Claire Walker, "How to Shape Our Mouths"

 

Claire Walker’s poetry has been nominated for the Forward Prizes, and shortlisted for the Aesthetica Creative Writing Award. Her work is published in journals and anthologies including Poetry Wales, Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal, Finished Creatures, Dust, Aesthetica, and Ten Poems about Daughters (Candlestick Press). Her new pamphlet is How to Shape Our Mouths (Black Cat Poetry Press, 2026). Claire is co-editor of Atrium poetry webzine, and is currently studying for a Creative Writing MA at the University of Birmingham.

About How to Shape Our Mouths, by Claire Walker
How to Shape Our Mouths is a consideration of womanhood, exploring experiences of artists, writers, muses, mothers and daughters, often through an ekphrastic lens. 

You can read more about How to Shape Our Mouths on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read two sample poems from the collection. 

From How to Shape Our Mouths

In which I am one of Modigliani’s nudes

We share a cigarette at the window, blow smoke out into the evening. This is our 1917 Paris skyline, and you are in full bloom, the exhibition imminent. We’re down to embers, so I remove my robe, the cliched silk slipping easily away. I move to the couch and recline. There is tenderness as you ask if I’m comfortable. Amedeo, here I’m so comfortable I could dream. You lift my head, place another cushion for me to rest on. By now, you have a reputation for drink, though you’re not yet tragic, and I am not yet grieving. The walls of your studio are blush-soft. You take up your brush, mix colours to match my hair, contemplate the correct earthy tone for my skin. My spine uncurls, my neck grows long upon the canvas. Here, we are comrades, the moment both abstract and acute. Let’s take my sadness, your poor health, and let’s make something beautiful. This is not sex, or love. There is a little pigment of my heart that wishes to be seen, and there is your longing for greatness. Come, see you whisper. I notice you have captured the exact shade of my irises, the exact shape of my eyes, not your go-to almond form. You tell me you’ll paint the background warm and red like the soul. Modi, by now, all the good light has gone. We circle back, we share a cigarette, blow smoke out into the Paris night. A night so black we no longer see our breath escaping us.

Unzipped

"It was as if another woman had been waiting inside her all along, ready to slip out" - Rachel Joyce, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry.

After I gave birth to my daughter,

I cradled her on the crisp clean sheets.

My body grew a new version of me,

one long exhale, skin unzipped 

and out she slid, quiet and instinctive. 

I knew how to hold the girl, 

was so sure of this fresh employment. 

My baby and I made friends with ourselves 

and those like us. I felt sweet at ease 

teaching how to feed, smile, count on fingers, 

how to shape our mouths into mama.

  

At thirteen, our certainty is delicate 

as sugar work. Those two, who slipped 

knowingly from me, have less to say. 

Still entwined by blood and love,

some days laughter halts in thickened air. 

The bared teeth of that zip pull away, 

come apart. And although we remember 

how to smile, sometimes our mouths cloy 

with stuck apologies. There is a confusion

within us. Those people we once knew —

not quite gone, not quite there either. 

Alan Baker, "A Book of Psalms"

 

Alan Baker was born and raised in Newcastle-upon-Tyne and has lived in Nottingham since 1985. He runs the poetry publisher Leafe Press and its associated magazine, Litter. His recent collections include Riverrun, a book of modernist sonnets about the river Trent and a book of prose poems, Letters From The Underworld.

About A Book of Psalms, by Alan Baker
A Book of Psalms is a sequence of 64 lyric poems in the form of psalms which attempt to do what the Biblical psalms did: praise, lament, critique the state of the world and humanity, elegize a lost homeland, look for faith, and provide comfort and consolation in times of trouble.

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

From A Book of Psalms

Psalm 13

A scattered pigeon, a day named Wednesday

An afternoon declined into undifferentiated colours

As I stumbled into the town where neither the flies

Deceived into activity by the January sun

Nor the stallholders unrolling their canvass

A risen Sun and a working day earth tilted from the light

And all the people chilled and shouting their wares

Seemed more than living words that carry a history

In each syllable, a song in every vowel

Psalm 45

If it should ever come, and I suppose it must, let it be

On a bright morning when all the possibilities settle as one

Like a flock of sparrows who don’t know whether

They’re coming or going or whether the air

Seems cooler, their numbers fewer

Who don’t know that they’re symbols of lust and vulgarity

Who deserve a constellation to be their aid and shelter

And to notice their fall, to hover over late-night pharmacies

To dart between the eaves of Amazon warehouses, to alight at last

In a dream I had of a red-brick terrace in some northern Celestial City

Daniel Sluman, "Pain Songs"

Daniel Sluman is a poet and disability rights activist. He co-edited the first major UK Disability poetry anthology Stairs and Whispers: D/deaf and Disabled Poets Write Back and he has three previous poetry collections published by Nine Arches Press. His most recent book, single window, was released in 2021 and was shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize.

About Pain Songs, by Daniel Sluman
Pain Songs, Daniel Sluman’s fourth poetry collection, is written through the personal experience of chronic pain, examining the ways the body and the world interact and intersect. Tender and often sensual, we encounter the internal weather systems and shifting states of the bodily self, challenging conventional ideas of wellness and illness.

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

From Pain Songs

Chronic

 

god whispered in my ear

 

but the only word I caught

was pain

 

lord      I have learnt

to suffer well

 

                                                            to keep silent

 

as the lit nerve stirs my body

into meaning each morning

 

it begins

like a murmur

 

gathers itself

into a loose gust pushing

 

the window open

 

& say I understand the lesson

this life has taught me

 

to know myself

to the root of each hair

 

to cherish this feeling

 

pale & seized around the suffering

I’m drunk on

 

well what kind of surrender is this ?

 

crumpled in the footwell

of my father’s car

 

as he drives me to the hospital

 

how do I explain

how lucky I am

 

to be the husk this life passes through

like a sweat or splinter

 

how I hang over myself

in bed at night

 

& watch the pain climb inside me

                                                            whilst I sleep

 

& if there is faith

it is the faith required

 

to keep waking inside

            this immovable reality

                       

this ache that tells me

to love loudly

 

the body on fire

 

On leaving the pain clinic

                                     summer was over

 

I watched the light

in the building

 

slip clean

from the windows

 

darkness resting

 

over steel drawers

filled with scalpels 

 

rolls of gauze

& tiny bottles of anaesthetic

 

the storm clouds spilled over

the slick

 

of afternoon traffic

 

                                    the sensation of a lit cigarette

pressed into my left hip

 

kept me here in the car

rain sifting through hedgerows  

 

the knowledge of my pain

always intact

 

this stubborn sense

 

that I will forever

be wedged between the life

 

we’re making

 

& the one we’ve carefully set

aside

 

at the interchange

my mind drifts to thoughts

 

of you in your dress                

of orange flowers

 

when I am pulled whole

through the cotton

 

by the noise

 

of the truck’s wheels

swerving before me

 

the spray

 

of water lifting my car

off the road   

 

            held momentarily

neither in pain or at ease

           

between the ground

                        & the air

 

Linda Anderson, "Against Falling"

 

Linda Anderson is Emeritus Professor of English at Newcastle University where she founded the Newcastle Centre for the Literary Arts (2009) and the annual Newcastle Poetry Festival. She has written extensively about autobiography and feminist theory but more recently has published widely on Elizabeth Bishop, including the monograph, Elizabeth Bishop: Lines of Connection (Edinburgh University Press 2013), and has co-edited a collection of essays on poetry archives, The Contemporary Poetry Archive: Essays and Interventions (Edinburgh University Press, 2019), Originally from Scotland, she was an editor of Writing Women for many years, has worked to establish innovative poetry archives at Newcastle University, including the Bloodaxe Archive, and has published a poetry pamphlet, Greenhouse, with Mariscat Press, 2013. She is currently Chair of Bloodaxe Books. Her first poetry collection, The Station Before (2020) was shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney first collection prize.

About Against Falling, by Linda Anderson 

At the heart of Linda Anderson’s second collection is an exploration of time and of ageing. Time is pressing, urgent, in relation to both the individual and the planet. However, underneath, there is also something unfinished, whether that be in relation to memory’s ability to revise the past and take on different shapes and meanings, or in relation to writing itself which has a materiality which links it to the body of the writer. The collection contains an interrogation of the poet’s notebooks where chance and randomness have an important part to play, forging surprising links, and directing attention to the surrounding bloom of uncertainty, the ‘diaphanous, unwritten poem’ that lurks behind any finished poem. The fragility of the body also undermines certainty, and while much of the collection draws on visual imagery, derived particularly from the natural world, the loss of sight is folded into acts of careful observation, making seeing itself both more problematic and more precious.

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

From Against Falling

Near 

          1.Blanchland 

          For A.S.

Pause in this proximity, 

in the flare of beech trees 

alight with green, 

the canopy of birdsong. 

Now is what we live over and over.

 

Even in this place that feels ancient, 

where our memories come back to us, 

something new is forming, 

an indentation in the surface of things 

a shape making itself felt. 

Listen and it’s as if there’s a note 

almost too high to hear, the merest touch on the strings, 

and we don’t know if we’re imagining it, 

fence and blossom and light 

pierced by singing. 

It takes only this hair-crack in time, 

mid-stride, mid-sentence, 

a bated breath, 

for all the winged creatures suddenly 

to rise up and fly through us.

Dustman 

           (After the painting by Stanley Spencer) 

Everything depends on dust, 

the particles of everything. 

Look closer it tells us. Never 

despise the slightest thing. 

Time is a drift of heaven-knows-what, 

silted into memory. 

Coal-dust, vegetable-dust, 

bone-dust, crockery-dust. 

The dust he noted in the long bare studio, 

warmed by the radiant stove. 

Or the dustmen clattering the bins 

in the street, a paean of bells. 

Life evicts us from our homes, 

yet live we must. 

Fustily, he will resurrect it all. 

The miracle of cabbages 

and teapots and skin. 

Dust to dust 

crowded with yearning 

for how it begins.

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 

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

Bert Flitcroft, "From Standing Stones to the Stars"

Bert Flitcroft was born and brought up in Lancashire but now lives in the Midlands. He now has four collections of poetry published: Singing Puccini at the Kitchen Sink, Thought-Apples, Just Asking, and Seeing the Light. Recently he has made available a fifth, a "new and selected" entitled From Standing Stones to the Stars: History and Science: 30 Poems.

He is an Arts Council prize-winning poet, was Poet in Residence at the Southwell Poetry Festival and has performed at a number of leading national festivals including The Edinburgh International Book Festival. He was Staffordshire Poet Laureate 2015–17 and curated the on-line Staffordshire Poetry Collection. 

He has worked as resident poet with one of our "National Treasures," The Wedgwood Collection at the V&A; as resident poet with the prestigious R.I.B.A. exhibition "The Road Less Travelled"; and recently as part of the University of Keele project "Labelling the Museum."

Bert offers a professional mentoring service and has a long and successful history of running workshops and giving readings, not just to local poetry groups but in libraries, arts centres, gardens, galleries, museums. His website is here. 

About From Standing Stones to the Stars, by Bert Flitcroft

This collection  includes a few new poems alongside poems published in Bert’s first four collections. Glancing through these he realised how many of them reflect his long-standing interest in History and Science, and the variety in form and structure this has involved. This collection is designed to appeal to a wider-than-usual audience as well as the general poetry reader. Many readers will find this collection both a pleasure and a rewarding, if occasionally challenging, experience.

From From Standing Stones to the Stars

Re-reading Jane Austen

in the age of quantum entanglement

It is a truth universally acknowledged

that a single heavenly body, in possession

of space, must be in want of a soul mate. 

Between such bodies there is always gravity. 

And who is to say this isn't a form of love?

Whole galaxies may be holding hands, 

finding themselves entangled

at a subatomic level, sharing words of love. 

And, for all we know, causing each other 

both joy and heartache.

Let us imagine two heavenly bodies

and name them Elizabeth and Darcy,

separate them by unacknowledged forces

a physicist might label Pride and Prejudice.

Two planets, mere particles, seemingly 

destined to circle around each other forever.

There is much that is mysterious about love,

but two particles can exist in many places

at the same time yet be connected, 

and, though separate, can influence and refine 

each other's behaviour.

So who is to deny that our two particles,

one in a high-waisted white gown

and one in a tailcoat with white cravat,

could be entangled at this subatomic level,

discovering that they share an affinity

created by a chance encounter at a ball

or an innocent visit with an aunt.

In the light of quantum entanglement

Jane Austen was much wiser than we think.

With such knowledge would the tale

of Romeo and his Juliet, two universal 

star-crossed lovers, have to end as it did?

Or Abelard and Heloise suffer such a fate?

Intensive care

Back from theatre, again, the room quiet 

but for your breathing and the syllables 

of monitors and voices in the corridor,

your eyes closed in opiate delirium 

you whispered, "I’m being chased 

around the room by a mashed potato."

And, after a silence, "Is that you, dad?"

and you squeezed my hand.

To see your pale flesh turn red and swell,

a doctor's pen daily marking out the fronts,

was to witness Life reduced 

to mortal combat between microbes.

If only Love could be a friendly bacteria

we could drip-feed into veins.

But for now at least, thank God for surgeons 

and men of science, and Fleming.

And yes, thank God for love.

Had you gone before your time, the natural 

order disturbed, I would have needed 

your absence, the silences, made bearable; 

convinced myself you were still somewhere:

in the low clouds, your voice in the wind,

your hands part of the warm rain.

Heaven would be good. That’s what it’s for.

Christine Hammond, "Sojourn: Moments in Poetry"

 

Christine Hammond began writing poetry whilst studying English Literature at Queen’s University, Belfast. Her early poems were published in The Gown (QUB) and Women’s News where, as one of the original members she also wrote Arts Reviews and had work published in Spare Rib. She returned to writing after a long absence and her poetry has been featured in a variety of anthologies including The Poet’s Place and Movement (Poetry in Motion – The Community Arts Partnership), The Sea (Rebel Poetry Ireland), all four editions of Washing Windows and Her Other Language (Arlen House) and literary journal The Honest Ulsterman. She has also been a reader at Purely Poetry - Open Mic Night, Belfast.

Her collection Sojourn: Moments in Poetry has just been published in both digital and paperback forms.

About Sojourn: Moments in Poetry, by Christine Hammond 
Stylistically concise and visually vivid, this collection invites the reader into a reflective space – one filled with poetic resonance, yet open to individual interpretation. Whether inspired by real life, fictional construct or social observation, the poems in Sojourn flow with a deliberate rhythm that mirrors the title’s essence: a journey through moments that shape and define us. All are skilfully observed and articulated, frequently using the descriptive lens of nature and the natural order as a mechanism to contextualise, interpret and seek spiritual understanding. 

You can read more about Sojourn here. Below, you can read two sample poems from the collection. 

From Sojourn: Moments in Poetry

Flight Path

 

         Upwash to Strangford

Long and languid

the dark nights hang

heavy as a cloak 

festooned by Ursa Major

in the lane bats squeak, cats screech

a river runs tidal

and the moon’s soft filament flickers

dying to sunrise

slowly, the wild geese appear

a prelude of eager starts, then

more and more

join to shape the sacred apex

faith in formation

divine travellers lining the sky 

calling their sojourn across the dawn

gifting light from a slipstream 

Ritual

First, the ting-clang comforting din

of companion set with shovel

tuned to the scrape of grate and bucket then

fold, roll, wrap, tie, tuck it with sticks, with coal

till the glow of broadsheet rosettes

cast a news flash for the era

and headlines despatched themselves 

from the hearth

immaculate hearth of the fire altar

lit by my mother, high priestess of the house

who, standing back decreed

that coal’s more like slack, must speak to the coalman

David Morley, "Passion"

 

David Morley, photo by Graeme Oxby

David Morley’s last book FURY was a Poetry Book Society Choice and shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection. David won the Ted Hughes Award for The Invisible Gift: Selected Poems. His other books from Carcanet Press include The Magic of What’s There, The Gypsy and the Poet, a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, Enchantment and The Invisible Kings, also a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and TLS Book of the Year. He is a Professor of Creative Writing at Warwick University and a Fellow of The Royal Society of Literature. 

About Passion, by David Morley 
Drawing on Romany language, storytelling and the speech of birds, award-winning poet David Morley offers a provocative and passionate invitation to reflect afresh on the ways in which the lives, stories and fate of humans – and the more than human – are twinned and entwined. In poems that crackle with verbal energy, he invokes a world where God is Salieri to Nature’s Mozart, in which hummingbirds hover like actors ‘in a theatre of flowers,’ pipistrelles become piccolos, swans swerve comets, and a Zyzzyx wasp is ‘a zugzwang of six legs and letters.’ There are exuberant celebrations of Romany language in the style of Edward Thomas; of how a Yellowhammer inspired Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony; of the world-shaping discoveries of women scientists; and an autobiographical sequence, which roots this poet’s authority and reflects on how power shapes what may be said in public.

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

From Passion

Dialect

Evening froze to a night nailed with stars.
I watched a birdbox fill with flying words
fleeing the chill by bundling in on each other.

I took the box from its hook and prised its lid
and shook the lives of language out of it
festooning my table with wings and feathers,
writhing, fluttering, like a bird made of birds:

Bumbarrel, Hedge Mumruffin, Poke Pudding, 
Huggen-Muffin, Juffit, Jack-in-a-Bottle, 
Feather Poke, Hedge Jug, Prinpriddle,
Ragamuffin, Billy-featherpoke, Puddneypoke,
Bellringer, Nimble Tailor, French Pie, 
Long Pod, Bush Oven, and Miller’s Thumb.

I tucked them in this box before they woke.

We Make Manx Shearwaters Vomit Bottlecaps

‘Here is what a stomach full of plastic
looks like’, says the bird reserve warden. 
‘You can see it stretched so much that the shapes 
of plastic are visible. When I say we make 
shearwaters vomit bottle caps I’m not exaggerating.’ 
He twists the dead Manxie on its back, 
snipping the sac open. His forceps fossick 
into the dissected bird. Rubbish piles up 
by the body. I try to focus on the wing feathers.

Eye-bright and gliding over wave crests
the shearwater rides on updraught and jetstream. 
A placid sea is her unploughed field.
The bird bends on the blade of storm to turn 
the seabed over, drive deep swells to the surface.
The wind swings north, the moon’s gravity 
tilts the sea-surge. For phytoplankton this
is everything life needs, and they flicker 
and breed in that frenzy of crosscurrents
the fish following the glut of plankton
dumped on the surface like data 
from the dark. The shearwater’s compass 
stills, she stabs straight into the undertow 
where her fish-prey spiral in their bait-ball
like an underwater galaxy, a million stars 
spawning in a nebula of bioluminescence.

The warden stares up at me: ‘Don’t look away.’
  
This is what a poem full of plastic looks like.

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.