Photograph by Tom McKinnell Gold Metal Match, Ice Hockey, 1980 None of us was a team player. We were rehearsing for something no one...

Jars It was a surprise so I kept my eyes closed all the way to the garden. My empty stomach was a theatre of kaleidoscoping gems. She...

Who Will Mow the Cemetery Now That They're Gone? Is wisdom getting comfortable with cobwebs in the barn? Elephantine wolf spiders...

Excuse Me, I Am Not Myself Did you know that the Danish word for boyfriend is genderless, translates only to dearest? For those four...

Selmer It wasn't the music that drew him, not at first, but the shape it made on a stand and the way it took the light, staring back at...

Race to The Top How we got here is anybody's guess. Sure, you were impressed with the rest: the skyscrapers, the towers, the bridges, but...

Philip Gross writes: "There are poets who disapprove of giving any introduction to a poem. I'm not one of them. The life of a poem, like...

Gullgirl Praemoneo de periculis Listen, don't listen to them. Your day will come. Up, like a satiny Lazarus, lapsed but swaggering. One...

Josephine Balmer writes: "After hearing his nephew sing one of Sappho's lyric songs, the Athenian lawgiver Solon ordered the boy to teach...

The Sky, signed by you You have taken to painting birds on post-it-note-sized canvases that flock on the walls as if they were telegraph...

A Rag-Tag Song It was the good old-fashioned plain stuff warmed up and ladled out. We got stew, a mess of baked beans. We got plum duff...

Seasoning If I'm winter – and I think I must be as I comb the white drifts in my hair and count down the hours to my seventieth birthday...

Travelling by night When the numbers rattle through my dreams, back and forth like abacus beads, I take a trip to that place where I...

Head spin I am the golden dandelion always open with my gift of yellow throbbing brightest in my final hour before my flower folds...

The Night of the Barn Fire This side of midnight a starless sky erupted, flared over pines and oaks, extraordinary as dragons. Rooks...

Down the Hall On a lighter planet I'd be light on my feet or whatever those are; here, the muscles make no sense except as meat of an...

James W. Wood has been writing poems for over thirty years. These, he tells us, are his final two but we're not entirely sure that we...

jerry-built – twitchy, transgressive, serotonin-dip weeks doing normal blokey things fork-lifting hours onto days growing ...

No Cat There is no cat here, biding its time, curled on a ledge where warm air soothes and sunshine caresses through the glass. No extra...

Every Friday and Saturday Granny was up early tying bunches of loolladi then putting them on her cart. She wore a paisley scarf, a dark...

You are cordially invited to the home of Henry Phillips Lovecraft, on his 6th birthday There will be jellies, huge as pavilions, in the...

Hide and Seek It was a favourite game, we savoured all of the running from a younger brother who would divide us like iron filings,...

The Pond Heron The dead don't write but my cousin's letter arrives three days after he's blown away by some kid in his own platoon. Maybe...

Paul Celan was born in 1920 in Romania and committed suicide in Paris in 1970. He was a slave labourer under the Nazis and wrote one of...