoes, 

any articles of expression or indulgence 

she could hope might make it easier 

for me to blanket the segments 

of disaster her erratic attentions 

invariably caused.  I allowed this 

behavior for so many years 

that I no longer feel a prickle 

of shame when I find myself pressed 

against remembering.  

What else could we do, 

this single child and her raging 

mother offering gift after gift 

from a silver horn?  The whole 

is never far, and one fraud 

is as easily dressed in silk as another.

The extravagance ended entirely 

for one year when I was seventeen 

and found myself wearing so much 

of my mother’s blood that the new pale 

yellow sweater I adored became lost 

in awkward blossoms of sticky red. 

I remember cashmere softness before 

I begin to usher in flashes of the surreal 

scene of her fourth suicide attempt.  Memory 

is unfaithful to intention, catapulting 

what we should recognize far 

from what our cognizance vividly defends.  

There is no room for apology 

at any moment in the scene, neither 

when it unfurled as quick thin tentacles 

or now, when recollection feels viscous 

and tastes of paint left to dry on a lid.  

While tracking the minutes 

from the call to the sound 

of the gangly ambulance halting 

near my mother’s window, I focused 

on the saturation spreading peripherally 

down my own arms, soaking 

the delicate fibers of my daffodil sweater.  

There was a pattern forming over 

my forearms and onto the top layer 

of lemongrass-shaded sheets 

my mother bought to match a vase 

with similar colored latticework 

snaking around and through its glass.

In those twenty-six minutes when I pushed 

my hands into her wet arms and waited 

for whatever help would arrive 

through sirens and stillness, I felt 

as though there were streaks of rain 

pelting far too slowly against my face 

and back.  There was more wetness 

in that waiting than what could be 

described as measurable pain. The shape 

of her was an indication that something more 

had gone wrong, but I was lost in the absence 

of humming, and the reticence was a film 

like thin stained glass—fragile 

and something to be irrationally trusted. 

The reality of blood strips all defenses 

into patience, calculations descending 

into calm like knowing the old gods 

are present and full.  Silence 

can be its own kind of vertigo, 

and there is nothing so quiet 

as keeping your mother alive 

and not being certain that you should. 

When her veins were finally bound 

and there seemed to be a cessation 

of rushing, both of fluid and breath, 

I finally looked at her face.  The paramedics 

had obscured her mouth and nose 

with a dome of plastic and whatever color

was left clinging to her skin

seemed temporal and cheap.  

The sheets on her bed were beautiful, 

and watching her blood deploy itself 

over the quiet sheen of the cotton 

was a betrayal of sorts.  I imagined 

she would wake at any moment; her mouth 

opening in an impossible "O," and hordes 

of butterflies would emerge and become her hair.  

Robin Vaughan-Williams, "What Data Saw"

Robin Vaughan-Williams is a poet and producer based in London. His previous publications are The Manager (Happenstance Press) and How to Fix a Human (Sampson Low), and poems have appeared in magazines such as Acumen, Under the Radar, Long Poem Magazine, Dream Catcher, and Anthropocene. He did a PhD on the Bakhtin Circle which fuelled an ongoing interest in the voice as material, from open mics and performance-collage events to his practice in collaborative poetry improvisation. His work was highly commended for the Erbacce Prize 2026, and he has hosted live literature series in Sheffield, Nottingham, and Oxfordshire. His website is here. You can find him on Bluesky/Instagram @robinrvw.

About What Data Saw, by Robin Vaughan-Williams

In Robin Vaughan-Williams’s latest collection, Data is reimagined as a mythological being in the process of becoming. Unsure yet who or what she is, or the extent of her powers, Data attempts to blend in, understand, and communicate in a human world where she both does and does not belong. 

She appears on Secret Millionnaire, becomes the target of protest movements, witnesses human-on-human violence, and is used by people for their own ends. She needs to feed; but if everything is text, where can she find her mouth?

You can read more about What Data Saw on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read two sample poems from the collection. 

From What Data Saw

Data engulfs her mother

When Data yelled it made her mother go deaf in one ear.
When Data laughed a pod of dolphins dived for fish.
When Data gurgled cats patrolled the enclosure that kept her safe.
When Data opened her mouth there were already words waiting to fall from her breath.
When Data sucked at the breast it was hard.
She charged up on two teats thick with serum.
Her exhalations were sweet with electrolytes.

When Data was weaned she engulfed her mother.
She took her to a quiet place and lay there undisturbed for 9 months.
The mother-shape dissolved in her belly.
It became a fly.
It became a drinks dispenser.
It dropped cans into foxholes
that exploded when shook.
It pinpointed movement in the snow.
It entropied warm bodies.
The mother became the probability of an event.
A collision on a screen.
And Data moved through her mother in violent ways. 

Data: in a field

it is as if she is not there nowhere is Data
only data the stuff of her dreams things
she is made of always 'of' something
content but not contentment the feeling
of emptiness good at camouflage
and transcendental meditation stirring
the sugarcube into the universe to sweeten
the brew losing herself in an acid dance
in a field when the cows come home
she's still not there having it like a lost raver

Tim Relf, "Not Even October"

 

Tim Relf, photo by MadMann photography

Tim Relf is a Leicestershire-based poet, novelist and journalist. His debut poetry collection, Not Even October, is out soon with Salt Publishing. His poems have been published in most of the UK’s leading poetry journals, including Poetry London, The Rialto, Stand, Under The Radar, Poetry Wales, The Dark Horse, Acumen, Banshee and Bad Lilies. He is a former poet-in-residence at Leicester Botanic Garden. His most recent novel, published by Penguin, was translated into more than 20 languages and turned into an audiobook starring Emilia Clarke and Charles Dance. You can find out more about his writing on his website here.  

About Not Even October, by Tim Relf
Not Even October is a collection about the easy-to-miss moments that shape lives. Moments in hotel rooms, petrol stations, cafes and vets. In suburban gardens and city parks. In small-town streets and country lanes. Evoking love lost and found, nights of excess, threads of friendship, the rip of grief and the flickering, beautiful absurdities of life in a digital, distracted age, the poems trace how we make sense of memory, mortality, place and home. Not Even October vaults from humour to heartache – then back again – in a breath, attuned both to the anxiety-inducing barrage of turbulent times and the calming comforts offered by the natural world. In this tender, relatable debut, Relf navigates contemporary Britain, finding everyday magic in everyday places, while asking readers: How do we hold on to what matters – and let go of what doesn’t?

You can read more about Not Even October on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read a sample poem from the collection. 

From Not Even October

Windfall

It was going to be about how, if you sit in an orchard

in September, it surrounds you:

falling.

It was going to be about the soft drop of decades as you rest

between Ribston Pippins. But now I see – hear –

this poem isn’t about that, after all.

It’s about waiting for the word

for the sound apples make

landing:

the exact right word for the noise they make

as they hit the ground.

Mati Shemoelof, "Bagdad | Haifa | Berlin"

Mati Shemoelef, photo by Ali Ghandtschi

Mati Shemoelof is a Berlin-based writer, poet, curator and creative writing educator, originally from Haifa, Israel. He has published sixteen books of poetry, fiction, essays and drama in Israel and Germany, and his work moves between Hebrew, German, Arabic and English.

He is the co-founder of ANU – Jews and Arabs Writing in Berlin and the initiator of the Poetic Hafla, a literary and cultural series that brought together Hebrew, Arabic and German-speaking writers and artists in Berlin. He has also worked as a curator and editor and teaches Creative Writing in English, German and Hebrew.

His books published in Germany include the poetry collection Bagdad | Haifa | Berlin (AphorismA Verlag, 2019), Das kleine Boot in meiner Hand nenn ich Narbe (Parasitenpresse, 2023), and the novel Der Preis (PalmArtPress, 2025). His latest book, Fünfzehn Narben: Jüdisch-arabische Texte zu Politik und Poesie, a collection of essays and political and poetic texts, will be published by AphorismA Verlag in 2026. His first book written originally in German, Jiddische Sounds, Deutsche Wörter, will be published by Elif Verlag in 2027.

 

About Bagdad | Haifa | Berlin, by Mati Shemoelof, translated from Hebrew into German by Jan Kühne, Arabic translation by Nael Eltoukhy, Afterword by Jan Kühne

Bagdad | Haifa | Berlin brings together 40 poems from Mati Shemoelof’s Hebrew poetry books and presents them for the first time in German translation. The bilingual edition places the original Hebrew poems alongside Jan Kühne’s German translations, creating a dialogue between the language in which the poems were written and the language of Shemoelof’s new life in Berlin.

The three cities in the title mark three connected but very different worlds: Bagdad, the city from which Shemoelof’s Iraqi-Jewish family came; Haifa, where he was born and grew up; and Berlin, where he has lived since 2013 as a Hebrew-language writer.

The book brings these places together through questions of migration, memory, Mizrahi and Arab-Jewish identity, Jewish history, belonging and language. The poems move between family memories and contemporary political realities, between Israel and Germany, and between the experience of home and the experience of being a stranger.

Rather than presenting identity as something fixed, Bagdad | Haifa | Berlin shows it as something formed through movement. The three cities are not simply geographical locations. They become different layers of memory and belonging, carried by the poet from one language and country into another.

You can read more about Bagdad | Haifa | Berlin on the author's website here. Below, you can read two sample poems from the collection. 

From Bagdad | Haifa | Berlin 

Milena Williamson, "Milk & Moon-water"

 

Milena Williamson, photo by Stephanie Sy-Quia

Milena Williamson is from Swarthmore, Pennsylvania. She has an MA and PhD in poetry, both from the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen’s University Belfast. Her debut pamphlet, Charm for Catching a Train, was published with Green Bottle Press in 2022. Her debut collection, Into the Night that Flies So Fast, was published with Dedalus Press in 2024. In 2021, she received the Society of Authors’ Eric Gregory Award. In 2022, she received a support for the individual artists programme grant from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland for work that became Milk & Moon-water.

About Milk & Moon-water

A Sudden Stitch. Unfruitful Land. A Fever. 

In Milk & Moon-water, Milena Williamson uncovers 11 Old English metrical charms – ancient incantations spoken to ward off harm – creatively translating them into magical and medicinal spells for the modern reader. 

Alongside each reimagining is an original charm poem, a remixed and new telling of an old text. Covering the climate crisis, illness, ageing and fertility, this collection of charms ranges from the incantatory to the unhinged, and re-engages with the ancient practice of looking to the land and the body for answers to life’s new and persisting questions.

You can read more about Milk & Moon-water on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read two sample poems from the collection. 

From Milk & Moon-water

Charm for Unfruitful Land (Remixed)

The good news is the wolves have returned to Europe.

   The bad news is people are killing wolves again. I own no

underwear from this island. There is no purely wild place left

   on this island. I buy wildflower seeds from the dark web.

I walk on the earth while there is still time and sprinkle seeds

   on riverbanks, lawns and graveyards. The smoke pours

across borders and becomes the sky. It’s time to buy an air filter

   and give it a name. I am stuck inside a well and Europe

is the silver bucket framed against the sky. We are living

   in the overlap. We can create clouds from seawater.

We drilled into Antarctica to find the most transparent ice.

   This ice is compressed by other ice so it’s dark down there,

dark enough to see neutrinos belly-flop into light.

 

Journey Charm (Remixed)

With eight lanes on the upper

and six lanes on the lower,

the busiest bridge in the world

is a sonnet. Love, we are suspended

in steel between the river and the sky.

Manhattan and a flood warning

is a good backdrop for listing everything

that has spilled on the GW Bridge –

gas and manure and watermelon

and frozen chicken. Upper or lower?

A man once landed a plane here

and survived. Now there’s a woman

on the median selling fresh oranges.

We see the signs. The lanes divide.

Apryl Skies, "Elements & Angels"

Apryl Skies is a California native, an award-winning author, filmmaker, and founder of Edgar & Lenore's Publishing House. Skies’ writing is highly aesthetic, lyrical and provocative. She now resides among the ancient saguaros, colourful street art and opulent monsoon skies of Tucson AZ.

About Elements & Angels, by Apryl Skies
Elements & Angels is a wildly imaginative collection of poetry by award-winning author, Apryl Skies. Like snapshots capturing memories, past lives, Skies draws a full spectrum of emotion from each sacred moment, moulding them into cinematic poems, dramatic recollections and gritty vignettes. Skies navigates her way through an uncertain world recognizing the magic of the mundane. These poems are time capsules and the messages within overflow with thought-provoking metaphor. Long-awaited and epic in scale this collection reads like a survivor anthem.

From Elements & Angels

Poems inspired by Los Angeles

LosT Angeles

City to cinders
Buried beneath soot and ash
Paradise wounded

Fire at the Midnight Matinee

The entire southern California coast
bursts into flame

Radioactive egos tread water
exploding into a sea of cinder

centerfolds and cardboard cut-outs 
with their manufactured smiles, 
flailing arms, and yoga mats
rush toward a painted 
Hollywood horizon 
scraping the gum from their heels.

Ushers rip perforated tickets,
viewers take their seats
awaiting the next Black Dahlia

Mouths agape
full of popcorn
and imitation butter.

Poems inspired by Tucson

Tucson Landscape

Mai tai sunset sky
Over desert horizon
Coyote and moon


Oracle Starlings

Starlings in flight 
their peculiar formations 
mingle with the ghosts
above the cemetery on Oracle Road

a choreographed birdsong,
a dance with the dead
at twilight

here on Oracle road
the sun sinks
beneath the Tucson landscape
into the shadows of ancient Saguaros

where no one is less alive 
than the living

115 Degrees Fahrenheit 

I tickle Mexico 
to return to you
across desert horizons 
of saguaros and mesquite
miles rippled with heat
trundling onto this tired highway, 
my bridge back home …

And I could not love you more
as I lean heavy into your indifference,
once my soft place to land
now a shattered citadel 
of infinite distances

And those raw truths 
that continue to burn and consume
our existence, and each of these
haunting stars above
revealing all our unremarkable postures

How very foolish we are 
to think any one of us 
worthy of crown.

Cathy Galvin, "Ethnology: A Love Song for Connemara"

Congratulations to Cathy Galvin, University of Leicester PhD Creative Writing student, whose poetry collection Ethnology has just been published by Bloodaxe Books!

Cathy Galvin's debut poetry collection, Ethnology: A Love Song for Connemara, is published by Bloodaxe Books in the UK and Ireland. She has published three previous pamphlets of poetry, Black & Blue (2014), Rough Translation (2016) and Walking the Coventry Ring Road With Lady Godiva (2019). She is widely published as a poet and short story writer and is the recipient of a Hawthornden Fellowship, a Heinrich Böll residency and an Arts Council England DYCP award. As a journalist she has worked as a senior editor for Newsweek and the Sunday Times. She founded the Sunday Times Short Story Award and the short story organisation, the Word Factory. She is the editor of Red, an anthology of new writing published by Waterstones. She is a PhD candidate at the University of Leicester and lives near Bodmin Moor in Cornwall. 

About Ethnology: A Love Song for Connemara, by Cathy Galvin
Ethnology draws on the mystical cry for the dead of Cathy Galvin's Irish-speaking ancestors. Within an epic narrative she reclaims place, people and language and creates a dialogue with the poets, folklorists and ethnologists who have written about the West of Ireland for their own agenda. Loss, and loss of a mother tongue, are carefully explored. 

You can read more about Ethnology on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read two sample poems from the collection. 

From Ethnology

Walls

There’s no anvil, brooch, harrow-pin.

The currach’s broken, walls stand without a roof.

All that’s left: a bureau containing bills,

cards, scarves, a Will.

You’re not in view but I can hear a breath

– the well-made dress and phrase.

My made things broke long ago.

They had little purchase on this world.

The creed, letters I do not read.

Solid seem the things that slip away.

Leaving us bone.

We stake a claim, lay foundations,

build and watch it fall.

Within, the comforts that ease survival.

We cut back wilderness, tame, contain

sycamore, birch, bramble, willow, grass.

All return.

Our walls come down, consolations go.

We do not come back. Take away it all

and what is left is who we are.

Our homes are built to go. 

Coventry Carol

You did not sing in Irish or in English.

Never told me what the English did to your people,

were clear you did not want an Irish husband,

someone who might sing sweetly and leave his wife behind,

become a father like yours who did not feed his own children.

When the Irish began bombing Birmingham,

and a shopkeeper refused to serve me in my Catholic

school uniform, your silence filled my mouth.

Karuna Mistry, "You-me-verse-all Hueman"

Karuna Mistry is a British writer of Indian ethnicity and works at the University of Leicester. He has published over 100 individual poems in more than 70 anthologies. Between his two poetry book releases, Karuna has been a poetry editor for an online magazine. As well as poetry, his creativity includes blogging and drawing – his illustrations appear in both of his books. You can connect with Karuna via his website or Facebook / Instagram: @karunamistrypoetry. You can read about his previous book, Sojourn, written with Pratibha Savani, on Creative at Leicester here. 

About You-me-verse-all Hueman, by Karuna Mistry
You-me-verse-all Hueman captures humanity in its plurality – age, gender, race, sexuality, sociality and spirituality. Follow humanity’s pursuit of happiness through past, present and future in this epic journey. A variety of themes and recurring subtleties build through the chapters, culminating in a sublime climax. The book contains 120 poems across time and space, 40 digital images, 30 illustrations, as well as 4 essays. You can read more about the book here. Below, you can read two poems from the collection. 

From You-me-verse-all Hueman

LJ Ireton, "Unclaimed"

LJ Ireton is a poet and a bookseller from London. She has a 1st Class B.A. Honours in English Language and Literature. Her poems have been published by over forty journals both in print and online, including: Green Ink Poetry, The Madrigal, Humana Obscura, Spellbinder Literary Magazine, Drawn to the Light, Acropolis Journal, Amphibian Literary Journal, Tiny Seed Journal, Black Bough, Spelt and Wild Greens Magazine. Her poetry features in the printed anthologies Spectrum (Renard Press, 2022), York Literary Review 2023 (Valley Press), Building Bridges (Renard Press, 2024), You’re Never Too Much (Macmillan, 2025) and on the BBC World Service Bookclub. Her debut poetry collection, Lessons from the Sky, was published by Ellipsis Imprints in February 2024, followed by Interlude in February 2025 by Haywood Books.

About Unclaimed, by LJ Ireton

These are lyrical, first person poems, which give voices to the bold and spirited Tudor and Stuart queens judged and condemned by history: Anne Boleyn, Catherine Howard and Mary, Queen of Scots.

You can read more about Unclaimed on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read a sample poem from the collection. 

From Unclaimed

Scotland 

          Mary, Queen of Scots

It was there. Hidden,
sleeping in my young soul
while I was scorning rocks
on curated tile.

I am awake now, and turning;
wild heather scales my bones, 
shedding my skin –
I was schooled in everything but
how earth-gold would respond
to my step 
returning,
humming at my feet —

my mourning veil
curls in the wildflowers;
they are reclaiming it
with teeth,
thistle purple sharp ghosts
arise,
my lungs smoke mist
moors and heights —

Scots King am I;
brocade and pearl
re-learning the beauty of thorns.

Peter Kalu, "Act Normal"

Pete Kalu recently received the Society of Authors Travelling Scholarship Award 2024 for his "impressively experimental, thoughtful and challenging" writing. His memoir-essay mashup, Act Normal, was published in October 2025 by Hope Road. He is also the author of the novel One Drop (Andersen, 2022). His short stories can be found in Book of Manchester (Comma Press, 2024), Colonial Countryside (Peepal Tree, 2024), Collision (Comma Press, 2023), Glimpse (Peepal Tree, 2023). Instagram: @petekalu

About Act Normal, by Peter Kalu
In this polemical and poetic collection of 250 mini-essays, personal history becomes a lens for cultural critique. Through fragments and feeling, it asks what we remember, what we forget, and who gets to tell the story. Unflinching and yet tender, these  vignettes are a fierce yet joyous meditation on Black memory, identity, and resistance. Merging memoir, reflections and observations in the style of Annie Ernaux’s Exteriors, Act Normal challenges erasure, mourns what was lost, and dreams of what could be. This is a lyrical reckoning with history, silence, and the radical act of speaking back.

You can read more about Act Normal on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read a short sample from the book. 

From Act Normal

Watermelon

I have great difficulty eating watermelon in front of white people. Throughout my childhood white people invested so much time and energy in their literature making us into these eye-rolling, big-grinning picaninny idiots who chomped on the big green and red fruits that I boycotted them for decades. Then I met someone from Iran, and they loved watermelon and didn’t carry my cultural baggage. They were mad for it. Watermelon was in their fridge, on their kitchen counters, in their dreams and all over their late-night cravings. I was tempted. In my mind, I resisted. So much weight and volume, so little taste, those slithery pips that require spitting out making it an outdoor fruit rather than a dining room fruit, the crazy prices, the ecological damage of growing those things which drink litres and litres of water, the mess, the stickiness, the perfumy smell … My mind went on and on, but my stomach rumbled and I gave in. Now I eat watermelon clandestinely. I only buy it from black stores. I only eat it around Global Majority people. My daughters eat watermelon unproblematically. "Deal with your issues, Dad," they tell me, "Deal with your issues." 

Laura Besley, "sum of her PARTS"

Congratulations to Laura Besley, University of Leicester PhD student and MA Creative Writing graduate, whose new collection, sum of her PARTS, has just been published by V. Press!

Laura Besley (she/her) is the author of Sum of her PARTS, (Un)Natural Elements, 100neHundred – shortlisted for the Saboteur Awards – and The Almost Mothers. She is an editor with Flash Fiction Magazine and runs The NIFTY Book Club - a monthly online book club wherein participants read & discuss novellas-in-flash. Currently, she is a Creative Writing PhD student at the University of Leicester. Having lived in the Netherlands, Germany and Hong Kong, she now lives in land-locked central England and misses the sea. Her website is here.    

About sum of her PARTS, by Laura Besley
sum of her PARTS is a collection of 30 micro pieces, each exactly 50 words with a one-word title. They explore female body parts and how they are used and abused by those around them, as well as celebrated.  

You can read more about sum of her PARTS on the publisher's website here. You can read a review of the collection on Everybody's Reviewing here. Below, you can read two sample pieces from the collection. 

From sum of her PARTS

solitary

most days
I like
living alone, 
no one 
to moan
about my
lack of 
culinary skills
or clothes
strewn around; 
only when 
a robin - 
breast aglow - 
frolics in 
a birdbath
or I
almost choke
on a 
piece of 
molten cheese
on toast
do I 
regret certain 
decisions made
long ago.

bold

It's an hour before sunrise when I wake and discover I've turned into a trombone, my body shiny-sleek. I try out my new mouthpiece, a short shy toot at first. Subsequent blows grow in length and volume until I am blaring, brass-band loud. This is my voice. Hear me. Listen. 

Tina Cole & Michael W. Thomas, "Nothing Louche or Bohemian"

Tina Cole was born in the Black Country and now lives in rural Herefordshire near Ludlow. She has three published pamphlets, I Almost Knew You (2018), Forged (Yaffle Press, 2021) and What it Was (Mark Time Books, 2023). As a poet and reviewer, she has led workshops with both adults and children and judged a number of U.K. and international competitions. Her published poems have appeared in many U.K. magazines and collections, including in The Guardian newspaper. She is a past winner of a number of national poetry competitions, 2010-2023, and completed an M.A. in Creative Writing / Poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University in 2023.

Michael W. Thomas has published ten collections of poetry, three novels and two collections of short fiction. His most recent poetry collection, prior to this, is A Time for Such a Word (Black Pear Press); his most recent short fiction collection is Sing Ho! Stout Cortez: Novellas and Stories (Black Pear Press); his most recent novel is The Erkeley Shadows (KDP / Swan Village Reporter). With Simon Fletcher, he edited The Poetry of Worcestershire (Offa's Press). His work has appeared in Acumen, The Antigonish Review (Canada), The Antioch Review (US), The Cannon's Mouth, Critical Survey, Crossroads (Poland), Dream Catcher, Etchings (Australia), Irish Studies Review, Irish University Review, Magazine Six (US), Pennine Platform, Poetry Salzburg Review, The Times Literary Supplement and Under the Radar, among others. He has reviewed for The London Magazine, Other Poetry and The Times Literary Supplement, and is on the editorial board of Crossroads: A Journal of English Studies (University of Bialystok, Poland). He was long-listed for the National Poetry Competition, 2020 and 2022, and long-listed and short-listed for the Indigo Dreams Spring Poetry Prize, 2023. Michael's website is here. He blogs here. @thomasmichaelw

About Nothing Louche or Bohemian, by Tina Cole and Michael W. Thomas
A miscellany box of memories, intense and disconcerting; a gently encouraging piano teacher; teddy bears that knew better days; tinkling bottle-tags; classroom faces happy, wistful, preoccupied; a district nurse’s long-ago phone call; an assignation beneath a canal bridge; a father’s jokes worn down to the metal. These and so many other scenes find their places in the landscape of Nothing Louche or Bohemian. As the collection unfolds, threads are caught, drawn out, found to be markers on the map of what once was—and what, in these pages, lives again … enthralling, troubling, never less than vivid. Tina and Michael have known each other for several years but discovered that they’d grown up in the same area of the Black Country – and gone to the same secondary school. Those coincidences prompted Tina to suggest that they collaborate on a project. This is it.  

From Nothing Louche or Bohemian

Intoxication

It's all in the way you look at things 

or so they say. I remember them being purchased 

in a junk shop just behind The Miners Arms.

My hand went out instinctively to three silver

bottle tags, fingers tracing the engraving, whisky, 

gin, vermouth, how they glinted in the forty-watt 

light amongst tarnished soup tureens and discarded 

cutlery, but oh, that word    vermouth! 

                          It was evenings in cerise silk pyjamas, 

something louche, bohemian, a life away from corseted 

cares. Listening to Rachmaninov, nights at the Royal Opera 

not the sixpenny stalls at the Sedgley Clifton. No, the life 

I deserved sitting in a green Lloyd-loom chair, wafting 

about a Hampstead flat thin and mysterious, smoking

something sweetly scented. I would have written 

a clutch of acclaimed collections, beautiful poetry

not the usual tat that is continually rejected. 

                          It's all in the way you look at things, 

in the way one's hand reaches out for beauty,

a rose, a baby's hand, a moment of success, 

and that word vermouth    is still    intoxicating. 

- Tina Cole

Jacqueline Burnett

           Holy Trinity Roman Catholic School, Oxford Street, Bilston, 1958-1965

We were in the same class

at primary school. Shared 

the same birthday. One year

were told to stand up

so the room could sing

and toast the nothing we'd done.

Slight, she was, freckled:

tawny keeps coming to mind.

Already bringing on a bit of a stoop

to oblige the future.

You'd glimpse her 

slipping out to play,

edging the shadows

of the manager's son

and the town-clerk's daughter.

She answered each question perfectly

then retrieved her stillness,

putting the world away from her

till called upon again.

She rarely smiled,

perhaps never,

certainly not the day she and I

held an end apiece of coincidence,

like a pageant-flag

golden from a brush of sun

fluttered in a pocket of wind.

- Michael W. Thomas

Penny Boxall, "The Curiosities"

 

Penny Boxall is a poet and children’s writer who has worked in various museums. She won the 2016 Edwin Morgan Poetry Award with her debut collection, Ship of the Line. She is writer in residence at Wytham Woods, University of Oxford, and was visiting Research Fellow in the Creative Arts at Merton College in 2019. She has held Royal Literary Fund Fellowships at the Universities of York and Cambridge, and is an RLF Bridge Fellow. She created new works for Tartu and Bodo Capitals of Culture 2024. Her debut novel for children is forthcoming in 2025. Her website is here.  

Penny's new poetry pamphlet, The Curiosities, is published by New Walk Editions, which is co-edited by Nick Everett, Associate Professor of American Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Leicester. 

 

About The Curiosities, by Penny Boxall
How do we remember and memorialise when we’re not at all sure what we have just experienced? How do we know our own minds when we find ourselves by turns reflected and obscured? The poems in this pamphlet are like artefacts in a half-forgotten museum: records of how life once was, or might have been.

You can read more about The Curiosities on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read two sample poems from the collection. 

 

From The Curiosities

Equity

I see her, evenings, in the new retirement flats
near my mother’s house. The curtains
are always open, or there are no curtains,
and so no mystery. She’s young for there.
 
She sits on the neat sofa, ankles crossed,
or writes neat letters at the bureau.
Sometimes there is a glass of champagne,
a single orchid. There are never visitors
 
I have suspicions. The space is as anonymous
as a brochure: not a particle on the carpet;
cards wishing her a happy something
lined up faultless on the mantelpiece.
 
Easier to think she’s on the payroll, Equity Card
tucked inside her model’s-own purse.
Easier that than to accept she really lives
like this: all lights up, nothing to hide.

Conservation Status

Least concern                            More than you can shake a stick at
Near threatened                         Enough for you to shake a stick at
Vulnerable                                  I wish you would put that stick down
Endangered                               Can’t see the wood for the trees
Critically endangered                 What is the sound of a tree falling
Extinct in the wild                       What is the sound of no trees falling
Extinct                                        What is a tree