A note on reading: If you are reading this issue on a phone you may find that switching to desktop view restores the intended structure and linebreaks of the broader poems. Seen/Unseen (2024) by C.S. McIntire Gallop is to Horse as Fall is to by Jane Zwart Jack and the beanstalk by Simon Alderwick Midwife’s Bargain by Christina Henneman My Headstone by Ronnie Sirmans Making Crop-Circles by Damen O'Brien Libation for Mother by Saraswati Nagpal Manuka Honey by Patrick Wright Ectopic by Aisling Towl Mathematician by Jane Griffith Pine Cones by Julian Bishop Bats, from th ..read more

Gallop is to Horse as Fall is to  A. Angel  A gelding, an emasculated seraph: both know the pinch of deference. Say the horse finds an orchard suited to brushing the rider  from his back, and say the angel gives God the brush-off.  Both would bolt after that,  both would go as fast as four legs or gravity would take him.  B. Rain  Think about the sound,  the drumming of hooves  and drops of water.  C. Fall  If you have seen the way power moves through a horse and a horse through a field, if you have paid even the smallest attention&nb ..read more

Jack and the beanstalk  but he lives with his wife, not his mother  and the wife gives him money to buy groceries  but he comes home with arms full of books  and she throws them out of the window  and they turn into trees  but not overnight  in fact it takes hundreds of years  for the pages and the covers  of the books to break down  into mulch and compost  and for saplings to sprout and grow,  by which time Jack has been long forgotten  but the kids of the folk who live in the house now  sometimes climb the trees&nbs ..read more

Midwife’s Bargain A gasp, a scream, the night spliced  for the birthing  of a ruby morning. I pull in sync  with your pushing, grip against  slime and blood. You’ve freed yourself  by a hair’s breadth, from rivers crusting red, brown, black.  I hold you against it, vernix-clad flesh on sweaty pallor, wriggling to glide  from my hands, blood thickens between my fingers as the knell rings   three times— twice, and the crows  silver their screech in the yew’s crown. Christina Hennemann is based on the West Coast of Ireland. She’s th ..read more

My Headstone I told my husband that when I die I want one of our artistic friends to do my headstone. I want mine handmade, almost like it’s folk art. Not granite with a sheen, no perfect inscription chiseled. Let the angel in outline be primitive, sharp wings to jut up, in darkness like devil horns. Let’s use some cheap concrete mix, blend in pages from my unread books, add in shells and pebbles I saved from trips to beaches and walks in woods.  My husband warns me such a marker could soon wear away. Yes, I say, yes. Ronnie Sirmans is an Atlanta digital media editor whose poe ..read more

Making Crop-Circles Wheat can’t worship on its own, or stocks stoop to genuflection or haj, neither mandelbrot nor mandala. The wheat won’t lie down in despair, in prostration, ear into air, coil and spiral, mazed with live circuitry.  The wheat has no agency, Earth won’t speak. All across the fields of Hampshire, before the thresher  comes, the newspapers found ripples like a spray of missiles,  tattoos tamped on new-grown crops, alien geometries and  leafy hieroglyphs, an arbitrary smattering of stamps, extra-terrestrial chops and signatures. Crop-circle days. Giggli ..read more

Libation for Mother  The kitchen’s where your words haunt me.  In serene dishcloths. In steaming potatoes and  warm daal freckled with mustard seeds.  Stir like this. Mind your fingers. Always, ginger first. A handful of curry leaves stops the clocks: fragrant  spells to rekindle your voice, I’m eleven again. On dinnerplates I sail to our scent-laden past resurrecting your aromatic meals— You who clawed at domesticity ladled your power in eloquence: honey of dissent, gut-grown courage to leave the world  altered momentarily.  You who I am becomin ..read more

Manuka Honey You believed in viscous  gloop of Manuka honey syrup to heal your wounds from navel to pubis the lacuna  of Fallopian tubes  the womb you cursed & were glad to be rid of  (on the surface).  Outside Saint Mary’s on a grass verge you ushering our fingertips  to the stitch & itch you saw as positive the sun at solstice & speaking of the anatomy  of a flower, its completeness against your abdomen  how you held the carpel  close & how it cast a shadow.        Patrick Wright has a p ..read more

Ectopic Two months it takes my black dog to leave her dank bed. Shelled and supple, I meet my maker Don’t see Her but She feels of moss; chemical. I am asleep when they excavate, then No longer, they beseech — not pregnant. Cold river pouring heart-ways, Clavicle rain, whirlpool. Relatively unscathed— She’s a doctor, I believe her. Years I keep her, held in stitches, phantom. Each month again she leaves me, weaning. Aisling Towl is a poet, playwright and arts critic from South London. Her writing has been published by Oberon/Bloomsbury in the UK and Samuel French in the US, and s ..read more

Mathematician His grand piano plays unique form, algorithms in air. In the Red House, knowledge was abstract – origami, exploded. A bird on the fishscale slates of the house across the road, and decades to go before the 4-minute mile on the field next door. The Red House: of Corpus, but separate – as we are all members of one another. And maths, life-like, purely what you make of it. Mind over matter. He went to Mass, Saturdays. He numbered grains of sand in the desert, in Africa, was it? –  it was educational. The 4-minute mile was run. The red house the tiles the deser ..read more