June Wentland, "Factory of Light"

June Wentland would like to be able to say that she has a degree in Cosmology from Samarkand University and now divides her time between Milan and Vienna as a doyen of both dance and fashion but this would not be true. Married with a child by the time she was twenty, she’s an ordinary woman from Hull and now (via Manchester and Bristol) lives in Wiltshire. Her novel, Foolish Heroines (Valley Press), was published in 2021. June has an MA in Creative Writing from Bath Spa University and her poems have featured widely in literary journals and magazines. Factory of Light (Fox and Star Books) is a limited edition poetry chapbook and her first collection of any kind.

About Factory of Light, by June Wentland
When I was recently asked, in a Poetry Society Stanza group meeting, what I would look for if I ever had the fortune (or misfortune) of judging a high-profile poetry competition, I said I would be hoping for a poem that created a  world which insinuated itself into my literary landscape. Poems which approached the unsayable or were of such clarity that they landed in the very heart of a feeling. A big and intimidating ask! 

I hope that the poems in Factory of Light go a tiny way towards part-achieving some of these aspirations, whether it’s by inviting the reader into a Daphne Du Maurier-loving garden or sharing a Eureka moment in an electric lighting factory when a flat piece of cardboard is conjured, at the flick of a wrist, into an object with volume. The chapbook has been put together with the belief that it’s wonderful to sometimes look beyond the scaffold of our tired perceptions and use words to rediscover the miraculous in everyday things.

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

From Factory of Light 

Reading Rebecca

Last night my garden dreamt of Manderley. 
I only have myself to blame – 
wandering below the green domes 
of Du Maurier’s prose.

No one told me how impressionable 
foliage is to literature in April – 
its cuticles absorbing words 
with frail spring sun.

The garden listens, sleeps and grows, 
advancing gothic-stemmed through dusk. 
Slugs creep through clumps of sub-plots, 
snails through sage, thyme and tortured love.

The neighbour’s gardens are more formal,
but if they were better-read
they too could dream of Manderley – 
seeding ideas outside the neat edges

of their flower beds. The walls of this house
are a breakwater for surging blooms – 
tides of hyacinths and hydrangeas, 
sagas of azalea and chard. 

Here, you can listen – not to the sea – 
but to the swish of couch grass 
where a woman might falter in a flimsy boat 
and perish on the waves of greenery.


Summer in the factory of light 

          The former Cascade Lighting factory, Radcliffe, Manchester

To the sound of Diana Ross and the Supremes, 
we worked in teams and over the sunny weeks, 
grew close. Fingers filled with washers and threaded-rods, 
we disclosed intimacies – finnicky as circuit wiring – 
the positives and negatives of our lives. 
The other girls were all sixteen 
I was sage-like in my twentieth year 
and as we ate our Friday fish and chips 
I gave them all advice. 

In the packing bay I had my own epiphany. 
Never before had I considered 
the aspirations of cardboard. 
How flatness could flick to volume – pre-
configurations opening in a man’s quick hands – 
futures seeded in papery DNA. 
Panels like corrugated petals, blooming
or geometric creatures unfolding from a pupal state.
Their flaps fledged only for closing – never flying – 
their limits taped in place. 

All through those warm, slow-moving weeks
I thought of boxes. 
Their inclinations and their secret needs. 
I was just nineteen. 
I was a mum, a mortgage-holder, student and a wife – 
I was a sorcerer of cardboard. 
I was an oracle on love and life.

Carmella de Keyser, "Chasms"

Carmella de Keyser is a prize-winning British poet, known for explorations of identity, and the liminal spaces of human experience. Her writing spans both adult and children’s poetry. Founder of Harlow’s first Poetry Society Stanza, judge for the Harlow Poetry Open, she is committed to the democratisation of poetry and is an active figure in the grassroots UK poetry scene. De Keyser has five books published or forthcoming, from Hedgehog Press, Alien Buddha Press, Parlyaree Press and the Seventh Quarry Press. Her accolades include winning first prize for the Hedgehog Poetry Press Pamphlet competitions of 2024 and 2025 and achieving over 100 of her poems published in contemporary journals such as The Madrid Review, Hooghly Review, Dream Catcher: International Arts Journal and Dust Poetry Magazine amongst others. She has had her writing selected for podcasts and radio shows including for the BBC and has had the honour of having her poetry widely anthologised including by the major publishing house Macmillan. Her website is here. 

About Chasms, by Carmella de Keyser
Chasms is a reflective journey into intersections, an exploration of identities, trauma, conflict, justice and recalled memories of visiting the Balkans juxtaposed with London life in the 90’s. The word chasm originates from the Greek word "khasma" meaning yawning hollow or gulf. It can also be a profound divide, rift or impassable rupture in the earth between peoples, feelings or ideas. The poems within Chasms consider dissonance and identity across different settings, borders, edges, and of projective identifications of self and the other, yet they also invite in space for bridges to be built across these gulfs via joy, integration and reconciliation.

From Chasms

Reflections

Baba's face resembles railroad tracks that disappear into each other. 

Like an Escher woodcut. 

I can look at it for hours …

She has been perma-sketched by early dawns in the Balkan sun. 

Grooming her garden,

Twisting cucumbers away from their tender climbing. 

When she smiles, three more lines crack open - from each of the sides of her cinnamon eyes. 

As her lips downturn again, the motifs across her face are filled with wholesome flesh, plumped up by "baklava," "tulumba" and "revani." 

She has toiled for her whole life and her skin is all stories. 

My reflection has no novellas,

Or folk tales, 

Or kneeling in the early womb of the teeming soil, 

It’s paler than hers, has lived in colder climates, 

My cheeks are smooth, mirthless urbanised tombs,

Yet for a moment -

Drawn in, by her flare, and her gaze,

Her face warms mine.

 

No More Anniversaries

A pile for "her" and a pile for "him,"

Twenty years and it’s come to this.

The mahogany music stand – "his."

The mini pyramid ornaments – "hers."

The toaster – "his."

The porcelain chopsticks – "not sure."

Plates from his intrusive mother – "Who cares?!"

The origami child coiled in the corner – "theirs."

Some things can never be unshared.

Suyin Du Bois, "Eating Air"

 

Suyin Du Bois is a poet of mixed Chinese-Malaysian and Belgian heritage, living in London with her South African husband. Her poems have been published in Propel, Iamb, Stanzas, Bi+ Lines: An Anthology of Contemporary Bi+ Poets (Fourteen Publishing, 2023) and Malaysian Places and Spaces (Maya Press, 2024), amongst others. She is a member of the Southbank Centre’s New Poets Collective 2024/25. When not obsessing over word choice, Suyin spends her time building a profit-with-purpose start-up that seeks to ensure 24/7 access to nutritious, affordable food for NHS hospital staff. Eating Air is her debut pamphlet.

About Eating Air, by Suyin Du Bois
Steam rises from bowls of noodle soup, tender steaks are seared in butter, sand-roasted chestnuts are shared from a paper bag. Eating Air – the debut pamphlet from Suyin Du Bois – is a mouth-watering collection of poems about food, belonging and connection. 

Charting a journey across cuisines and continents, these poems carve into the author’s dual Chinese-Malaysian and Belgian heritage and food's enduring role in our cultural, familial and personal histories. 

From the low stools of Penang’s kopitiams to the bright lights of London's Chinatown, Eating Air is a love song to food and a poignant catalogue of its profound capacity to serve up memory, language, and longing.

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

From Eating Air

Ode to Kaya

 

Egg jam first on my young tongue: palm sugar 

sweet, coconut milk rich. Thick layers on charred 

toast, salted butter cubes between, melting in Penang 

sweat. My Goh Ee Poh stood for hours stirring you

in that double boiled heat. Exports to be swaddled, 

twisted into pink and green plastic bags, nestled

amongst swimming costumes and sundresses – rituals

to ward off mid-air leaks in the 14 hours from one home

to the other. Back in England your layers thinned, 

our knives more sparing after each spread. 

After Goh Ee Poh grew too frail, aunties and uncles 

gifted us store-bought surrogates. You were labelled Kaya.

Our cupboards filled with your empties, aides-mémoire

of indulgence repurposed to house fragrant rice, Chinese 

mushrooms, our longing for Nyonya flavours.

By the time pandan leaves arrive in Chinatown, I am grown 

up, have my own kitchen where I can stand for hours.

Goh Ee Poh has long since condensed

into photographs, so I sweeten my never-asked

regret, trace down someone else’s heirloom recipe.

You are needy, threaten lumps, failure, but I stir and stir

like her until my spoon draws the right depths of lineage.

I lift a heap of you into my mouth, tongue 

your clotted grainy sweetness.

 

Cut Scenes

Dad fusses with his leather school bag / before sitting down to breakfast / by the coal-fired stove / in a 1920s maison de ville I’ve visited from the pavement / my grand-père / who I know from Agfa Billy snaps of walking holidays in the Ardennes / Sunday best studio portraits / has sizzled him a small steak / in a lump of butter / crisped at the edges / deep juicy red in the centre / fried bread on the side / the best way he knows / to sustain his son / on the bundled walk across the tram tracks to school / to protect him / against its respected priests / the wooden blackboard erasers they aim at boys’ heads

 

Dad orders steak in a restaurant / blue / walking to the table / by the excuse-me method of cooking / one part joke / three parts recipe / waiters don’t always get it / my held breath / a kind of grace / I watch for his knife to deliver / deep juicy red / not pink / worse grey / how else / can he see his father again / only when I know / it won’t be sent back / I slice my own / reveal / the fibres that make us 

Tara Singh, "✹Fr⚘gm∞nts⊗"

Picture by The Mollusc Dimension @squidhorsecomics

Tara Singh (they/them) is a queer, neurodivergent poet and occasional facilitator, born in Nairobi and raised in Nottingham. Their writing explores the Indian diasporic experience, queerness, gender identity, intergenerational trauma, mental illness, and disability.

About ✹Fr⚘gm∞nts⊗, by Tara Singh

My debut pamphlet, ✹Fr⚘gm∞nts⊗ (Five Leaves, 2025), emerged from several years of engagement with Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy, a psychotherapeutic model that conceptualises the self as composed of multiple "parts." Working through trauma within this framework, I began to visualise my internal system through emojis, each representing a particular survival response:

🦔 = fawn

🌋 = fight

🎭 = flight

❄️ = freeze

🌝 = befriend

These symbols became a creative shorthand for understanding emotional states and behavioural patterns. I often find it difficult to answer the everyday question, "How are you?"—but I can describe, in detail, how each of these parts feels and interacts.

Much of this exploration took place in collaboration with my therapist, through shared Google Docs in which the different parts of me "spoke" and received responses. These dialogues became both therapeutic and creative, allowing a multiplicity of voices to coexist on the page.

When I began composing ✹Fr⚘gm∞nts⊗, I realised that each section of the pamphlet was being authored by a different part. The chapters correspond directly to the IFS framework:

🦔 = fawn ⚘

🌋 = fight ✹

🎭 = flight ∞

❄️ = freeze ⊗

🌝 = befriend 〇

In this sense, the pamphlet can be read as a polyphonic work—one written collaboratively by all five internal voices. The cover, perhaps, should credit the full IFS team: 🦔🌋🎭❄️🌝.

Below, you can read a couple of poems from ✹Fr⚘gm∞nts⊗. You can read more about the collection on the publisher's website here. 

From ✹Fr⚘gm∞nts⊗

part of that world 

look at this house
it is not neat to end up with a girl who
doesn't seem to have a collection
of anything to make complete

there is no trove or treasure
no wonders or cavern
looking around you'd think
no child lives here at all

I'm the first there are no others
my scales are emerald satin
my hair is lush fire-red
I made a wish because I thought

I wanted to be where the people are
one day the girl decides
to take me to that place
what's it called? the bathroom

I'm ready to dance & swim but
she perches me on the edge of ugly coral
I want to ask Matey all my questions
he's gruff & unfriendly

I watch the bath being filled with
what do you call them? bubbles
they're flat
I wait for an invitation to play

the father comes in the girl seems
to forget I'm there I try to shut my eyes
then I remember my eyelids are plastic
the father leaves the girl seems to

forget what happened
she gets into her nightie
I try to say something but
I remember I'm not real

(taken from "freeze" chapter❄️⊗)
 

The Summer Holiday I Decide to Fight

His elbows have jigsaw bends so
he can punch in a weak plastic way
a boy in Derby sold him to me for £1.99

Brother's vest, clammy eggs in tigger cup
gulp don't throw up burpee 1 2 3
Papa's pullup bar until dizzy

The Undertaker punches stones
I punch dried kala chana, my notebook
holds predictions good guys & bad

I make boy cousins fight, I always win
Baldish is the first to say fists clenched
"boys & girls shouldn't play this way"

neck flushed he points at my chest
"you need to get a bra" I lob the Undertaker
over the fence into bushes next door

My new notebook measures me
every day how many calories I take in
& how much I burn away

(taken from "fight" chapter 🌋✹)

Jayne Stanton, "Have they marked you with arrows?"

 

Jayne Stanton’s poems have appeared in print and online at Anthropocene, Ink, Sweat & Tears, London Grip, Pennine Platform, Skylight 47, The Amphibian, Under the Radar and other print and online magazines and anthologies. Her first pamphlet, Beyond the Tune, was published by Soundswrite Press in 2014. She has written commissions for a county museum, University of Leicester’s Centre for New Writing, UoL poems for International Women’s Day 2018, and a city residency. Jayne runs Soundswrite, an East Midlands network for women who are enthusiastic about all aspects of poetry. Her latest pamphlet, Have they marked you with arrows?, is newly published by Poetry Space. 

 

About Have they marked you with arrows?, by Jayne Stanton
This strongly narrative and deeply personal body of work is the poet's creative response to living with uncertainty following her diagnosis and treatment for primary breast cancer. The poems give voice to the cancer patient's lived experience and its psychological and emotional legacy. 

The opening poem is a swift dispensing with the "journey" word, though a journey this undoubtedly is. The poems are unapologetic in their honesty, defiant in their asking of questions to which there are no easy answers, and naming and shaming those oft-pedalled platitudes. Hope is to be found waiting in the wings, still learning its lines when it takes the stage.

You can read more about Have they marked you with arrows? on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read two sample poems from the collection. 

From Have they marked you with arrows?

Many-feathered 

Hope is a scalpel in a steady hand.

There’s a point, somewhere

along an incision from axilla to areola

where Hope (who doesn’t know the lyrics) 

starts humming the tune on a loop.

The patient is too far under 

to appreciate the sentiment.

Hope is an evicted ductal carcinoma, 

the rose that grows 

in a pathologist’s petri dish.

Hope has clear margins. 

To what’s left, it delivers

high-energy beams from a linear accelerator.

D. A. Prince, "Continuous Present"

  

Since 2008, D. A. Prince has published three collections with HappenStance Press. The second, Common Ground, won the East Midlands Book Award in 2015. The third, The Bigger Picture (2022), includes ‘The Window,’ Highly Commended in the Forward Prizes anthology for 2020. Her poems have also made less conventional appearances: as bookmarks, on posters on the Longbenton Metro station in Newcastle, and even handwritten, on biscuit wrappers as part of the Wrapper Rhymes installation at StAnza in 2020. Prince reviews contemporary poetry for London Grip, The Friday Poem and Orbis among other literary magazines. 

Prince's new pamphlet, Continuous Present, 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 Continuous Present, by D. A. Prince
Is there such a thing as an ‘average moment’? If so, what might it contain? The varied immediacy of the natural world, perhaps, richly green; a conversation on a suburban bus or at the hairdresser; or the monotony of the M1 in heavy traffic, where the relentless pressure from heavy lorries and their mission statements – Driven by Perfection, Optimal Solutions, Your Tomorrow Delivered Today – tower over you and your small car. While the continuity of time brings the past close to the present, just out of sight there are other worlds: the what-ifs, parallel lives and choices you might have made. These poems explore the textures of routine experience but also glimpse alternative dimensions within and beyond our daily lives.

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

From Continuous Present

I’d Got My Notebook Out

but the man by the window untangling his hearing aids
explains how the batteries stick — no, not rechargeable —
and, when the bus bounces, that the drain covers
need resetting, how it’s easier with tarmac
unlike the Chinese granite — this City Council,
that Mayor they’ve got — and he and his brother
(both into archaeology) complained —
but do they listen? Then he’s back to the cellar,
his aunt’s house, demolished now —
but you know that bar, that Belgian one —
and when the gas was put in
they found a hole, could see three arches
with those Roman bricks, and a wall,
but were the Council interested? And now
it’s all gone, but what’s beneath, buried:
who knows? Gets off at the museum
(two developers gone bust, the deadlined posters
eaten by the rain) and pavement, asphalt, tarmac
aren’t the solid footings they were yesterday.

Cézanne at Tate Modern

Too many apples says my friend, dismissing
Cézanne and his stubborn brush working
the canvas over and over, trying
to uncover truth or whatever
lies under the skin. His apple-flesh grows solid
but never solid enough for him:
he’s weighing their presence, finding that they lack
what his brush won’t give. Perhaps it’s the light
falling too thin on them, too forgiving
of failure. Perhaps he can’t forgive himself,
his hand closing too tight. Perhaps
one more time will get it right, then one more time.
He can’t have too many apples. None
is perfect but it’s no longer apples that matter,
only how in the alchemy of oil and canvas
and his brush they become apples.
Obstinate, indestructible, wrote Rilke
after Cézanne’s death. Now they hang here
framed and untouchable, still challenging
the ticketed crowd nodding past,
familiar with the surface blur of apples
— Too many apples — red, green, why so many? —
not seeing each apple testing itself
against the previously unpaintable air,
the brush coming to terms with the press of paint
against weave and hand and eye.
We can’t have too many apples.

Meg Pokrass, "Old Girls and Palm Trees"

 

Meg Pokrass is the author of The First Law of Holes: New and Selected Stories (Dzanc Books, 2024) and eight previous collections of flash fiction and two novellas in flash. She is a two-time winner of San Francisco’s Blue Light Book Award. Her work has been published in three Norton anthologies of the flash fiction form, including Flash Fiction America, New Micro, and Flash Fiction International. It has also been included in The Best Small Fictions 2018, 2019, 2022, 2023, 2025; Wigleaf Top 50; and hundreds of literary magazines including Electric Literature, Lit Hub, Rattle, SmokeLong Quarterly, Wigleaf, New England Review, American Journal of Poetry, McSweeney’s, Washington Square Review, and Passages North. Meg is the founding editor of New Flash Fiction Review, festival curator and co-founder of Flash Fiction Festival UK, and founding / managing editor of the Best Microfiction anthology series. She lives in Inverness, Scotland, where she serves as chief judge for the Edinburgh Flash Fiction Award.

About Old Girls and Palm Trees, by Meg Pokrass, illustrated by Cooper Renner
Old Girls and Palm Trees is an illustrated collection about iconoclasts, perpetual dreamers, tightrope walkers, living room magicians, cat lovers, and female friendship. The "old girls" in these linked hybrid pieces are women of a certain age who, in an alternate reality, refuse to accept the stereotypes of aging. The collection is conjured from dreamscapes of what just may be true. The poems, prose poems and micros in this collection invite us into an alternate reality where joy and love for same sex friends become a magical force to be reckoned with.  

You can read more about Old Girls and Palm Trees on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read five sample pieces from the collection. 

From Old Girls and Palm Trees

Rosy 

 

Late August we adopt a cat. The house brightens up. We name her after the pinkish-red clouds hanging around like half-eaten cotton candy. Rosy is a kisser, jumping on my desk, sniffing my lips. Twirling around in the living room chasing her tail. 

"Did you know that a scattering of wavelengths and blue light in the sky could be so lovely?" she says as the sky turns even more rosy than the night before.

Plunking Away on the Sofa 

 

It trickles down from my scalp as if it doesn’t know where to go or how to stop going there. "Stop moping about your mop," the old girl says. She smiles at me as if I’m perfectly imperfect and sits with the rosy cat while I plunk away on my ukulele, singing "When the Saints Come Marching In" to an audience of whiskers. 

"All we need now is a New Orleans funeral," she laughs, her arms around the cat—the three of us floating away to the islands.

Grand Entrances

 

At the Japanese lantern festival, the old girl and I hip-bump in, psyched about whatever people think of us, two zaps of purple in the crazy shuffle, licking wasabi from our lips, ignoring our hair, unpedicured, unmanicured, candid with hard-earned frumpiness. "You are my badge of honor," she says, holding my fingers. "You are my lantern in the wind."

Collector of Days

 

Late August, the dampness eased. We watched a squirrel collect nuts and take them back to her nest. I told the old girl, It’s almost September, you’re still here. She smiled. Where else? At the pond in the woods, we cast our fingers into the water, felt the cold sting. At the end of each dripping day we swung on the porch, kissing the rims of our wine glasses.  

 

Lewis Buxton, "Mate Arias"

Lewis Buxton, photo by Rosie A Mills-Smith

Lewis Buxton won the Winchester Poetry Prize in 2020 and has a full-length collection out with Nine Arches Press. He regularly visits schools, delivering workshops and performances to young people, and his theatre shows tour extensively in the UK. He lives in Norfolk.

About Mate Arias, by Lewis Buxton
Mate Arias is Lewis Buxton’s love song to his friends, a soaring voice attempting to communicate in a masculine world often punctuated by silence or violence. Muscles are torn, crossword clues are pondered, and pints are lifted as the poet attempts to make sense of his friends and himself, and their often clumsy, physical dances around each other.

Under the glares of floodlights and movie screens, with a backdrop of superheroes and zombies, Buxton creates the settings for new versions of male friendships. A poignant and funny exploration of making and maintaining relationships as lives begin to move in different directions, Mate Arias is a unique celebration of the tenderness and love that can be communicated by men.

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

Working Out 

We lift until our arms are dead rabbits: 

he would prefer we were sat in awkward 

positions, dumbbells slung across our hips 

thrusting upwards, rather than find a word 

for what we are to each other: Mate? Friend? 

Buddy? Pal? Brother? I don’t even know. 

Now we are fit shadows trying to bend 

our bodies into shape. I wouldn’t go 

if you didn’t come with me, Alex says 

as we knacker ourselves on the treadmills, 

horses eating air, speaking through spittle. 

I often turn up alone but most days 

that feels thick and forlorn. It’s nice you’re here 

mate, friend, buddy, pal, brother, whatever.

Pam Thompson, "Sub/urban Legends"

 

Pam Thompson is a writer, educator and reviewer based in Leicester. She has been widely published in magazines including Atrium, Butcher’s Dog, Finished Creatures,The Alchemy Spoon, The High Window, Ink, Sweat & Tears, The North, The Rialto, Magma and Mslexia.  Pam’s last collection, Strange Fashion, was published by Pindrop Press in 2017. A pamphlet, Sub/urban Legends has just been published Paper Swans Press (March 2025). Pam is a Hawthornden Fellow.

About Sub/urban Legends, by Pam Thompson
These poems cross and re-cross boundaries between the real and surreal and take imaginative leaps in form and subject matter. The New York School poets are presiding spirits and Eduard Munch puts in an appearance in a Welsh town. The poems don’t shy away from the darker side of life: loss, grief, mental illness, but there is joy and exuberance and hope. 

You can read more about Sub/urban Legends on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read two poems from the collection. 

From Sub/urban Legends

In New York City with my daughter

Outside the Whitney, a man sells red roses.

Mother’s Day. Inside, Berdie, Larry Rivers’ mother-in-law

is naked, twice. Every wrinkle and fold. After she died

O’Hara wrote, ‘Berdie, Berdie, where are you

and why?’ Schuyler loved her too.

On Brooklyn Bridge a cyclist shouts at a woman

who has wandered across his lane.

I turn to catch the views Georgia painted, read messages 

on love-locks chained to the rails, ‘I love you

Jay, Carina, Kim.’ Black heart drawn with a Sharpie.

Times Square—two living-statues of Liberty,

bickering through green rubber masks. Rap 

boys pull out stooges from Asia, Australia, the UK—

all brag and swagger, leap over them. Our cameras

OD on light—we lose our bearings, just by looking up.

The Glass Strawberry 

My friend sent his boyfriend a single rose for Valentine’s Day.

It arrived with its head cut off. His boyfriend bought 

him three cacti and put them on a fold-up table

which collapsed which is bizarre because it reminds me

of my daughter’s early Christmas present: three small cacti,

packed flat and posted, wearing woolly hats and scarves.

My cacti lean together in the kitchen window.

My friend sends people care-packages when they’re ill.

I told him I’d read about ‘strawberries,’ little treats 

we should give ourselves when we’re sad, sitting in the sun, 

or stroking a cat, to boost our endorphins.

A homeless man he worked with called them ‘dolphins.’ 

My friend sent me a glass strawberry that’s cool

and slightly spiky. I like to hold it but the glass heart 

with severed arteries stays in its red satin box. 

We have both been in the desert for ages 

but our cacti have pink flowers, are taller than us 

and hold out their arms. And the dolphins leap and leap.

Charles G. Lauder, Jr, "Year of the Rat"

 

Charles G. Lauder, Jr, was born and raised in San Antonio, Texas, graduated from Boston University, and has lived in southern Leicestershire since 2000. He is the author of the pamphlets Bleeds (Crystal Clear Creators, 2012) and Camouflaged Beasts (BLER, 2017), as well as the collection The Aesthetics of Breath (V. Press, 2019). His latest pamphlet is Year of the Rat (Blueprint Poetry Press, 2025). From 2015 to 2018, he was the Assistant Editor for The Interpreter’s House, and since 2008, he has run the South Leicestershire Stanza, a poetry writing group affiliated with the Poetry Society. He’s currently working on a second collection. His website is here.

About Year of the Rat
Many of the poems in the pamphlet were written during or just after the lockdowns of 2020–1, and though COVID is never mentioned, its shadow lurks at the poems’ margins, manifesting in a theme of survival, not only physically but also spiritually. Coincidentally (or not?), the year 2020 was the Chinese Year of the Rat. Taoist philosophy underlies the poetry here, including the titular sequence of sonnets, which is about the rats that came to live near our rural home during this time and their attempts to endure, despite predators and harsh weather. Most importantly these poems focus on the significance of family bonds in the dire circumstances of a pandemic.

From Year of the Rat

September 24th

On the same day the old upright
is busted apart in the kitchen
because they can’t get it out the door.
Hammers and ivory flats and sharps
splintering across the counters and sink.
Long-silent keys cry out, stripped-bare 
metal skeleton groans beneath the mallet.
The dog, deaf but feeling the vibrations
of the blows, hides with us in the lounge.

Our old piano tuner sounded the death knell 
months ago: this Weinard over a century old 
didn’t have long to live: Piano makers were once 
all over London, names no one remembers.
Pre-war survivors sell for a song on eBay,
ours having lived in a church hall for years,
then a damp barn, before the farmer
toted it here on his tractor, smoothly rolling
into our home, now refusing to leave.
On this same day the baby grand is tuned,
previously owned by an in-law and willed
to her priest but he was already in a home.
Elvis the mover had to remove a closet door
to get it inside our house. The piano tuner
turning up today is young, a jazz musician
by night. As if finding a lost soul a new home,
he cocks an ear, taps a few keys, sprinkles out
notes, then when satisfied he plays.

Autumn leaves cover our drive
and fill our dining room.

from The Year of the Rat

We try to inventory them—amongst
the chickens, beneath the duck hutch, 
two in the woodshed, one in the hedge 
scampering under the gate to the compost 

(and tunnelling through the straw
in the greenhouse?)—compared to the dead
found beneath the dining table

or in the cat’s bowl, bodies too cumbersome 
to be dragged upstairs and left beside the bed.
Sometimes it’s only a heart or liver,

sometimes the head is missing, the rest
too big a meal. Like censuses of old,
we only count the heads of households.
No telling how many pups they’re feeding.

Fiona Theokritoff, "New Uses for a Wand"

Fiona Theokritoff is a poet and educator, with a science background. She lives in Nottinghamshire, and has worked as a Creative Writing tutor since 2017. She did her Creative Writing MA at Nottingham Trent University in 2019, and as one half of Wine and Words, she performs her work at book festivals and other book events across Nottinghamshire. In the 1980s, Fiona studied Ecology and Environmental Science, and went on to have careers in publishing and as a health practitioner. Her first book, New Uses for a Wand, was published in June 2024 by Five Leaves. Her work has appeared in poetry journals including Mslexia, The Interpreter’s House, Under the Radar, Ink Sweat and Tears and Consilience, a journal created to forge connections between the sciences and creative arts.

About New Uses for a Wand, by Fiona Theokritoff 
New Uses for a Wand is a book about transformation, from the way our world has transformed myths and old magic into science, to the transformations that we as humans experience: those we reach for and those that are thrust upon us. 

In this wide-ranging pamphlet there are poems about lapis lazuli, the Periodic Table, the James Webb Space Telescope, and about people being in love, growing old, facing loss and taking revenge.     

You can read more about New Uses for a Wand on the publisher’s website here. Below, you can read two sample poems from the collection.

From New Uses for a Wand

The One Thing Brian Cox Taught Me

At the outer edges of our eyeballs,

184 million rod cells stand

ready for this low-light moment.

We are seeing stars.

The tiny lights hover,

we are bathed in photon streams,

two lovers full of whispered dreams,

starlight from faraway and forever

        star light

          star bright

        shine on my retina

                  tonight

A 13 billion light-year journey ends,

illuminates us   with a flash

of rhodopsin       workaday magic.

Ancient light is

        perceived,

        captured,

        persists,

                dances

            free in our eyes,

answering the lovers’ eternal question…

so it is true, that nothing        in this moment

has existed        in quite this way before.

 

Photosynthesis

          Magnesium  - Mg2+ - activates enzymes in phosphate metabolism. 

          Constituent of chlorophyll. 

Biology: A Functional Approach, MBV Roberts

The Magus takes centre stage,

and in his own limelight,

creates alchemy

with simple wandering players:

                             sunlight

6CO₂ + 6H₂O –––––––→ C₆H₁₂O₆ + 6O₂

Photons cascade through stacks

of green lamellae coins, exchange

one currency for another.

Sugar strings will become

coiled sugar rings,

a chorus line of can-can dancers,

energy locked in their sweet skirts.

Released, that sun-sparked flash

means a flower will bloom

a grub will feed.

Green blood throbs.

Silent Magus sits.

Polly Walshe, "Silver Fold"

Polly Walshe is a poet and painter. In recent years her poems have appeared in Acumen, Pennine Platform, PN Review, The London Magazine, 14 Magazine, Shearsman, The High Window and The Spectator. She was longlisted three times in the National Poetry Competition, in 2019, 2020 and 2022. In 2019, a selection of her poetry featured alongside Melissa Ruben’s paintings in the exhibition Night Vision(s) at the Atlantic Gallery in New York City, and in the same year she won the Frogmore Prize. Her novel The Latecomer was published by Random House in 1997 and won a Betty Trask Award. Silver Fold is her first pamphlet of poems.

The pamphlet is published along with Graeme Richardson’s Last of the Coalmine Choirboys by New Walk Editions, which is co-edited by University of Leicester Associate Professor of American Literature and Creative Writing, Nick Everett. Register here for the free online launch reading by Polly Walshe and Graeme Richardson at 7pm on Wednesday 27 November.

 

About Silver Fold, by Polly Walshe
We are always starting out – from ourselves and our pasts, from our own words and ideas. The poems in Silver Fold are preoccupied with how far from ourselves we can ever get, and with our struggle to make words say the fresh things we constantly need them to say.

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

From Silver Fold

Bridge Building

The day they came to take the phones away
Was a revealing one. Some threw devices

Into hoppers happily, lobbing them high,
Watching them fall with a whoop. Others tried

To bury, cancel, download, go AWOL. All
Pointless. The signals were dying

And the servers had combusted. Myself?
Loved it, hoped all the long-ago winters might

Return to us, the looking-at-faces, the nothing-
To-do, the night in our horses’ manes,

The bright law of the morning. We’d be
Building a bridge into space as we were meant to,

We’d laugh as we laughed once, like a river
Rising for no reason, scarcely contained –

For a few seconds fearsome, then drawing back,
Earth different, small stones rearranged.


Moving to the Coast

Don’t think of moving to the coast
Since everything you need is here.

Cars rushing by make an evening tide
And there’s something of the wharf

About these traffic lights. Gulls swarm
Behind our bin lorries on collection day

Then politely disperse.
Gulls by the sea are known to be worse.

However far you go you’ll never feel,
Sufficiently, there. Why trouble yourself?

Rumours of a better place won’t stop
But every halt has empty shops

And dummkopf men in secret clubs
And the lonely women they fear.

The painful laughter of those women
Clatters forever everywhere. They yearn –

The women and the men – for gestures
From an unconventional god

Yet find it hard to think
That Being’s bird might sing

Along this landlocked street
In preference to Scarborough or Deal

Or any flaking crust shored up
Against the indecision of the sea.

Coast is the ravelled edge of time.
It’s where you are.

Cathi Rae, "Just This Side of Seaworthy and Other Poems" and "Rock, Paper, Scissors and Other Poems"

Congratulations to UoL PhD Creative Writing student Cathi Rae, who has just published two new poetry pamphlets!

Cathi Rae is a poet, spoken word artist and educator. She is currently in the final stages of a practice led/creative PhD at the University of Leicester, where she was also a graduate of the MA in Creative Writing. She has performed throughout the UK, including readings at Womad Festival, The Houses of Commons, Chiltern Arts Festival and many spoken word and poetry events up and down the M1 and M6. She has just published two new pamphlets of poetry with Two Pigeons Press: Just This Side of Seaworthy and Other Poems, and Rock, Paper, Scissors and Other Poems. You can read about these two new collections and a sample poem from each below.  

About Just This Side of Seaworthy and Other Poems, by Cathi Rae
Just This Side of Seaworthy and Other Poems is a pamphlet collection which explores ageing, ageism and how older people navigate the world. It challenges the ageist notions that older people have less validity or become invisible.

From Just This Side of Seaworthy and Other Poems

Just this side of seaworthy

I could be  you
another older woman    our bodies bearing 
one carefully cherished child

just the one
no time to make another
no time to try again

I was akin to you     almost kin to you
recognising this stony skerry
where you stand                washed up
I too have swum these currents

tides that trick and tease
entice you on towards the shore

I feel your           unsteady      steps
across a beach
a beach in name alone
black blasted rock ground down to grey

 
somehow 
I avoided this      this destination    this depression
with frantic paddling     bailing out
keeping my head above the water
watching you and those like you
who submerged beneath the sea 
and emerging
found themselves      sea changed

the boat    the tides    the landing
repeat    repeat        repeat
a life on endless loop
your coracle
just this side of seaworthy
crafted from a faded photograph

gives up the ghost and floats in-land
oars that drop and drift away


your gasping    grasping breath 
presence of pain    still presence of a sort
knocked backwards   you attempt to stand again

fingers clutch at the last remaining 
half remaining    almost-memory  of     croft  wall
grip slipping on moss slick stone
peering out to sea     myopic     in mist that never lifts
cataract-vision 

and on this chain that reaches back
to meet the mainland
I’m standing on another island
larger     the trees a little taller 
hints of green and growth
holding on
hoping     knowing    
that this must pass.

About Rock, Paper, Scissors and Other Poems, by Cathi Rae
Rock, Scissors, Paper and Other Poems is a taster selection from my PhD work, a collection of poems based on conversations and interviews with individuals who shared their lived experience with me.

From Rock, Scissors, Paper and Other Poems

Brick Dust

You tell me about the brick fields 

where red dust earth and red brick dust become impossible to separate 

and paint the little boys in red dust too 

little boys who work for food 

and you tell me what happens to little boys who work for food 

and now I can’t unknow that 

You tell me about the onion factory 

where you peeled skins and were in turn 

unpeeled yourself 

and as we talk I’m crying onion tears 

and I try to keep the sobs inside and silent 

as you too must have done when you were small 

You tell me about the coming here 

boys packed into room too tight 

to house so many bodies 

you sent that hard-earnt money home 

planned triumphant returns full pockets and a sharp new suit 

until one day home was here but never truly here and no longer there 

You tell me about marriage love and madness 

times when you were racked with shame 

but didn’t have the words to name the fears in any language 

but Djiin or ghost seems closest 

the boy you used to be 

still haunts this broken self 

You tell me about love 

your wife become a tree in whose shade you hide 

shelter from a burning sun and later still the British rain 

your children never hungry safe you say and loved 

their lives a world away 

from red dust brick dust onion peeled boys