The Roots Belong to You: Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award Commended Anthology 2023

Foyle Young Poets of the Year Anthology

‘Being a Foyle winner means so much to me. It feels like my voice is being given a spotlight, and that’s so important for young writers.’ – Rishi Janakiraman

Foyle Young Poets of the Year Anthology

The Poetry Society 22 Betterton Street London WC2H 9BX poetrysociety.org.uk

Cover: James Brown, jamesbrown.info

ISBN: 978 1 911046 49 3

© The Poetry Society and authors, 2023

The title of this anthology, The Roots Belong to You, is taken from Nabiha Ali’s commended poem ‘tuesday 10:30 p.m. (in the parking lot beside the field)’.

This anthology is available in a range of accessible formats. Please don’t hesitate to contact us at fyp@poetrysociety.org.uk

The Roots Belong to You

Poems by

the

Commended Foyle Young Poets of the Year 2023

Poems by poets aged 11–14

sorry for hiding that picture of us folded in my notebook because I just couldn’t look at your face without having a crisis

by poets aged 15–16

* Content Warning: these poems tackle sensitive topics, such as assault or violence, or contain strong language.

Poems by poets aged 17

‘These poems show such joy and invention in language that it is an absolute pleasure to spend time with them. They are suffused with love and they look in an open-eyed way at all sorts of difficult experiences. In every situation, they offer their beautiful and uplifting singing. What a wonderful advert for the importance of poetry, and – more – how much faith they give us in people, our capacity for empathy and tenderness and how, with nothing more than words, we can make the world go “Wow!”’

– Jonathan Edwards, Judge of the Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award 2023

The Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award has been finding, celebrating and supporting the very best young poets from around the world since 1998. Founded and run by The Poetry Society, the award has been supported by the Foyle Foundation since 2001 and is firmly established as the key competition for young poets aged between 11 and 17 years.

In 2023, we received over 15,800 poems from over 6,600 poets from 120 countries. 15 top poets and 85 commended poets were selected by judges Jonathan Edwards and Jane Yeh; together, these 100 winners showcase some of the most exciting young voices emerging today. Reflecting on the judging experience, Jane commented: ‘I was astonished – and humbled – to read so many poems brimming over with inventiveness, ambition, and sheer quality. I was deeply impressed by the artfulness and linguistic sophistication found in many of these poems, as well as the engaging, ardent lyricism of their unique voices. It was a privilege and a pleasure to read these entries, which make me feel excited and energised about the future of poetry.’

This anthology collects the 85 poems commended in the competition, and celebrates the names of all 100 winning poets. A sister anthology, collecting the top winners, is freely available to read online (as are a wide selection of anthologies from previous years of the competition and accompanying teaching resources). All of the poems were written by poets aged 11–17. Both anthologies demonstrate a breath-taking array of talent that promises to inspire poetry lovers everywhere.

You might find one or two of the poems difficult to read. Content warnings are included on the Contents page and at the top of any poems where this applies. We have also grouped the poems by the age of the poets who wrote them. We hope this will help you navigate these pages and judge what is appropriate for your age. We recommend younger readers ask a trusted adult to look at the poems before reading them alone.

To enhance your enjoyment of the poems, videos of some of the young poets reading their work are available on The Poetry Society’s YouTube channel.

The young poets represented in this anthology come from all across the UK, from Perth to Portsmouth, Northumberland to Northampton, Enniskillen to Enfield. Further afield, poets hailing from Canada, China, Ghana, Ireland, Philippines, Singapore, Ukraine and USA rub shoulders in these pages. The result is a dazzling array of talent that showcases a vast range of poetic styles, tones and subject matter.

There are poems that deal with the big topics: love and loss, heritage, war, coming of age. Many accomplish this by shining a spotlight on the material of the everyday, demonstrating the way, for instance, a LinkedIn profile, an iPod Nano, or a pair of second-hand shoes can reveal so much about a familial dynamic or the intricacies of first love. There are a number of concrete poems, which make a clever link between form and subject matter. There are poems that draw on fairytales or evoke paintings, and others that take popular culture as their soundtrack, the lyrics of Taylor Swift and Rihanna resonating through the lines.

We were struck by how many of the winning poems are in celebration of grandparents, an illustration of the enduring strength of intergenerational affection. Striking, too, is the number of poems that take animals as their starting point, drawing our attention to the delicate details of a moth, a caterpillar, a ladybird – but always with an eye on what those details reveal about our own, human, lives.

The title of this anthology, The Roots Belong to You, is taken from commended poet Nabiha Ali’s poem ‘tuesday 10:30 p.m. (in the parking lot beside the field)’. In a sense, it gestures towards the ethos at the heart of the Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award: with the award, we hope that every young writer who is recognised – and indeed, every young person who has the courage to write a poem – feels empowered to use their voice and nurtured to grow as a poet.

The Roots Belong to You marks a celebration of the work to come from some of the most inventive, playful, sharp and inventive emerging writers in the world. As Jonathan Edwards commented, ‘the achievement of these poems is enough to drive faith not just in the future but in the present of the art.’

Foyle Young Poets of the Year 2023

Congratulations to the 100 winners of The Poetry Society’s Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award 2023. Thank you to everyone who sent their poems into the competition.

Top 15 Winners

Tyra Alamu . Ellen Bray Koss . Cameron Calonzo . Heather Chapman . Freya Gillard . Rishi

Janakiraman Charlie Jolley Sidney Lawson Lauren Lisk William G. Marshall Frank Qi

Dawn Sands . Issi Sharp . Bea Unwin . Eva Woolven

Commended Poets

Mathias X. Adler . Alicia Aitken . Evie Alam . Lux Alexander . Nabiha Ali . Zaara Arif . Eleni Barrett . Axelle Benoît . Maithreyi Bharathi . Grace Bowen . Saturn Browne . Elise

Buckingham-Lazell . Sophia Camiña . Juliet Capgras . Lilly Cheeseman . Fae Chui . Lewis

Corry . L. Costa . Dingzhong Ding . Mari Farrand . Elena Ferrari . Camille Gabbert . Bohan

Gao . Gabi Goncalves . Margot Liv Gothard . Noah Gower-Jones . Merila Gramy . Sofia

Eun-Young Guerra . Sophie Hardaker . Ben Heiss . Maille Hennessy . Emma Catherine Hoff

. Paromita Islam . Riva Jain . Sarah Kane . Neha Katariya . Emma Kurr . Arthur Lawson .

Michael Liu . Noah Ma . Iona Mandal . Hannah Mansfield . Frankie Martins . C. McIntyre

.

Ramona McNish . Fedora Mensah . Amber Alison Miller . Lydia Mitchell . Eesha MohanClarke Mukhtar O. Mukhlis Frank Njoku Noemi Nobile Maabena Nti Sophia

Papasouliotis . Megan Park . Charlie Pennell . Isabelle Pollard . Anna Ponticos . Jack Puddy

Maaria Rajput Esther Richards Zach Rolfe Madeline Schaeffer Nerys Schmetterling

Margot Sidwell-Woods . Amelie Sillitoe . Cassia Stuttard . Richard Su . Mariia Sukhomlinova

Hannah Sutherland Georgia-mae Tan Malin Janna Vega Ananditha Venkatramanan

Amy Walpole . Helen Wang . Robyn Ward . Chloe Whitehead . Elise Withey . Keiana Wolfe

Jesse Aviv Wolfsthal Lara Wong Leyton Wong Jilin Yan Ange Yeung Viktorija Zak

Poems by poets aged 11–14

Emma Catherine Hoff

The Bookkeeper’s Wife

She is bored – she cooks and cleans, but she does not fry numbers or sweep up paper, she doesn’t sew clothes from calculations, she doesn’t sit in chairs patterned with dollar bills. She is bored. She does not think mathematical thoughts, her fork stabs at potatoes,  not calculators, the movies she watches never feature monsters made of multiplication.  Her husband keeps his work in the office, and comes home completely ordinary, he does not complain about his boss, he does not remark on the records he keeps. She is bored – he keeps no actual books inside the house, the paintings on the walls do not feature landscapes painted with digits, the plants she waters do not rattle off the answers to math problems. She is bored. Her shoes do not tell her exactly how far she has walked, starting from inches and making their way to miles, her walls do not scream the dimensions of the apartment, the piano does not say how many keys it has. She is bored – everything in the house is filled with numbers, and yet nothing admits it, not even the dirt from the carpet of his office. She watches him come home. She opens the door. She serves dinner. She is bored – she keeps on going.

Keiana Wolfe

Summer Camp

In the dorm,  my friends sit  in a braid chain,  combing their  fingers through  each other’s hair.

Honey blonde,  chestnut brown,  their soft strands blush in the lamp  light. The girls radiate rosemary and grapefruit, L’Oréal shampoo which I can’t use.  I am at the back  of the braid chain. My afro, stubborn,  matted, untouched.

Alicia Aitken

A box of plasters

I am on a shelf like many other objects, wondering who might pick me.

Inside me, my children, a flurry of plasters rustling in my tummy.

A little boy seems to be staring in my direction, soon after his chubby fingers clutch me. Plop! I am dropped into a trolley, and I feel dizzy as I whirl.

Noise comes and goes, people chattering and laughing, but then I hear a cry for help. Suddenly I am shaken, as my precious cargo is taken.

Stuck onto a scratched knee, one by one almost all disappear.

Onto a scraped elbow, a blistered toe, they all went happily.

Only one remained, the biggest of all, destined to heal greater wounds. Could it be for a damaged doll? Its soft padded shield still untouched.

Days later, the same chubby fingers crawled inside me, he poked my last dressing onto a huge screen, wishing to fix the morose images of debris, of an unexpected earthquake causing misery.

And then I understood my destiny I ended up empty, but my life felt complete. I am a simple box of plasters, but do not underestimate my powers of remedy.

Zach Rolfe

The Caterpillar

The bright luminous ball rises, as a minuscule caterpillar hatches from an egg. The soft, spring breeze strolls past him. Soon, he goes to the ground to learn defence. He makes friends and gets a degree in clumsiness. He makes enemies, but always befriends them soon after.

The luminous ball is now in the centre. The caterpillar has now met his true love. He takes her out to the ‘All the Leaves’ buffet and he takes her to see his parents. They are having the happiest time of their lives and have a family.

The light is dying now and shadows are being cast. The caterpillars’ kids have grown already. The love is dying and the two caterpillars do not sleep together anymore.

The darkness is coming.

The light is gone and the children now have kids of their own. The icy wind now creeps up upon him. He lays in his chrysalis with no light, no love. Until eventually, he awakens but as a different creature. He flies off into the great barren field of clouds.

Noemi Nobile

The girl I never saw

I never did see her face, Nor the dull glint of one eye, The faded birthmark near her mouth, The deep red of her lips. I might’ve seen her crooked smile, Angled towards her steel-capped boots, I may have heard the swish of a coat, And the jingle of a purse. And if I did see a watch, Slip off a man’s wrist, I never did say a word, To anyone of this. But I did see her board, And hear footsteps hit metal, The piercing sound of a whistle, And the small raise of one hand As the train took her away, And the rain started pouring in, Filling the space, Where she had once been.

Juliet Capgras

I am going to make a hat

I am going to make a hat. A hundred different parts all pulled together, With red embroidery thread. Buttons, so it stays together, A key, so I’m never far from home, Feathers, so it can fly.

Ribbon, so it feels nice when you hold it, Sea glass, so it makes pretty colours in the light, And a brass beetle, so it can remember him.

All arranged like a bouquet On a green felt hat.

I’m going to put it on.

I’m wearing my hat

Wherever it shall take me And we walk

Together

And the harsh winds whip my hair around, But I don’t care.

Because I’m wearing my hat My hat takes me to the beach

We gaze out upon the great chalk cliffs We look over the sun-bleached sand.

I take off my hat I set it on the sand I look at it I leave.

I think the sea needs it more than me.

Sarah Kane

I SET THE TABLE

I set the table smoothing out the wrinkles that form on the stained tablecloth. At your seat I linger, placing your dish there, the steam that radiates from the feast dancing along in the still air. It’s empty, that chair, that I know.

The food is a meal you’ll never consume. I know that too.

I fold your clothes neat and tidy. I make your bed, arranging the pillows just the way you like.

Will you lay your head upon this again and slumber once more?

Will the hands that bathed me, lathered me with my favourite soap, ever touch me again?

Your scent I start to forget, it dissipates with every second you remain gone. I frantically close the windows, shutting them tight so you stay with me, despite the suffocating summer air.

Mom yells at me for it, she doesn’t understand. But I know she misses you, she hides the tears she sheds, when your name escapes my mouth. Her vacant bottles cover the floor, every drop drained from them.

I’ll keep your stuff tidy, I’ll make you breakfast, cutting your toast just the way you like it.

I’ll keep Mom safe, too, be the soldier she needs, just like you. I’ll be here.

Waiting for the day you come home.

Paromita Islam

Made in Bangladesh, Made in China

Young women with old lives scrubbing the floors of dusty places history has long forgotten. Old women with young eyes knitting until the light burns out, until history has remembered. Smoke clouds their vision, each blinded by the daze of their work-stricken lives as they look down at their hands and remember a time when there weren’t so many Scars

Scratches

And lines

Stitching on labels and tags that say Made in Bangladesh and Made in China –She knits a jumper, while the other she cleans the floors,

To pay for a home they cannot afford.

To pay for the children they so desperately want to keep.

To pay for the lives they so very much want to live.

That is the stuff of dreams and the women, both young and old alike, cannot seem to make time for such dreams in their lives, Cannot seem to schedule it in, Freedom, it seems, has to be pre-booked.

Or at least make a reservation though the chances are unlikely, Of the women ever coming out of history alive; coming out of history remembered.

Cut to downtown New York where young women live young lives, only blinded by their potential, Where old women with old women eyes have the satisfaction of sending daughters and granddaughters to college, Wearing everything from minor to designer

Where equality couldn’t be finer and awareness the messiah

Yet I walk to classes wearing jumpers, Made in Bangladesh

Made in China

Fae Chui

Gardenias

My father migrates with the storks, every time the leaves Turn from green to yellow and eventually fall off. The house lights dim down as the storks set off, And the tables and chairs turn dull as the storks elevate off Rainy London.

My father separates from the storks, Bidding farewell to them, ready to meet them when The leaves turn green again.

In front of the sunken eyes awaits the soil and the concrete Waiting to be grown into the gardenias

That he so longed to be with.

A pencil and pen sulking on the desk, A ruler and stencil going down memory lane, He gets a rude awakening when planet-sized tracing paper is slammed In front of their edges, ready to build Gardens upon gardens of gardenias.

Murky mud and sorrowful sand, Sticking and squirming to the soles of my father’s shoes.

The blazing fire burning the skin of the construction site, Rivers of sweaty aroma hiking through the air –Howls and yelps and then an alarm, As a tsunami sandstorm buries the garden of gardenias.

My queries on why I was never allowed to go to the site Were answered by the howls of the drowned gardenias. Was it a construction site Or a desert?

My father takes one glance at it and Summons the leaves to turn green three months later.

Maille Hennessy

Cooking

with Grandad

My grandad, aged eighty-seven, adjusts his glasses and asks:

‘Where am I?’

‘You’re in Mary’s house – my house, daddy, remember, you’re going to cook with the girls!’ Explains my mum, as she winks at me and my sister –And –

I can see the fogginess in his brain – like white, fluffy clouds. He blinks, just for a second and the clouds move out of the way.

His eyes shine a little brighter than before.

He grins, and holds out his hand. I shake it.

We are making soup – carrot and coriander.

He wears a black and white apron over his bottle-green jacket and unusually he isn’t sporting his brown cap.

Instead, I’m wearing it – right over my eyes so I can’t see and I’m joking around with him.

‘It suits you,’ he says hoarsely – and then he laughs.

As he chops up the veg and peels the carrots he asks the same question he asked just minutes before:

‘Where am I?’

He is given the same reply. His shoulders unstiffen and he relaxes.

He asks more questions after that, but the soup has to cook.

We sit him down, swapping old school pictures of him and his classmates.

He recites the name of almost all of the friends and family members from each picture.

‘Well done, Grandad!’ we say, as we praise him and he is more perky and good-natured after that.

Our soup is ready to eat, and although he needs reminders that he made the soup, he enjoys it nevertheless.

He goes home, apron off, jacket on, cheery smile, strong handshake and his old brown cap hung on his head at a jaunty angle.

Margot Sidwell-Woods

All the Words for Dawn

Light-splattered, dapple-glowing, dimpling dark, midnight to morning to brightness and stark light piercing the sky, in indigo, periwinkle from blue; fuchsia, marshmallow, damask, every pink hue, to scarlet, crimson, vermilion, rusty sanguine, peaches and nectarines, bright tangerines – mandarins –to the lemonade bubbling through your straw, to primrose yellow dotted on the spring forest floor, fading into blue summer sky with the chitter-chirp of the soprano choir of worm-catching early birds, clouds flounder and it’s done, white cotton meanders past the sun – the night, for now, severed and sawn, but these were the colours behind your curtains at dawn.

Ananditha Venkatramanan

home. tomorrow, i’ll meet family.

old women who can’t use ‘the Facebook’, aunties who pinch your checks till they pain, old men who quiz you on your sport knowledge, the latest cricket scores, uncles who give out the worst dad jokes. cousins who exist just to irritate you, old and new friends, soulmates. tomorrow, i’ll meet home.

a whole new world in front of me, the advertisements of ponni rice on the boards, the cows roaming around, at one with us, the posters of cricket stars wearing colgate toothpaste, the colourful apartments dressed in the shining pinks and bland beiges, the motorbikes calling my name.

two years ago, i thought why aren’t i there?

this type of love doesn’t appear too easily, when you get lifted off your feet, when even shaded trees make you cry (the good way), when dangerous driving makes you feel safe, when thunder and lightning wraps around a city – bringing it alive, when people are so good they allow you to be immersed in their company. so when i have to walk away, it breaks my heart.

Grace Bowen

letter; eleven months ago

she is twelve years old. she is twelve years old and she longs to be temporary. she is electricity. she says sorry too much and thank you not enough. she has lost three friends this summer. she can’t see the next two months but they will be hell. she is atlas. she chews bright pink gum but is too afraid to spit it out. she sees patterns when she closes her eyes and walls when she opens them. she has to go soon, but she is still grieving her old face. she eats gravity like it is nothing and wears pearls in her hair because they make her feel closer to the sky. she looks in the mirror and sees nothing. she looks up and she sees stars. she is lightning. she is gone. she is learning to disappear. she writes her name fainter. she is twelve years old and she smells of fear.

Anna Ponticos

The Goldfish

Scales glow dimly. Age old copper, Marred and stained with wear.

Through still, stale water

A fin flaps. Gingerly, Lethargically.

Staring at the world through eyes glassy and grey,  The filter unshakeable.

Swimming absently

Drifting in circles, A ghost in a solitary bowl. Hitting the walls over And over,

The same routine.

Maybe one day it will reach the river.

But there was a time That may not even have been  When water was to be sailed through, When scales had a golden sheen. And the glass bowl Had felt endlessly wide

But that time is no longer.

Swimming absently

Drifting in circles, A ghost in a solitary bowl. Hitting the walls over And over,

The same routine.

Maybe one day it will reach the river.

Margot Liv Gothard

Let’s talk.

Hey, are you the love of my life? I’m a little off of this but now is here again, so. I want to ask you something but you don’t have an answer and I want someone to clean the blood on the floor and draw lines over my face and I’m crazy. For you. I think. And I miss someone I haven’t met and I miss him all the time all the time all the time. And words are going on forever in the space behind me and I wonder who I could be if I could see them and I’m done with the chitter-chatter people over the hills and up and down and everywhere at once because in another life I was. I was and was and was. And I want you to hear me hear me talk to me be here with me be messy and bloody and so so in love here over here I’m waving my hands can you see me? And I love my brain because I couldn’t be so quiet so quiet sometimes I am and you don’t understand that telling me I’m being too loud will kill me slowly. I’m dying slowly. In times of beauty and humming glowing, time stops and I see myself creeping towards the end of the line. And I used to dream of a train stop where I would climb under the train and sit over the tracks and I would read every name carved there. And I hope someone will read a world of me in that place. A world of ribs and color and early mornings slow and swirling, and infinite, endless, inscrutable, senseless, and beautiful beautiful people who saw some glimpse of the multitudes I contained. I hope you bury me and laugh at the insignificance of a handful of atoms that did close to nothing to contain me, to contain this and I hope you look around and know that I am everything. Everything everything everything. I want you to draw an arc and see me on a plane listening to ‘Are You Gonna Be My Girl’ cause right now I see a boy twirling in the space between the tray table and the seat and I love him and I live and live and live. And I’m going to miss breathing. I really am.

Leyton Wong Dream

Time to return there

pink skies with orange clouds

an endless sea of pale blue grass

strange and stubby birds

mushrooms that put skyscrapers to shame.

a plump purple cat emerges from a hollow

bouncing around asking me to follow leading me down the rabbit hole to a room where

a group of maniacal monkeys are

playing and eating a deck of cards

a squad of glamourous geese dressed up in a dapper tuxedo letting out heavenly honks of song

frogs give an exhausted elephant

a slimy massage with their tongues.

weirded out I continue

deeper into this rabbit hole

screaming gassy goats letting out deadly fumes

a fish dressed up as a sushi chef

two human sized ants boxing

snakes endlessly eating their tails

a round orange old man starts to glow and fly

brighter and higher

so bright that he’s blinding me

a strong flash of white.

Frank Njoku

Born Black

After Dave’s ‘Black’

Blacker the berry, the sweeter the juice, A kid dies – the blacker the killer, the sweeter the news, If he’s white, he’s ill and confused, If he’s black, he’s probably armed, If he sees you, he’ll shoot.

Growing up, we learn our lineage, While my ancestors picked, Yours were free to relieve their responsibilities, We never got to experiment with family trees, as they taught us about famine and greed, Showed you photos of our fam on their knees.

Black is working harder than the people you’re better than, Black is having your culture stomped on by people who are whiter than. Black is all I know, There’s not a thing I would change in it.

Jilin Yan

Slip

By the stone city, with its squatting historic buildings and tourist traps, Nanjing’s residents hang their clothing on lines made of red plastic bags. The stone buildings burn my hands when I climb up to see the city, and when my fingers slip, my mother’s there to give me a soft scolding and a hand. When I stand on wobbly legs, the world doesn’t look like much: worn paper boxes leaning on each other in the cupboard, neat little sections where the motorcycles line up for rest. Then my father taps my shoulder and points upward. Jagged and hugged by Chinese characters, the tower hangs over my head. Incense smoke wafts from the windows and when I inhale, my throat prickles. It’s a castle, I say in wonder.

***

In Canada’s kindergarten, we play every day. The light is harsh and black polka dots spill over the white floor, like someone dropped a container of beads. Toys scattered all over the table make me dizzy. I want the purple one. I ask for it, but when I try to move my mouth around the rounded English vowels, they slip away. New words twist around my tongue – too sugary, like my brother’s new bubble-gum. My classmates look at each other and giggle. Jane, another girl from China, smiles at me in encouragement. Whenever I speak, it comes out all dirty from my accent. I’ll learn to speak English perfectly, I decide, and I’ll keep trying the words till they find a way to fit.

Tomb-sweeping day in Lufeng. We buy cemetery flowers that reek of perfume, the plastic wrapping crinkling in my aunt’s fist as we walk up the hill to the graveyard. Our best outfits and mosquito repellent are slathered on all around. The little cousins use fallen trunks as balancing beams; I stay to babysit as my relatives find their lost loves in the tidy rows. They place the flowers, arrange them with tenderness I can’t watch, and kneel, pressing sweet proverbs into the dirt at their knees. My grandfather fractured his spine a year ago, and watching him hunched over on the steep mountain, I realise that someday I might be coming here every year to mourn him. The thought feels like a bruise. I turn away and join my cousins in their game.

Weekdays slip away through the cracks in the windows of a creaky Vancouver house. I sit in front of the scarred kitchen table in the yellow light, reading a battered copy of Junie B. Jones that I borrowed from my brother. The colours on the cover unsettle me so I won’t look at them; my feet don’t yet reach the floor. My mother clicks out emails on her weary red Dell and when she’s done,

she scrapes her chair back to tip the screen towards me. Is the spelling right? she asks, and I scan the paragraphs and make corrections. She thanks me, and we both turn back to our words. ***

Visiting my mother’s Shenzhen neighbourhood. The vines cling to the entrance gate and it takes a special manoeuvre to reach the lock. Inside, the curtains flutter under the giant fan in the living room. Waipo steams fresh fish, just slaughtered, while my mother’s sister tosses bok choy in oyster sauce. The little kitchen revels in the attention, clunking and whistling as the adults gossip; from the living room, I watch my family light up. I slip away and talk to my cousin, but his English is scattered, and I find that my Mandarin is now almost as bad. He prods at my brother and me like we are foreigners, asking how to pronounce restaurant and dessert, and shame clumps in my throat when I reply. We are not what he expected, and this place is not what I remember. But I think I like it. ***

Eating steamed buns at Raine-ayi’s house, a dozen aunties with strong lungs assembled around the shrimp, picking off the heads and cackling about their kids’ weight. A pinch of Guangdong in suburban Vancouver. The lighting is some mouldy yellow with a specific awfulness that makes me want to cry, so I run outside. Jane and Daniel and Damien and Estella and I chase each other around the backyard, all of us with the little white names and shrieking games. Our parents watch us with careful relief and adoration through the screen door.

They knew, watching our Mandarin conversations stumble and slip into English, that someday we’d outgrow China. They knew that for the rest of their lives, we would be showing them how to sweeten their words just so, like this. They knew that we’d build our better lives in a world in which they’d always be outsiders. They knew it all, then, and now I do too.

Charlie Pennell

What You Made Me and What I Became

At the dinner table. I stare at the photo of my grandmother in her wedding dress. She is talking and I try to imagine her saying her vows, her face going soft around the edges, her hair tucked behind her ear by a larger hand. The wrinkles of her face tell a story, one I have not quite learnt yet. We clear the table together and I wonder how many times she has done this. I wonder if she gets tired. I wonder what she dreamed of, if she ever imagined me.

By the window on the warmest day of the year. My mother is asleep in the garden. I am hit with a burst of love so strong I have to sit down, seeing her with her sunglasses over her face and her legs stretched out over the deckchair. She works hard. I notice it in the late returns, in the quiet rants, in the bags under her eyes. When I glimpse her caressed by sunlight, I am five again, unable to be near her without wanting to be in her arms.

My middle name comes from a woman I never met. I carry her with me on every certificate, and so I keep her alive. My eyes and nose and lips are shaped from the genes of a hundred women who gave birth and gave birth and gave birth until I was put together like destiny’s puzzle. I carry them with me, hidden in every reflection, and so I keep them alive.

We are the woman who will never die. We watch, silently, as the man who will never die laughs and cries and hits and gets hit and we wonder when is the right time to speak. But we will speak. And when we speak, it is with every voice and it will deafen the world, so that in the ashes and debris we can all learn how to listen.

Malin Janna Vega

I’m sorry for hiding that picture of us folded in my notebook because I just couldn’t look at your face without having a crisis

I’m sorry for the attachment I have to the broken dollar store earphones that were shoved, tangled, in the deep pockets of my messenger bag the pair that we shared on that bench in the middle of the field listening to The Wallows after walking for three hours, our hands intertwined the whole time and I didn’t know how to tell you that my fingers were growing numb I’m sorry for the way I look at the stuffed owl with the floppy beak that I bring around and the stuffed bear with no clothes that I have worn down over the nights yes, the one you called “dead meat” because it reminded you of a corpse the same way I say I look at you and your brimming eyes, so full of adoration for me? or for what I say I am?

I’m sorry that I can’t sit beside you and give you everything you give me and that I can’t bring myself to say the words “don’t be afraid, I’ll always be your safe space” I’m sorry that I looked you in the eyes that January night and said everything I once meant and for how I took your hands into mine and ignored the burning in my chest because I have woven so many mistruths about misfortunes that I no longer know if you love me for me

I’m sorry I hid the picture we took at the arcade booth where we made a heart with our hands for so long squeezed between ink-stained pages where I wrote about you after you gave your heart to me, after I became your world and you became my greatest fear you can’t just open your mouth and whisper words of devotion – don’t you dare call me perfect everything I’ve ever been afraid of has permanent creases on it

Lilly Cheeseman

Two Pirates and Sally

He and I were pirates

Sally – the ship’s cat

There were SHARKS in the water!

But the water was actually LAVA And the SHARKS had LASERS

They were getting closer…

He sliced off their heads With one slice of his  Sword. Then I was KIDNAPPED. But Sally came and rescued me I was FINALLY FREE

And YOHOHO

The winds blew wildly Wrapping my hair around my neck

As we DEFEATED the BADDIES

I watched His skill

How young and free His movements

Our boat was HUGE

But you could cross it in a metre

And the sails were large

And there was a LAVA DRAGON

And skulls everywhere

And an elephant that ate burgers

And a mermaid who gave us chocolate

And He raised His sword and –

‘Excuse me girls, visiting hours are over’

The mermaid becomes an old woman

A MEAN one.

Who makes us leave.

And we’re too scared to argue.  Bravado gone with the eye patch. At the bottom of a bag.

Sally and I left Him,  Pirate Captain Left Him, our grandpa alone.

Nerys Schmetterling (Ladybird) Tragic in a Glossy Pink Wig

Slender

Kisses in ladybird, contracts and flushes

Lips stained red with pigment: flimsy camouflage

Colours a shabby bird

She sketches an idol to stylise

Feathers glossy with magazine ink

Restless bones ache

Towards a frayed curtain, perpetually closing

This is the final act.

Tread backwards

To where the stars wink

Confused and derelict

Wisdom teeth clink

Like Champagne glasses

You stutter

Spewing your flimsy camouflage

To the eruption of applause

Spotless ladybird.

Poems by poets aged 15–16

Eleni Barrett

Beauty

We’re high on Dr Pepper and heatwaves

Summer storms, sweat and rain on our faces

By the river on thirty degree days

Lost in our overprotected spaces

Of purposeful addiction and essays

Which we say we can’t be bothered to write

Because we’re too busy socialising

But we write those same essays late at night

Alone in our darkness and bare blue glows

Which comfort us in the stark sun’s rising

Like flickering waves lapping at our toes

Lame and lyrical, lingering and lost

Like childhood melodies played through our bones

Hollow and unfamiliar… and soft.

Richard Su

the abandoned cathedral where we confessed every other week

I think there was a day when our moms stopped dragging off our bed sheets to catch Sunday morning service. Because we’re newly sixteen, we can’t remember what our last ‘Amens’ were for. Noah sighs before sliding onto the pew after a Friday of playing hooky and raiding the wine cellar. We sit where our family once sang ‘How Great Thou Art’ at a tone that almost sounded like a holler. The yellowing ass indents are now covered by a thick layer of dust. We’ve grown used to lip-syncing to scriptures as the priest glared at us with divine judgment. We’ve grown used to the weekly sermon ending with Father Augustine praying for God to forgive us. We’ve grown used to heading out of church and heading straight to the train yard with graffiti spray paint in hand. Families lean forward and close their eyes. We’re busy smudging pink bubblegum under the timeworn pews. We didn’t have to hide sin in our prayers anymore.

Echoes of our hushed swearing reflect upon the chambers, then onto the altar. The chamber’s mural of Mary and Joseph gives us the same stare that our mothers do.

Zaara Arif Remember

You remember how you were always shivering, even when the leccy meter wasn’t switched off and your mum had missed enough meals to give you kids a warm one it’s like there’s this blizzard whipping up inside me you used to whisper to your sister when you huddled under her covers as if the threadbare fabric, with its lint and mayonnaise stains could block out your dad shouting and your mum sobbing as she prays

Looking back, you think it was more of a strained feeling pulled taut against fraying heartstrings that cannot be bookended between words and letters but you recognised it, knew it like you wished you didn’t, when you all trudged down these dismal London streets shoes soaking, water pooling where your hood should be eyes wide as flashy cars whizz by drenching you

that familiar sinking moment when you see yourself the way they see you and how small your mother looks You used to flinch at everything and wonder if it was because it took all your effort to sellotape

everything together and even breathing too loud might make the whole Jenga tower go flying

with the odd block going missing for months at a time under the sofa along with unopened bills, eviction letters and all the other paper monsters you had learnt to dread

Content Warning

L. Costa

Maternal

My mother walks with her feet in concrete. She tells me of her grandparents and those beyond. Of her once-uncle who tied his fate with 2 ropes in his garden. Yet I study all she says, she spits out all she’s heard. My brother relishes the silence, like my father, whose silence is more an absence. At lunch, I speak in hope that my mouth won’t be served on a plate. I do not talk for them, but for the house on the lake. The cupboards full of warm shirts and towels. The pastel door and the sun-soaked rooms. And when I can no longer speak of lakes, I say I am exhausted. I must go to bed.

Madeline Schaeffer

portrait of a whale

After Amanda Gorman’s ‘Essex I’

i wa nt to swim i want to s wim but i’m sca red the water will sting my skin and the w hales will hear my alarm from miles out. there was a boat in port today it sunk it sunk on a wind less night. when it sunk, it shoc ked the sea with its stomach. it was carry ing water. cases and cases of plastic bottles sinking in their own element. the whales know there are many ways to drown many ways to sink to sing. of course, no one speaks of the shipwreck, myths like that are easily forgotten. like hurricanes and oil spills and record heat in california. the streets, i can hear them. the rain in my car window sculpts itself into a river and the drain puddle is an ocean a rainbow-oil ocean. i want to scream i want to glean the beaches of carcasses and mourn with the whales. there is a stage of grief where you blame yourself for everything. i cannot stop thinking i washed my hair twice today. it felt good to mourn and destroy at the same time. we ship ships across the ocean like paper boats in a bath tub. i was five when they sunk. six when i learned that there were vessels in my blood there was blood in the vessels in my body. an ocean. the boat that sunk was not a myth, the whales choke on the little blue caps as they swallow. i watch their bodies strategically wrecked. i play battleship with my nephew he shrieks as my ships are hit. driving home, the road is covered in rainwater. floating on the stream, a shopping bag. a toothbrush, a shirt, a styrofoam cup. we leave pieces of ourselves everywhere, as though we think nature will plead for our leftovers. accept them as its own. as we own. our cars and everything that ends up in the ocean. i do not claim ownership of that gasoline. but it is mine. like the sea. i want to swim and when i hold the whales i want to tell them i’m the reason you have to grieve.

Camille Gabbert

Cadence

I teach a music class on Saturdays, for kids because I am not qualified to do much else, except play cello and break up fights between boys who still say sorry, sit at the back and like to keep me guessing on whether they actually like me or are simply deposited there each morning, the cold still clinging to their carpet-burn cheeks as I teach them how to sing with all their breath so it doesn’t hurt

Leo: my favourite and knows it smiles big, like he wears summer between his teeth and tanned skin, and makes people laugh by being naughty, as if he knows I’m safe to push against, the same way I only sass teachers who never lose their temper

One week when the trees are green Leo’s father pulls him out of class, and beats him for his stupid mouth behind the lacquered door, his face pressing into the marble as he refuses to apologise for a crime that runs deeper than marrow

I stand reflected at the threshold, hand still waving goodbye to the dust that billows from old carpet when it’s struck, the weight of my face in the glass, my jaw hitting the ground as a phantom knee presses into the sniper red spot between my shoulder blades, just kind of staring

Content Warning

Frankie Martins

my mother left me sitting at the aquarium

floating in daytrips – she set my timer half an hour to pick fish bones from my teeth i reconciled their apathy with hands of splinters my guilt blew bubbles like a party trick popping eyes applauded – ruddy and suffocating shifting the glass with their tidal attention

my cardigan loops catch on fishing hooks their teeth pin details to porous stomachs

3 grains of untrapped food descended 2 were plucked – my tongue their saviour the third landed headfirst with a cartoon pulse whispered 7 rings into the patchwork

my mother texts me 10 more minutes. the vibrations itch of salt under eyelids through the rush hour i hear their sentence scraping scales from my belly i forge earrings they flap away the streamlined confrontation catching camera flashes with a knowing wink

my bubbles only exist while drowning i needed 12 stitches to sew shut my ugly gills gawking toddlers stare like coral bleaching their hollow mouths bury my anglerfish bulb it stutters and coughs through jaws that blink and never once cracked searchlights on sandcastles

Isabelle Pollard

Ode to Clouds

I write in praise of youLingering oasis from the sun. The way you lick the sky clean of heat. I write in praise of your slow dripping over the atmosphere like honey running down buttered toast, in praise of your sheer intimacy, of how you hold one another, merge and cling together as the world watches from below. I write in praise of your quiet subtlety, ink drops on the ocean, soothing sea-beds with your shade.

I write in praise of your wrath, the thunderous way you command the heavens, wringing out your will and wet warning. I write in praise of your unending

conclusion – vapour weeping into rain and washing over our mortal skin; the acquiesce that your time is over. I write in praise of the hope you inspire

evaporating out of puddles, each particle suspending, your calm wisdom in knowing you’ll return to the sky and claim it. Again and again.

Sophia Camiña

The Browning of the Leaves

We must resign ourselves to the browning of the leaves, Watch them dance for a second, to lie in pavement graves, As they spiral down to death upon the gentle breeze.

For the fading green, for the burning orange underneath, Time sings a mournful ballad, lamenting that We must resign ourselves to the browning of the leaves.

And Time will twist and stretch the Souls of these Men who count the seasons, rolling on their wheel, As they spiral down to death upon the gentle breeze.

Once heavy branches, now bare, float, naked, at ease, Amongst whispers of coming snow, and remind us that We must resign ourselves to the browning of the leaves.

In attic boxes of light and joy, lie last year’s lonely Dreams; Lids lift off, and away they waltz with the last falling leaves, As they spiral down to death upon the gentle breeze.

Although we know it is coming, never are we at peace; We fight against Autumn’s reminders of decay, but We must resign ourselves to the browning of the leaves, As they spiral down to death upon the gentle breeze.

Jack Puddy

Moth

After Emily Dickinson

As I stumbled out, early hours upon a muffled, moonlit tile –  a chip, on the whitewash a little winged ash –the shadow of a fly. Flapping, greyish thing a soft, strange burrowing –flightless, ball of fluff. Against the glistening night, it was a furry fleck of pale – or was it a silvering dust – the moth –a ghost?

Neha Katariya

Search History

how to write a poem

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how to write something loud that rips itself screaming and crying from a page to be heard how to write a rabid monster drooling with bloodied words

how to find corpses from a time where living was gentler on the soul and drag it out on display with a painted smile how to tear your heart out and throw it into a broken orbit and hope for the best how to weave a cadaver back together and puppet its bloodied footsteps through the hallways how to create new life with nothing but blood and ink how to write a poem

Elise Buckingham-Lazell

Ode to Plath

After Sylvia Plath’s ‘Lady Lazarus’

You are spinning, spinning, incandescent –   Blind and biblical, but tender as anything. Your shell should be ribbed and robbed of the soft Squelch of vulnerability, and yet you spill From the bullet wounds shot clean through your good hand And form a pool on the kitchen tiles. Turbulent, you travel Through centuries. You’ve existed for longer than Three decades. You are a stray match lighting  The gloaming, igniting the sky in flames that Bite with every tooth they were born with. The air Tastes sour, trailing obediently behind your Departure. Erratic, the bubbles from your  Drink burst and spit like hot oil into your irises.

I can picture your eyes, bright and brilliant And covered in three patches of void too many,  One for every life you’ve taken, Your own, your own, your own. You have six lives Left to spare and you are drinking them with olives  In a cocktail glass. I can almost touch the ring on the Wrong finger, imitation silver, through the wall of Your singing razor blade.

Content Warning

Mariia Sukhomlinova

Another Morning in the Ukrainian Country

An ever-slight smell of burned porridge did not unsettle us as Babushka blew out the fire with a single breath, we knew How hard it was to get it right, we knew our appetite could not be hurt.

As always, above a clamor of a hundred glass jars, she would emerge with a “Strawberry or Apricot?”

The jam thoughtfully divided between my cousin and me, we raced outside into the vast blue.

As I passed through the lace-draped front door, “So the mosquitos and the bugs do not invade in swarms!”

The lace felt soft to the touch, I let my cheek rest upon it, for just a moment, as I closed my eyes And breathed it in – a breeze that tossed about, but always keeping out of reach the dried up blossoms

Of grandma’s sweet strawberries, the bright-burning, ruby-red treasure guarded by her ever-watchful gaze.

“Be careful!” she would scold us as she climbed the pear tree from across the field sprinkled over with fresh dew, And still her voice would carry as the old rusty bucket she brought back from the factory in ’62

Carried the soft, sweet fruit, its handle tied with construction string around her waist. “I’m warning you!

Another step to the right, Liz! Be careful, we already have so few!”

The sprinklers on, we barely heard what she said as we let our hair down, our faces, Fatigued with the heat of mid-summer, red with the juice of the fruit we so carelessly trod over.

“Good Lord, what happened to you two?” “We made face masks, Babushka!” And down the stream fled her composure, Not finding near as much pleasure, as much blind happiness in the strawberry seeds dried into our cheeks

As we had found back then, untroubled, sheltered in a paradise we called our own amidst the weeds.

51

Who knew the language of life could so closely resemble my mother’s needlework: she’d often weave in her chair near the fire on some afternoons then say ‘Rosy, dear come look’. I see her interwoven threads in this Crystallography lab, this DNA, this photo. here, they bind together, spiralling to a ladder, the crystal light reveals spheres, helices, double like my sister’s French plaits I traced with my hands one night when we talked about the war which would (soon) be over like the motley macramé art I saw once at an art exhibit near the Seine, double like the part of me slowly dying; Cancerous ovaries. they said. who knew that the language of life would reveal a ladder one that I may never get to climb to the secrets of the universe

Photograph 51

for Rosalind Franklin

Photograph

for Rosalind Franklin

Axelle Benoît

Unfinished

The last line of a book is the most important, the line that determines how much your life will change. So I always finish my books. Just in case. My aunt holds me in a hug;

I am the last to let go. I wrap myself in my blankets, my head a bow; Wait for a call before I get up and start my day. The fridge is warm. I eat pickles for breakfast and wish that I could stick myself in the freezer. My head splits open when I get outside thoughts tumble on the pavement the birds use them in their nests. The man on the radio talks of his enlightenment. The channel changes. The sky is blue, the clouds stay the same. There are no grounds left in my cup.

But I finish every song I listen to. Just in case.

Michael Liu

Grandmother, these are your mountains

Back when you could still walk I remember  picking oranges with you. In your bones, we were picking oranges.

There was not a rainforest but there could have been one, there were no birds but there could have been many.

In the background was Changsha  and mountains. When it was time,

I gave you my brain  and you held the slimy cabbage. Then, you gave me your brain and I left it with the rest of your body.

I saw your eyes as the sun disappeared, and they were as brown as they were black  on the eve of my birth. A rainforest grew

around us, a rainforest of rain; a rainforest.

I remember walking more,  finding no oranges, walking more,  you by my side. We were no longer in your bones, we were in redness, the heart  of your heart, looking for oranges.

But when it got late, dark  enough for the shadows to be  sold away, you opened up  the branches, and we found one  hanging there. A little bulb,  a child. In the background: the birds went yapyapyap,  before the mountains ate them.

Robyn Ward

Average Boy (UK edition)

Father to himself Child of no one

Big man, fam. His trackies don’t even reach his ankles He hasn’t got no one except his shit music taste Lonely, probably. Stays in packs so he isn’t Alone

Not doing that bad in school but the teachers still look at him Sideways.

His friends shove the youngers ahead of them

They always seem to be ahead of him. Taps his foot in English, hoping he matches the tune, catches the eye of the girl he thinks is pretty fit. (Fit? Pretty?)

He’s not a ‘feminist’ Or anything but he’ll linger on the street corner to check that guy isn’t bothering her. He thinks it must be easier to be a girl He’s not ‘gay’ Or anything (his mates always say that and then Joe gets real quiet. Should he ask? Should he ask? Does it matter – ) but girls seem closer, intertwined Not alone.

His trousers hang too low Checks his phone (ALONE ALONE ALONE)

That’s what you’re meant to do? Isn’t it?

His brother is starting at his school this year He has no idea what advice to give him. He doesn’t ever really know what to say Just hoping it makes them laugh Laughter makes him remember that he’s alive, that he still hasn’t done that bit of homework. Alone. Still alone.

Content Warning

Hannah Sutherland

I want you to love me on Sundays

Eggs and coffee in the morning

The steam ebbing, flowing from the cup

You’re at the stove and I watch the back of your head from the breakfast bar

And I can hear it in between the benign sounds of living, the oil spitting, the extractor fan

I can see it when I am not seeking it out, strips of sun from the window, espresso ringlets

Time is on my side now

There is nowhere else to be

Your hands are on my rib cage

It’s early

The air beyond the duvet is cold and foreign

Beneath it we are intertwined in an inanimate calamity of morning breath and freckled eyes

And you can see me

And I am all over you

And the refraction of light on your brow bone makes me wonder how I could be so in love At 8 a.m.

And wherever you brush me I get goose bumps

We could lay here for hours

There is nowhere else to be

Evie Alam

Interrogation #344

Why did you pull the trigger, Mrs B?

Now your husband’s dead. He was only ever good to you, Yet you shot him in the head.

Why did you pull the trigger, Mrs B?

You should have been more grateful to him, Bowed your head in fervent prayer and Overlooked his sins.

Why did you pull the trigger, Mrs B?

Didn’t you think of the children?

Who you’ve left with nothing but grief and shame. Go on, tell them why you killed him.

Why did you pull the trigger, Mrs B?

You were meant to conceal your scars, Bite your tongue and always smile, Even if he went too far.

Why did you pull the trigger, Mrs B?

We think you’re being hysterical. There’s no need to make such a scene, Especially when your evidence isn’t empirical.

Why did you pull the trigger, Mrs B?

It seems you had no excuse. Nobody believes you and besides, That’s barely even abuse.

Why did you pull the trigger, Mrs B?

Why didn’t you just ask for help?

You should have worked up the courage to leave.

Why did you keep this all withheld?

Why did you pull the trigger, Mrs B?

She said she was aiming for herself.

Noah Ma

Everything That Happened in July

Trips down hutongs and a streak of green peeling paint on the dumpster. Rust eating through a tricycle

like a mess of rot-pink tentacles trembling, an octopus drowning in its tank at the seafood market,

a glass sheet of fog and beer-bottle green air. Suffocate. Oxygen is overrated when you’re at the bottom of a bathtub

filled with phantom coloured water, puddles in the middle of your neighbourhood’s rain-glazed main street, mosquitoes dipping

their feet in your sweat because the summer is dragging on like a dash of blackberry lipstick smeared across your own sun-bleached sweatshirt

and your bathroom mirror where you kissed it when shaving your head. Your hair won’t grow back before September

and you know it, but that is a problem for another you in two months’ time and this weekend is for cheap lukewarm wine

stolen under no stars and watching plants die on your balcony, breathing in clouds of moths, paper crowned king of your local street light galaxy.

Jesse Aviv Wolfsthal

Still i.

I come home to stillness; to a house that is without. There is no laughter here.

ii. A lovely sort of darkness hangs low upon the hallway; one that extends its timid fingers towards me as if seeking to befriend.

iii. It’s me and the dust, so much dust, like it always has been. We eat together in that darkness.

iv.

Light from the fridge, inept and moody, is my only reprieve. The chill wakes me up.

Gabi Goncalves becoming

once. in july. i hurl at him a fistful of blades &  my brother only grumbles. there in the  rotting heat of boredom we were keeling to  our fever-dreams:

one rickety swing & an overgrown lawn,  swallowed by the yellow-brown of an  argument had & forgotten, lying to the smell  of burning plastic

belly-up to the sun. this is how we were  made: sweaty & honest & alone. vá virar gente our only instruction. i left & took him  with me & even now

in the face of sweltering we do not move. i  knew when he faced me & said nothing & i  said nothing. no silence has been empty  since.

once. when he reaches out. i break a bottle  & hold it to the sun. a prism & his hand & i  could’ve cut him but instead i’m making  ribbons from the colour.

Cassia Stuttard

The Party

I slip into the waiting darkness like ice into a bucket. I know we’ve just met and everything but I haven’t had a new pair of trainers in 5 years and any new ones will give me blisters on my fourth toe because I’m addicted to erg scores and the shoes keep getting wet from muddy puddles when I’m late to school because I woke up 2 minutes after my alarm and I was supposed to go to bed at ten o’clock but I stayed up painting my nails aquamarine. For you –I need to get home now because I wanted to do my homework before tomorrow squirms into my phone calendar can I join you buying lunch tomorrow at 12:17 from the pop-up Italian I promise it will be fun, I can sit in the front seat of your car, connect my phone to Bluetooth and sing a whole album through.

Esther Richards

Penelope

I met a friend for coffee in the morning, then spent the rest of the day reading in my room.

Since noon, I’ve felt darkness drip in through the windows, and By ten it has filled up the house.

The sounds from the street are slowly waterlogged, Then drowned.

Until I hear those familiar, murmuring footfalls rise

Like smoke up the stairs to the front door.

Sometimes there’s cursing, and quiet clanging of metal

As he struggles to fit the key in the lock

And stand upright.

Not tonight.

It sounds like he’s whistling to himself.

Yes, a low, viscous song pushing through the walls.

It could go either way;

A dull thump as the doorknob dents

The opposite wall, Then a slamming crash.

Or, hopefully, just a purr as the door combs the bristled mat

Before it politely clicks shut.

Then, how loudly will his keys clatter when he tosses them onto the side table?

At what cadence will he shout ‘I’m home!’

A bad mood, or a good one, Slippery like a tadpole and tinged with black?

But there’s only the croaking of the letterbox opening its mouth

As something slides through, then a thud.

The knot in my stomach loosens

As the footsteps mutter away.

Sophia Papasouliotis

In working order

My mother’s bones Run deep beneath my skin, train tracks through The mess of a city. Our fingers meet at the Docks, precious cargo delivered safely. All Is in order. The quiet whistle of a Competent steam train tells me Passengers have arrived at their Destination. When she pulls Away, withdraws her hand, the carriage Finds another. A pileup, a mess of Steel, the squeal of Metal making other metal angry. The trains stop. Ships float at my fingertips, waiting Impatiently for a delivery – any Excuse to leave this Pit.

Hannah Mansfield

Saturday Morning

As you step out, tentatively, onto the icy patio that shimmers in the early morning sun, (Oh, please be careful!) you feel the gentle breeze caress your cheek. You smile; it’s watching over you.

You shiver slightly, wrap your shawl further around your shoulders, check the bird-feeder, as always. And, as always, lose a slipper in the grass. (Didn’t I tell you?) I laugh.

I’m making breakfast when you come back in, (Bacon, eggs, maybe some sausages) and you comment on the smell: always burning, you say, every day for 49 years always burning breakfast!

We sit at the table, you forget the milk. (Don’t worry, I’ve brought it!) I read the paper, nothing new, except in the obituaries, I see your name.

And then I remember…

Lewis Corry

this is a poem by Sophie Corry

sometimes it feels like i took the little girl i used to be and ripped out her lungs with my own  bloody hands sometimes it feels like soot and tar and soot and burning and wading through  tar and sometimes it feels like i led her to church with the promise of salvation  and we dug her grave instead sometimes it feels like i am eve eating the apple and  i am lying in the garden falling into the sky suddenly aware of how naked i am underneath my clothes sometimes it feels like concrete and  sometimes it feels like the flowers that grow from it and like the dandelions are caressing the soft crevices of  my skin and sometimes in the hush of long summer nights it feels like god being trans oh lord it feels like being god i am taking adam’s rib i am building my body anew with the sparks under my own tongue i am respeaking myself into existence with granite with marble with gold i am resculpting my limbs in the flickering flight of the fireflies i am glowing.

Mukhtar O. Mukhlis

light

the woman standing at the kitchen sink is not anyone i know, nor is she anyone i would like to know. she scrubs the grease off the frying pans with an exertion that scrapes against the surface of my ribs. she has things done meticulously. the woman holding kitchen knives in her hands runs the tap water as hot as it can get, and dunks the blades beneath the Tartarean flow. she talks at me from over her shoulder, whipping her coarse dyed hair out of the way of her scalding remarks. the woman slamming the plates onto the drying rack is calling upon all the demons in Hell with the clinking and the crashing and the clacking of the crockery that she masterfully plays like ear-ringing chthonic instruments. she pays daily visits to the dingiest layers of my nerves. the woman standing beneath the only working kitchen light is not someone i am proud of having known, nor is she anyone i would have liked to know for longer. with deep-set eyes shrouded in the shadowy veil cast by the impromptu spotlight overhead, she takes in every last line of me while she can, sleeves rolled up, hands bearing the remnants of dish-soap and grease, skin red from the heat of the tap water.

Mathias X. Adler

Old Father Time II

after Isaac Rosenberg’s ‘Break of Day in the Trenches’ and Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream

You cosmopolitan Druid!

Coffeedrip from the parasol. Drip. Wicker chairs. Two. STOP.

From Grandad’s jigsaw hands to mirror hands | hands mirror to

THE WHEELBARROW MAN

THE WHEELBARROW MAN

who ducks and weaves from fence to fence ‘over hill, over dale, thorough bush, thorough brier ’ etc burdock clingstohisclothes in the moonshadow.

THE WHEELBARROW MAN

with Captain Tabasco™ hot on his heels he twists into a 360° Ollie kickflip ricochets off the cereal aisle into the winedark underwood

THE WHEELBARROW MAN, who stares back at Grandpa through his knucklebones.

Opa, Opa, wo bist du?

Grampa, Grampa, where are you?

Someone’s at the door and I don’t know what to do.

It’s not bedtime yet and I want my story (please you promised to show me where the mailflap leads…)

Noah Gower-Jones

ocean-mother dread

When I look at my mother from behind, I can see myself in the shore-slope of her back, the sea-foam lines down her sides, the wave-shape of her hips and her waist and her stomach. It is bad enough to make me turn away.

I hope my blood-moon marks don’t fade: to look like her is divine punishment. She hates her body – does that mean she hates mine, too? / I swear that I will be a cliff-edge, sharp flint, roaring tsunami. My mouth rolls open to gulp down the dawning sun; mum, don’t try

to save me. I will line myself with shark teeth, stiffen myself with whale-bone scaffolding, coat myself with salt: stay away, stay away. There is no compromise here.

Mother, I found you in the space underneath the smooth-pebbled beach: hidden, unreachable, a creature of grief. I burst off of your limestone tongue, spattering hardening basalt over your warm and poisonous body, what am I if not a betrayal? This is a death, this is a death.

In my dreams I kiss your weathered knuckles and curl myself in the whorl of your left ear – the nautilus-shell. Forgive me, I am trying to make a home of you. Isn’t that what you want most? A rip tide come running… a connection? I migrate through you yearly: it is a matter of instinct. I wish I could stop it,

that decline down the side of the continental shelf / your scar-tissue spine, but it is circadian / Sisyphean – relentless. Your hands thundered down, now my broken cytoskeleton,

the smashed crab-meat heart of us peeling away from your sand-plane feet. This is a death, this is a death. I furl and unfurl like sargassum in the waves; in coiling water columns I ache for the shore, coral fingers clinging to my skin: my fish-gleam gullet gapes stupidly. Voice evades me,

‘us’ an ivory fishhook from which I hang… you ocean predator. Sundown, I cannot cross the horizon to where my father waits for me, all rugged, sun-warm rock (my brother you let pass) – instead, fibromyalgia pitches my plumed neurones desperate / I can see your grey-sea skin roiling from here. You should release it (I know you won’t).

You are abyssal – where is my mother? I am left to crawl to you like a newly hatched turtle, sand stretching and warding me back, waiting for the sea birds to pick me off. In you I drown and I cannot wake up.

Poems by poets aged 17

Lara Wong

Feverish

Summer heat like a thumb

Smudging ink into the hot

Concrete that we etched Hours into with our raw nails

Because nothing bled as much as The sun and we gripped it

Shared it like bread Drier than the barefoot grass

But sweeter than anything The rain could bring.

Ange Yeung

abecedarian for broken motherlands

After the smoke, I break into bars with meat cleavers painted with goose blood still dancing between dragon gates.

Every day, I throw my face into fire. Burn my arms watching gas masks melt into asphalt on Hollywood Road.

I swallow the flames whole, like Jackie Chan before he turned villain. They’re killing someone on that land of yours.

Ma tells me this is not the first time.

Outside, the buildings are obituaries of what used to be. Pork bones litter the ground. Sometimes, even quantum physics can’t salvage the streets soaked red then gold then red again, or help them to salvation. Ba says that there’s no fight to be won. Because this war began by slicing open a city’s underbelly and letting it bleed its veins to mix into capillary wine. Someone is somewhere taking more Xanax than the liver can breathe yellow umbrella under neon lights, street vendor selling the last zi maa wu – the sun disappearing behind tear gas smoke.

Bohan Gao

Cinematography

Leslie Cheung, 1956–2003

Twilight, like hurt, is unanswerable. Running through the patchwork borders of autumn.

Love is only love when the Technicolor dims and his face is still there, pinned as a distant star to earth.

There is no horizon. I scrape myself raw on camera and choke fentanyl between takes. I am

stained by the trip. I am fading into time. Always too-short pants, cold feet.

Always forgetting where bodies end and gravity begins, how the birds scattering across his back

is just a Tungsten light. The setting sun just a bruise.

In the scene where my character goes to Bible study God destroys everything: crashing, burning, flooding.

You see I knew our bodies were made of light they couldn’t possibly last very long.

God staring at the flames where the Tower of Babel once stood. So high it hurts.

Iona Mandal

UNTITLED

coffee rings on the bedside table / revealing the forgetful addict that you are / as you crack the spines of new-born books / your chiropractor fingers working their magic / how you sigh after reading a good poem / as if words are enough to start hurricanes in the mind / even tomorrow you will slice open the blinds at the crack of dawn / all to let in lustre to a sunless grave of a room / when I lay my head on your heart / I feel its buoyancy / as it grapples through the doldrums’ depths / I am reminded that it takes two to keep afloat / that wax will never run dry / as long as there is light to let it burn / I promise not to grimace when you pick your cuticles till they bleed raw / for I am no stranger to habits born in a difficult place / let me be the levee to each glacier / on the truncated spurs of your cheeks / I can never let cold tears erode a landscape like yours.

Saturn Browne

Bear Brook, New Hampshire

If I were the one driving, I would’ve crashed this car a decade ago. On our first camping trip, we pumped the

last hour of daylight as gas. I packed all my things into another: a sleeping bag, old words to burn, the A-frame for an old tent.

I never quite knew how to start a fire. Even in 5th grade Girl Scouts, I couldn’t do it quite right. I’m imperfect like that: I’m not a good one to love. When the body of that raccoon crashed into us on the backcountry road, I told you not to look back. Keep a steady hand, keep driving to town. I blame my crimes on other things, too. When it died, I lied &

said it was the rain that crashed our wheels into the body. & when I kissed the lines of your forehead in your sleep, I told myself it was your fault for this intimacy, the sparks of this forest fire. You make me feel guilty for

wanting more. The summer hisses instructions into my ear: I leave the June rain, I take the wheel. I carry on.

Megan Park Clementines

I want to believe your promise that everything will be ripe. I want to exist tenderly with you on the brink of our doom. The cul-de-sac is sweating, the heat is rising. I sit, I sit, I sit. I peel clementines and you stuff them in my face. Juice drips, and drips, and drips. You place a stem of lavender in my hair from my back garden, the end jabs me in the ear. The garage roof we sit on burns us. You say, calm yourself, things will all be fine. I say, brace yourself, things are not so fruitful inside.

Amy Walpole

Butch

To the butches who died today the word shivers under my tongue / butch /

tastes like cold beer / of Hugo Boss / rubbed into skin / like freshly pressed dress shirts and bed sheets and bowties and blazers. / butch is bro ken wo man / half of a girl / the other half, trespass. /

she, he, it – she walks home at night / and knows what the pavement smells like.

Content Warning

there are broken glass bottles in the lining of her tongue / as punishment for what it has tasted.  she knows how long it will take / for each bruise to fade / she wonders if rage / was the only method he could think of to be close enough to touch her. / the marks of men on her skin are oil paints smeared into white bedsheets / they hurt what they cannot touch / they are Othello standing over her / crying / and crying / and crying.

butch / means / nakedness / in every second of living.  when she takes her shirt off, skin comes with it. you look at flesh now, and she bleeds under you / the bedsheets are tapestries you leave / draped over the washing line in the rain her body is celestial / and misogyny is Icarus / the friction of her unshaven legs / is a nuclear fission reaction / at the centre of the sun /  butch / is a medical procedure of wrapping bandages over corset-shaped wounds / stitching up gashes leaking concealer / breathing slowly / into broken / ribs.

butch begins / shaking in front of a mirror

and ends, / laughing / beer in one hand and her wife holding the other. it is protest / when she goes home to have sex with a woman /  it is activism / every time she enters a room full of strangers / every time she enters a room full of strangers / she is dissected by their glances downwards at her chest / they  just  /  need  /  to know  / if /   it   / is a man / or a woman.

butch / is being told that when girls grow up / their bodies change /  and every time you sleep with someone / having to redefine everything you were told / everything you saw / everything you believe / of womanhood / the female body is more than soft / curves / and soft / skin / and all of its language is not its mothertongue / it is fathertongue / we have been discovered / each part of us / by a different Christopher Columbus / the history / of the female body / is colonisation.

butch / is historical.  every time she chose the shirt / over the skirt / she carved a tiny morsel of history / into the shape of freedom. / Lister Radclyffe Ellen Shane

butch / is a law-breaking, ground shaking, history-making love story butch is not, has not, will never. be. ‘hating men’. Imitation is a form of flattery

and we are flattered.

Riva Jain

proelium (i go to battle on the heels of none that came before me)

the candy shop on the corner of fourth and west is marred by black streaks about the size of my fist. sickly sweet patches of caramel ooze down the countertops. victory plays through the ceiling, on tiny speakers that i remember stealing two years ago, but i’ve never been in here before. there’s no cash in my wallet. when i open my mouth to pay in words, my jaws are duct taped together. the girl working the kitchen holds my glass of lemonade with her fingers dipped halfway in, a butterfly tasting with its feet. the habit must have come from the orangewinged swallowtail crushed against a security camera. i carry atlas on my shoulders. corinthian columns coalesce like pigeons under the balls of my feet, materializing stairs that bring me up to the pearly gates. when i get there, i see the devil in a red suit. “it’s a nice joke to play,” they say, pointing down, “heaven’s actually down there. there’s nothing in the sky except space to fall.” and then i fall. my shoes are covered in taffy. my lips crumble like shortbread. i flail my way through terrifying crushes of white chocolate. the shop is more broken than it was when i left. i drag my debit card along the wall like a knife, wondering if one wrong cut would bring it tumbling down.

Sofia Eun-Young Guerra

Lineage

I want to apologize again for the time I broke your ankle. And, I want to apologize for all the other ways my mother ruined your life. Did you feel relieved when I first opened my mouth and your language tumbled out? Redeemed? I know you regret how things went with my father. I can’t roll my Rs,  though. I didn’t make it that far.

You live physically in small-town Arizona and fiscally in a domestic relations court in Austin. Your youngest son blamed you for his divorce. You let him. My excessive politeness set fire to the patio of that house in Colorado. My uncle was yelling and you told him to shut up.

You were just glad to have the family all together. You called me by my cousins’ names and all our heads would turn. I’m going to college now, ok? I’m going to find a way to set your immune system straight. I’m going to buy you  a place on the California coast. I know you love the water and the sun and hate the GOP. Next time I come over, can we make tamales? Like last time? I got my love of ketchup from you.

Chloe Whitehead

The Ten Wardrobes

1. Jessica’s wardrobe is flooded with hot pink tank tops and denim skirts smaller than a belt.

2. Mary’s wardrobe displays well-kept vintage 1950s dresses, her Primark hoodies are hidden.

3. Chad’s wardrobe proudly presents £980 Dior sneakers though I prefer his pink bunny slippers.

4. Ava’s wardrobe is more colour-coded than a rainbow. Grimy plates spill out of her cupboards.

5. Jacob’s wardrobe has countless Nike tracksuits and a mustard crochet sweater with ‘son’ on.

6. Dylan’s wardrobe has a few My Chemical Romance hoodies, his girlfriend steals his others.

7. Bob’s wardrobe is mostly empty, its prize piece an endearing mauve three-piece suit.

8. Sylvia doesn’t own a wardrobe. She has an antique dresser with hand-painted scarlet marigolds.

9. Helen’s wardrobe has an ancient layer of dust. There are moth-shaped holes in her fluffy socks.

10. Edward’s wardrobe is a storm at sea. Towering waves of wool and thunderous claps of cotton.

Amelie Sillitoe

The Young Scientist

and then there was the young scientist with beanpole curls and blotted eyes who sat crooked on the edge of that dinghy and I watched her as the dirt of newspapers smudged the inkjet head of curls and from my kitchen in her future, I sighed and turned the page, fingerprinted on my eyelids the image of a purple raft I saw last summer, when I realised that sunlight can crack pool water and would cycle around the driveway until I was flying with the seasons themselves, until I crashed and now, as I look at the scar running down my elbow, the purple bicycle is collecting dust like grains of sand, and the fleeing girl on the front page of that newspaper dreams of mapping stars and ocean tides so she folds bruised letters from her boat, and sails from this island into the centuries.

C. McIntyre

Modern Day Icarus

i look at my golden best friend ’long the way walkin’ to under the railway bridge and i wanna punch him in the face and kiss him till my soul leaks a little bit into his and they mix

…

i lost my virginity last summer to a guy i went to primary school with he was 2 years above me we fucked on the floor and chucked the condom out the window of the old burnt out mill we got drunk in

…

we slip and skid together down the muddy grass he falls and grabs onto my ankle shit

i tumble after

…

we look innocently at the cinema worker five of us goin’ yeah we’re eighteen all we did was screech at the blood grope a bit in the back row

cheap beer frozen in a stream in the air cheaper still by fingers that nicked it immune to the consequences of adulthood smoke rings blown by a guy i wish wanted to kiss me a little bit

…

never got arrested but have run at the sound of sirens never got my stomach pumped but have thrown up never fucked with class a but have smoked weed never fucked a girl but wouldn’t say no to a quick kiss/cuddle/fuckyougetme?

…

hey we’re all fiery speeches and flirty sleazes pressing our backs to concrete walls feelin’ ’em shake as the train ran us over and gigglin’ on the other side shit, i could watch Ian shriek forever

Fedora Mensah

My Father Is Yet to Update His LinkedIn Profile

[insert profile picture]

[CONNECT] [MESSAGE] [MORE] ABOUT

on my father’s linkedin page, he’s still a boy, he’s still in ghana, working part-time jobs, young uni kid with no kid to feed. on my father’s linkedin page, he’s still 24, he’s not 26. he’s not a father to any child. he’s not working late night shifts, or watering down his mother tongue at work, or hiding in the darkness as if not to be caught by the british embassy. my father is not my father yet. he is simply wiling away the time. he is just a boy.

Georgia-mae Tan cresting / moulting

my teeth fell out of the tree  mango-stained, smiling  i strung them up on a washing line  pearls of puckered rice

sewn by those on bended knee  sat on upturned buckets, laughing when frowns morph to edges, while their grandmothers hold the lychee seeds  that mine buries in her hands

just as she mourned her son  when gold was etched upon her forehead  cheeks now droop like curved grapes  (they rid the sighs,                    whilst the burnt embers billow.)

she holds me like a baby

binding the legs tucked beneath, olive meat and splayed toes  with wide almond eyes which carry half moons

i lay limbic stretched against the light as a whirlpool gathers beneath my feet  glowing + pinned sure

time will always blur those under me  washed up records of recognition unfolding in a brief notion of ease  as i grow to moult the thorny things.

Ramona McNish

Apple Green iPod Nano (2007)

Gripped like a crucifix in sweaty hands, indented red from palm  to palm to palm in the middle of the night.  Sarah had snuck it in the bottom of her trunk.

The rubber of the headphones was splintering, and a hairline fracture ran curving through the screen,  but we in Wild Cherry cabin didn’t care, we were blue-glow hooked. Scrappy, leggy little students of the Top 40. The slyest, luckiest girls in camp,  had struck it rich with counterfeit music.

That was the summer we all showered so quick that we came out with dirt still  streaking down our skin, so we could sneak off to watch Taylor Swift music videos in the woods, our bony shoulders pressed hard against each other.

Braided One Direction into one another’s hair, whispering the lyrics with inflection all our own.  Fell asleep with Calvin Harris shouting in our ears,  tumbled into dreams of glittering synths.

It was height of July by the time the battery died,  flicker-fizzing the screen dark.

We buried it by the riverbank, sinking silver into grateful, soft mud.  And that night, as I lay awake in the top bunk,  I swore I could hear Rihanna, vengeful in the dark,  pulsing through the earth and trees.

Ella, Ella, Ella,  a crow calls, clarion,  Ey, Ey, Ey

Helen Wang

Free Therapy

I love to flirt. When I die, I want paparazzi to flirt at my funeral. Flash my effigy – it’s nude.

Nude is foxy. Fashion. Darling, take off your sweater. I don’t dislike it, I hate it.

Why?

Depends on the day. Today, I’m fun. And fainting soon.

When I drink wine in a closet. When I sleep on five stacks of magazines. Full make-up. When I brush my teeth with perfume. That’s why!

One kiss from me is two thousand dollars. Smells like a breakup. Smells like good shoes.

Three kitchens of Coco Chanel. Bet your mother wants that too. “Beauty or comfort?”

BOTH. Tell her.

I spit red lipstick in fur slippers. I wear five diamonds to shower.

See?

Ugly people love me. I’m free therapy.

Don’t lie. I know I am. Not married. Mother of cats. Sick. Of weddings and landlords.

Still, I am a fancier word than all the other liars.

Maithreyi Bharathi

My Father versus Winston Churchill

In sophomore year we discuss Winston Churchill so much his doughy face  seems to swim in every puddle I can find. The total: two documentaries,  three lectures, five worksheets, all to say Churchill is the hero of the  world. When my father asks about school, I recall the bowler hat and sing its eulogy the way I’ve learnt, praise unspooling florid and this is the first time I see him flush, cheeks deep brown and eyebrows slanting. He takes it upon himself to give me a proper education, meaning that every car ride is a podcast about the British Raj and every time anything happens the anti-Winstonite in him comes out just a little. His is a stone-heart, beating hereditary. We pump the same, mine with his blood and his with his father’s and it is not the blood of halfnaked fakirs*. My father and I visit 1943 and vomit up our ribs, bones  crumbling on a dusty road. Oxidize: iron skin flaking under the sun  that never sets. We look for rogues and rascals and freebooters* and find  none, only Cinderellas tired of Stepmother. Spokes crush tea-stained silks and my father’s rings slip from his fingers, rubies cracking on brick. So this is benevolence. Trading away our clouds for silvered shirts, banana leaves crisping naked in the wind –

The day before the test we throw around terms: Normandy,  Ultra. My head rushes, Churchill’s words a second heartbeat; beastly people / beastly religion / breed like rabbits, and again: beast / ly / beast / ly*. At night my father rubs oil into the little hair he has left and I take notes: WC lost @ Gallipoli, WC won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Downstairs he flips through albums and rails, our family fluttering through his palms; tugging up up up until they fly free from the footnotes.

Short answer: Explain how Winston Churchill’s actions during World War II affected his constituents. (3 points) In my head my father starts up again.

*quotes attributed to Winston Churchill

Merila Gramy

Costumes Deserve Better

This is the story of John, an inflatable costume who blew up this morning –and realised he. deserves. better. Perhaps he could have been something. Anything. But no, inflatable costumes don’t get a say in how they’re made, don’t know their fate until they’re shipped off to an English home, only aware of their inflatable parts after being broken into by sweaty middle-aged men. You don’t know fury unless your literal skin is being slept in by a drunk bachelorette princess. At least open the zip and let the air in, or better yet, don’t. John hasn’t seen daylight in five days. His previous owner, an oddly tall teenager, sent him away. John was nothing more than a refund. You only get 50% back at eBay, for damaged goods. John thought of the teenager as a danger. He was left with a scar down his left, slightly airless, sleeve to prove it. Even that didn’t stop the fan going full force ahead –at least blow up the good side John had thought. You can take the plane off the runway, but you can never take the propeller off the plane. If only oxygen didn’t exist, he reasoned. If only air particles were nothing more than air particles (he concluded they were not, but just as dangerous as his previous owner). If only John had been loved. He blamed his parents, two cold slabs of metal machines, running on nothing real.

Viktorija Zak

early bird

you try to fall asleep to the gossip of birds, your head fogged with nerves and hopes and expectations. with the terror that the prospect of future exploration won’t satisfy or soften the feeling of dread that often skips across the horizon of your mind. you shift and sigh around your bed hoping to turn all your thoughts off before diurnal becomes nocturnal. you trial ran writing in a journal once, you wonder what day you’ll be ash in an urn, remember that dress you want, your thoughts are leaping from grisly to bright but the light’s out now and the privacy of night is gone. the world yawns and awakens and you hear the churn of cars starting in consolidation with the conversational caws of early birds scouting and catching worms in the grass. you’ve fallen asleep now (at five past seven). no doubt you’ll be late for class yet again.

Ben Heiss

Though I Know

Though I know if I tried harder, tired still, I could ride the bike like the other boys, didn’t try, only walked through the cow-field.

First time the car started we almost got out there’s drums in the pavement, like under the concrete. ‘Inner City Pressure’

And then from blue-gates to the park near Costa. Trying to talk over the bass, ‘Alpine Air Rises’ – like quick splash of holy water on your cheek. It’s easy to forget in the grey that over that hill is where I grew up, with clear air and those big fields. But I soon realise that I’m not really from there anymore. So I shut up, and tune in, ‘If you care they’ll never know’.

Though under the drums it’s more of me sitting table-for-one style in the pizza-place in town, but it gives me something to want, too long for that hour, ‘It’s not the post-pandemic Cinerama that was forecasted’, though it’s not the post-woke renaissance the creatives had broadcasted, with a clean insight into why my best mate is lying in the field alone, thinking about vodka and gender-debates (etc).

I guess it’s a mere documentation of events, sitting on the fence, ‘let’s go Bens’.

Three hundred and sixty five days without a word from you, it’s like I’m growing up it’s like I’m growing up whilst I’m growing up; so as I’m in my hospital bed hooked up to the apple juice drip, I’m thinking about how it’s a preview, stag beetle, death rattle, sun.

As hypochondriac, as mono-monk, as Jean-Paul Belmondo, as you.

When I get my car I’ll stop at the petrol station and buy a meal deal, then root around the woods, knowing all I can do is good, far away from what the drinks made me, closer to the Mariners Apartment Complex.

I can stand I can stand I can stand, can you tell? I swear to god, you can see the national grid so well from here.

‘Who needs New York when you have Hertfordshire?’

People with a good sense of humour, people with nice teeth, people with displayed gums, people who are out, people in love, people in fields, people in pictures, people who are raw, people in grass, people in films, people in books, people in songs, people you know, people who are gone, people who are here, people who are strangers, people who you hate, people who run, disposable people.

Little birds, fly up the         parking congestion

Flocking in the orange mischief over disposable vape pens and churches, which are now only buildings ‘doesn’t that make them more beautiful’ don’t know,

ask the king.

His quick-add love is real, I’ve seen it, don’t let it draw us apart, I won’t run a mile to scroll through my phone in the scrapyard. I call her ‘out there’, she doesn’t call none.

Less than call, on the call of the grave I hear my Grandad call, he knows I have new questions and new names I miss your wicked sensibility, it was yours.

I call for the reaper to leave me out, he calls my home, like a teacher, when I’m dead asleep.

When I call you to come over, I’m calling it off – I hear the longing call for me splashing water on the coffin, and call for her body. All this because I know behind my house the hills wait, all toned and sleepy, daydreamed and forgotten, and all mine.

A stag

beetle wonders around them, I wonder around, I miss wondering. Around and Around.

– He talks to her through media posts, creating fake poets to smoke-screen his messages. In the rooms. So much space for you here.

‘Last One To Base Is Cop’ I heard you whisper as the feds smelt us. Running isn’t as hard when it’s across these expanses.

And hey, you’ve got a laughing face and I’ve got fists for legs that are all tangled like a Pollock piece. Stumbling

and these days I am nothing but then. Make me feel special again.

A little fly swam between orchids, dazed by the summer sun. She slowly swayed between thick leaves of grass and oak-wood, whilst the clouds dispersed gently. Her buzz was like a faraway sax playing between a maze of backstreets, fleeting between walls and whiskydrunk dreamers.

‘I know this fly,’ I said I know this fly. But you looked at me with sweat in your palms whilst Fred played in the summer dark the drum trance, the drum trance, the drum trance, – and you said ‘shut up’ like I know I will when the metal builds

I see kids flying to the progressive house mix

I thought it was you ‘with sweat bleeding down, I found you’ flavoured smoke, regulated jokes, whisky and coke, walk me home ‘unplug the wires and kiss your mouth’       watching you play these two parts tires me out.

Though I know your face it feels overturned each time, like a rare beetle found under dry wood.

Though I know this song I feel the drums in my lungs, pumping the blood into violet.

Though I know I knew you I know I don’t anymore.

Though I know you knew me I know you still might do.

Though I know these things aren’t true and are self-centred.

Though I know I will reach it if I try.

Though I know I reach my hands to the sky to excels the drum and bass into the trees. Though I know at your word I will beat to my knees.

Though I know nothing I still knew you.

Though I know I’ve watched a profile picture for so long.

Though I know all in all is all we are.

Though I know this form is not efficient in simply saying what I want. Though I know it might be if I changed the font.

Though I knew you as an italic, though ‘I knew you’ – Taylor Swift

Though I know what I know is only by me, made a myth.

tuesday 10:30 p.m. (in the parking lot beside the field)

i cut purple fingers dusty white perennials the smell of hay and flesh blood ribboned fingernails strain of wind and sea tuesday 10:30 p.m. / skin a champagne gold and you are laughing / bent over like a pastel greeting card soft bitten nails the colour of autumn’s fallen eggshells / i am a ’60s girl / the fingernails a saucy copper blue kind feet propped up on the dashboard like you always told me not to you / with your white head the colour of a soft curdled dandelion drinking in perennials through the rolled down window / grandmother tells you never to pick a plant / how even the roots belong to you like nights at the lake but / obedience is never a thing you succumb to politely sitting there / watching you cradle the soft droopy head in your palms i think what a good father you’d be / like how you kept it there so tenderly even though you knew that it was failing

ii

listen to yourself / know this is a memory you’ll never forget how i wish we were home i wish we were sober i wish we were in the kitchen telling my brother shit about fairies living in teacups i wish we were more useful i wish we were more us but just for the moment i find / myself looking at you thinking how i want always to be like this / hands awkwardly distant in the little red car / susurrus of the wind and sea / in the perfectly circular world its sky like a swallowed wet handkerchief in the cool green earth / each of us making furtive comments on our own imperfections; love if we didn’t have to open our eyes we’d never wake up to the world so beautiful and raw and yearning aching / for our undivided love

Emma Kurr

No Longer Will I Wonder

Every last grain of gazing at him I’d scrape from the bottom of the bowl, I’d take scraps, flashes – I’d take his reflection from puddles and shop windows, frame them, hands full of splinters.

Every last drop of time with him I’d gulp, scrabbling at the hand that tips. My mouth, dry and prickling: desperate, like a madman covered in sand, heat-stricken and half-dead.

Every last breath of his hands I’d heave, a mountain-climber reaching snow, blood thinning; his finger-tips sweet and calloused like dappled peaches, painting stars across the small of my waiting back.

Amber Alison Miller Tinkerbell

tinkering bells

shining cinder dandelion

will-o-the-wisp

a ball of light

I was scouted by Tchaikovsky

He transposed a part for my pattering feet Twirling, twisting, pirouetting across the stage Of a celesta.

Melodic; magical; drowned out By the orchestra

Humans, you can try to interpret, To mimic my melodies

But you can’t sing the song of a butterfly

When your tongue is a bloated slug

I learned then, that even when A man bends and lends their ear

Their giant satellite plates

That soon to follow are pitchforks and knives

Wolfing your gift down, Ripping and shredding, Devouring never tasting

Though even then, Barriers can’t stop a man’s imagination Star.

Second to the right.

Watch Wendy’s silhouette sail across the night’s ocean Laugh when she hurtles down

Of course, the lost boys said it was my words that strung their wooden bows

My words that shot, tied, and plucked each of her coils for a spring To launch missiles at all fairies, mermaids, or nymphs In my tinkering

Men stitched me into a villain’s shadow, Doesn’t matter if we have offended Pitting me against my sisters Barking slander

Puck, Sugar Plum, godmother, and Mab But that is not true

I love all my girls

Glinda, stealer of teeth, Maleficent, and Jinn

They’re my kin

Since then I’ve been the Muse of Disney, Locked inside my hourglass figure Draining my gold to be rolled and sold and framed. At least he made a good story.

Eesha Mohan-Clarke

Ties don’t belong on the dress code

For funerals

Where trembling hands skid across shirt buttons and fold down crumpled collars

Condensation clouds the mirror as the harshest breaths ripple through space

The knot falls through beneath your fingers

Its satin shine is slick with sweat

A mother quells her quakes and does a perfect Windsor

Just like she did before

She pulls the blazer on your shoulders

Brushing off imaginary lint, she keeps holding on

You bought the suit that week

(Can’t crash a funeral in a rental)

Black, crisp and two sizes too big for your frame

The arms hang halfway over your hands but the shirt is too white so you slam the door of the washing machine

You run it over, and over, and over

Watching the seams smash around the drum

Till the ivory veins run grey and old and you can finally stop feeling so cold. But the starch still scratches at your skin You don’t stop feeling weightless

Some petulant god with a sharpie

Has blacked out all the chapters that you were meant to read And started scribbling from the start as well

The vowels are blending into voids that hollow out your chest threatening your brain into forgetting When there will never be new words to remember

You get home and rip the suit straight off your shoulders

Wadding it up in silent protest and punching it through the walls

You bruise your knuckles

The healing doesn’t take the pain away

Clawing the tie off your throat, the tail end slips through the knot

Even in your cupboard’s solitude, it doesn’t come undone

Years pass and the suit is worn again

It stops being for funerals and starts having fun

It collects pocket squares and cuff links

It parades around the town on prom night and comes home worse for wear

Until it doesn’t

Because there’s no longer a mother to tie the Windsor Just like she did before There is just lint, and sorrow And you pick up that lonely piece of satin

The knot at your throat is so tight now

Too tight now

And looking down

The cuff of your jacket sits so pristinely at your wrist

The kid with fears for armour can’t hide in this cold embrace anymore

‘You’ll grow into it,’ they said You didn’t want to have to

Sophie Hardaker Doppelganger

An antique painting hung on the wall, With a carefully carved frame of gold, Mysterious symbols engraved on the edges. The painting itself had a grimy layer, Thick, unblended strokes locking past content away.

I tried to inspect the old layers behind, But thumping began to sound from inside, Ringing rattles on the museum wall.

Hands formed beneath the surface, Stretching the grime, feeling through the dark.

Punching violently, throwing themselves through their prison cell, Ghostly hands tearing the canvas.

A girl stared back at me.

Every contour of her face was sculpted like mine.

It was like looking in a mirror, but not quite. Her form was statuesque, expression frozen completely still.

As I stared back into her painted eyes, I saw that there was no light. In its absence was an ominous void, a darkness that seemed to pull. The longer my eyes lingered the more her shape changed. Her flesh started to slide and melt like tar, Bones ripping through her slimy skin. It was as if she was starting to step out from the frame.

Elena Ferrari

Ghazal for Longing

You find me crying. Just some salt down the throat to swallow the water, you coax. I tip my mouth open to a mute fire, calcifying for hours.

I’ll leave my fingerprints on the sticky floor of a soda-glass. Come find me, won’t you? Search, I won’t know for how long: moments or hours.

You are asleep so close to me. In my mind, I listen to your blood, line you up to me, dip to dip or swell to swell, rearranging for hours.

When you are the only one in the mirror, graying into light, breaking down, refracting into years, months, hours,

I say my name until it is no longer a name: Elena, Elena… spit-stained sparks. The universe atomized in four hours as the shells drift off molluscs in acidified seas, as the singular moon-body swings. It all follows neither thought nor hours, so slip the salty brine through my jaw. Make me something that is only ours.

Dingzhong Ding Decision

We spend two and a half mornings reading Yelp reviews of Cemeteries Near You, pondering each price, the illusion of options. We call up a location in Cincinnati, Ohio, which doubles as an arboretum, which doubles as a wedding venue. Wouldn’t you believe it – they’re talking to us. We become unrealistic, and think of the trespass of reindeer lichen, ragwort or yew.

And, yes, inevitably, the mildewed mucilage or fengshui, rules of centerpiece: related concerns.

Come evening, we remember we are generous with alarms that don’t wake us the way we are lenient towards guests that arrive late and halfdrunk. We forgive parents that mistake day as part-night. Mistaken as part-them, we are used to being positioned in a trade-off between day lilies and living space. It’s always been the partition of crowded rooms, division of labor, the divorce of one season from the other. Now we are asked to pick.

Arthur Lawson

Plastic Suicide

I used to know a man made out of polystyrene. I remember how he’d leave little pieces of himself everywhere he went Until he wasn’t anymore. He’d let anyone have A bit of him until he crumbled then They stuck him together with cellophane and PVA glue, like that would keep him whole But he unravelled himself. I found him in the toilets, small pile of broken up plastics, a note that told them how to recycle him Blue bin for plastic. No coffin.

Elise Withey still life before leaving

Light slanting through an opened door the red morning smell of apples in a paper bag on the kitchen table the still house, the cigarette coat over the back of a chair o and I have wanted to take the moon into my mouth and hold it there because to call you by name is like an apple sliced by a hand which knows what it wants.

Windows stay warm long after the city fills with dusty quiet.

Maaria Rajput

Clockwise

that swad of goatgrass we chose to soften into

sucking velvet earlobes off cherry stones

shadows begin my face assumes where branches the fullness slow. With of time.

pregnant breath and baited bellies to make them shine. we bury dead My hands are bees hourly carved from stagnant incense

in fertile sands my knees have our brown skin split into a ripening of knuckles, the sun the turgid earth spits on them

we plunge our that they did, now hands in: we pull a different shape out our own miry festles the lawn. intestines

sunflesh brimming our laps. We wanted to change our bodies and

Lydia Mitchell History Teachers

Questions are stones I sew into my skirt pockets. It is better always to wonder, and never to know. Between appointments I cram them in either side And when the fabric tears, I fall apart.

I read: He cannot remember the tune Of the Hymn he sang to me last June. Standing. Stuttering. Slowing down. His forehead crinkled by a frown.

Kings and rebels are only names in a textbook, Their castles and chapels have been graded to dust. Churchill is a C and Lincoln is a C. The marks accumulate like ants on my candy-apple heart And devour it.

I read: He cannot speak unless to scorn He cannot move, unless to mourn. So in his room he sits and waits And hunts for art with loss for bait.

I left my last History lesson early And listened attentively to others Reading their results in a ring on the floor. Grades arrayed like chocolates wrapped in coloured foil For everyone but me to taste.

I read:

In the night he dreams of leaving, And in the day I catch him grieving. How can I hold him when in my head I am made of mud and he is made of lead?

Mari Farrand

Ode to the Heels I Bought at a Second-Hand Store Last Week

My mother took her scissors to my prom dress and told me about a boy she knew in college. My grandmother keeps a piece of pink silk in a box buried under sweaters, like sunken tulip bulbs, but now the dress is too short and everyone can see what little midsummer bluffs I’m balancing on. My mother says she was too young to make a good choice, and now it’s too late to change a bad one. My grandmother wears sneakers each morning stepping into them, and I think of the  time I saw a man driving iron nails into the sole of a horse’s hoof. So I bought my first pair of heels like hard liquor and got drunk on inches like the hours she spun away with that boy on the  floor of her dorm, just talking and drinking up the courage of those tiny years.

Later I sat by the lake and asked for a set of magic words to say to him besides “Please don’t hate me,” and “Thank you for the necklace (sorry I might have broken it).” But my mother reads my voice on the telephone like tarot cards and carries it with her like a latch-key, so she tells me to find myself a pair of ballet flats, admits she ran out of courage when all was done. So keep my feet on the ground because too much water can kill a parched woman just as well as none.

Translation of Violence According to a Shoreline Bird

When they ask who my great-grandmother was, I tell them she was a foreign bird found on the shoreline twitching her phantom limbs – coarse, thick and ensnared. Sixty years ago, white men called her a rabid dog in their tongues. Each sunrise, my great-grandmother would wake up stuck into a foreign body with her mother’s voice: a generational language of violence pulsing on a ribboned tongue in a country that snapped on her heels but she told them how the borders of silence are being erased and how now language has a face and a body. What she meant to say was that she knew other brown girls who died drifting to her feet with their parched mouths open, sucking in the glass-cleaved air through gaps in teeth until their archways bled because violence was the only word they could pronounce with their mouths – lips split like tectonic plates.

The Poetry Society

The Poetry Society is the leading poetry organisation in the UK. For over 100 years we’ve been a lively and passionate source of energy and ideas, opening up and promoting poetry to an evergrowing community of people. We run acclaimed international poetry competitions for adults and young people and publish The Poetry Review, one of the most influential poetry magazines in the English-speaking world. With innovative education and commissioning programmes, and a packed calendar of performances and readings, The Poetry Society champions poetry for all ages.

The Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award is at the core of The Poetry Society’s extensive education programme, and it plays an influential role in shaping contemporary British poetry. Previous winners include some of the most exciting poets writing today, such as Sarah Howe, Jay Bernard, Caroline Bird, Helen Mort, Holly Hopkins and Mukahang Limbu.

poetrysociety.org.uk

The Foyle Foundation

The Foyle Foundation is an independent grant-making trust supporting UK charities which, since its formation in 2001, has become a major funder of the Arts and Learning. The Foyle Foundation has invested in the Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award since 2001, one of its longest partnerships. During this time it has enabled the competition to develop and grow to become one of the premier literary awards in the country. foylefoundation.org.uk

Help young writers thrive

The Poetry Society’s work with young people and schools across the UK changes the lives of readers, writers and performers of poetry, developing confidence and literacy skills, encouraging self-expression and opening up new life opportunities. Support us by donating at poetrysociety.org.uk/donate

About the Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award

Established in 1998, the Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award is The Poetry Society’s flagship education project. In 2023, the competition received almost 16,000 poems from over 6,500 young poets from 120 territories. The competition’s scale and global reach shows what a huge achievement it is to be selected as a winner. Every year, 100 winners are chosen by esteemed poets who are passionate about discovering new voices. Winners receive a range of brilliant prizes, including a selection of poetry books donated by our generous supporters, and talent development support, such as mentoring, performance and publication opportunities, throughout their careers.

Alongside the competition, the award supports poetry in schools. Free teaching resources, including the winners’ anthologies, are distributed to schools worldwide, and The Poetry Society arranges poet-led workshops in culturally underserved areas of the UK. Each year, we celebrate ‘Teacher Trailblazers’: individuals who have shown outstanding commitment to poetry in the classroom. In 2024, we are delighted to work with Tasha Seal from Beaconsfield High School and Kayleigh Mellor from Wilsthorpe School to share their enthusiasm for poetry with the wider teaching community.

The award has kick-started the careers of many well-known poets. Former winners regularly go on to publish full poetry collections and are often recognised in significant national competitions for adults. We are confident that the most recent winners will reach similarly dizzying heights, and we look forward to discovering yet more fantastic young poets in years to come. If you’re a young writer, enter the Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award 2024 and you could follow in the footsteps of some of the most successful poets writing today.

Further Opportunities for Young Poets

Young Poets Network is The Poetry Society’s online platform for young poets up to the age of 25 worldwide. It’s for everyone interested in poets and poetry – whether you’ve just started out, or you’re a seasoned reader and writer. You’ll find features, challenges and competitions to inspire your own writing, as well as new writing from young poets, and advice and guidance from the rising and established stars of the poetry scene. Young Poets Network also offers a list of competitions, magazines and writing groups which particularly welcome young writers.

In the past year, our writing challenges have invited young poets to unpick the ties between poetry, clothing and fashion, reflect on ways to cultivate peace, compose song lyrics for a youth choir on the theme of identity, tackle the villanelle and learn about the link between nature, health and writing. We’ve also published articles on code-switching in poetry, constructing reviews and criticism, getting over a crush with new writing, how to make a career in the arts and navigating Pride Month as a poet. Young Poets Network also partnered with the T.S. Eliot Foundation to run the Young Critics Scheme, offering ten emerging poetry reviewers the chance to develop new skills around reviewing and share their thoughts on the T.S. Eliot Prize shortlist.

For updates about poets, poetry, competitions, events and more, like us on Facebook and follow us on TikTok and X, formerly Twitter, @youngpoetsnet and Instagram @thepoetrysociety

Join the Young Poets Network mailing list to be part of this vibrant community of poets and continue your poetry journey. Sign up by visiting ypn.poetrysociety.org.uk

Further Opportunities for Schools

Download free poetry teaching resources, lesson plans and activities on our resources site, Poetryclass. Covering all ages and exploring many themes and forms of poetry, each resource has been created by our team of expert poet-educators and teachers. resources.poetrysociety.org.uk

Teachers can register to receive a free copy of The Opening Line, The Poetry Society’s forthcoming compendium of poetry reading, writing and performance exercises for secondary schools. Supported by the Foyle Foundation, the book includes contributions from leading poet-educators. Request a free copy by emailing fyp@poetrysociety.org.uk

Book a poet to visit your school through our Poets in Schools service. Poets can deliver one-off workshops, long-term residencies, INSET sessions for staff, and poet-led assemblies. Online and in-person options available. poetrysociety.org.uk/education

School Membership connects your school with all that poetry has to offer. School members receive books, resources, posters, Poetry News and The Poetry Review (secondary only), as well as discounted access to our Poets in Schools service. poetrysociety.org.uk/membership

Cloud Chamber is an online network for poets and teachers delivering poetry in the classroom to come together and discuss ideas, experiences and best practice. Meeting regularly on Zoom, each session considers a different theme. A presentation by an experienced poet-educator is followed by discussion time, and an accompanying lesson plan is circulated afterwards. It is free to attend and is open to anyone with an interest in poetry in the classroom. Find out more at bit.ly/CloudChamberPoetry

Follow our education news on X, formerly Twitter, @PoetryEducation or sign up to our schools e-bulletin by emailing educationadmin@poetrysociety.org.uk

You can also follow The Poetry Society on X @PoetrySociety, and on Facebook and Instagram @thepoetrysociety

Acknowledgements

The Poetry Society is deeply grateful for the generous funding and commitment of the Foyle Foundation, and to Arts Council England for its ongoing support: together they enable the running of the competition and publication of this anthology.

Thank you to 2023’s judges, Jonathan Edwards and Jane Yeh, for their time, passion and support for the competition and The Poetry Society. Thanks also to the dedicated team of poets who helped the judging process: Ella Duffy, Sarah Fletcher, Rachel Long and Josh Seigal. We are very grateful to former winners Eira Murphy, Helen Bowell, Jade Cuttle and Mukahang Limbu for helping us welcome the 2023 winners into the Foyle Young Poets community. Thanks to Shakespeare’s Globe for providing a venue for the award’s ceremony, and Poetry By Heart for collaborating with us on the event.

We thank tall-lighthouse, Forward Arts Foundation, Carcanet, Nine Arches Press, Penguin Random House, The Emma Press, Poems on the Underground and Divine for providing winners’ prizes. Thanks to Chris Riddell for illustrating the top 15 poems, and to Arvon for hosting the Foyle Young Poets’ residencies.

Our thanks go to Marcus Stanton Communications for raising awareness of the award, and to James Brown for designing the Foyle Young Poets anthology artwork. Thank you to our network of educators and poets across the UK for helping us to inspire so many young writers.

Finally, we applaud the enthusiasm and dedication of the young people and teachers who make the Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award the great success it is today. foyleyoungpoets.org

Now YOU can be part of the Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award

Aged 11–17? Enter the competition by 31 July 2024

Judges: Vanessa Kisuule & Jack Underwood

Enter your poems – change your life! The Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award 2024 is open to any writer aged 11 to 17 (inclusive) until the closing date of 31 July 2024. Poems can be on any theme and must be 40 lines or shorter. The competition is completely free to enter.

Prizes include poetry books, mentoring and the chance to develop your talent through publication, performances and writing opportunities. If you are selected as a winner, you will join a vibrant community of young poets. The award has shaped the careers of many wellknown poets writing today.

How to enter: please read the updated competition rules, published in full at foyleyoungpoets. org. You can send us your poems online or by post. If you are aged 11–12 you will need permission from a parent or guardian to enter. You can enter more than one poem, but please concentrate on drafting and redrafting your poems – quality is more important than quantity. Entries cannot be returned so please keep copies. For more information, visit the rules section at foyleyoungpoets.org

School entries: teachers can enter sets of poems by post or online using our submission form. Every school that enters 25 students or more will receive a £50 discount on our Poets in Schools service. Want a FREE set of anthologies, resources and posters for your class? Email your name, address and request to fyp@poetrysociety.org.uk

Find out more and enter online for free at foyleyoungpoets.org

Remember, you must be aged between 11 and 17 years old on the closing date of 31 July 2024. Good luck – we can’t wait to read your poems!

‘What

a wonderful advert these poems are for the importance of poetry, and – more – how much faith they give us in people, our capacity for empathy and tenderness and how, with nothing more than words, we can make the world go “Wow!”’

– Jonathan Edwards

Judge of the Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award 2023