Tag: Poetry

Agnieszka Wodzińska

Before I could speak, I found language in your soft face, mimicked it, and tomorrow, I will see you one last time. If I seem afraid, forgive me, but you know I’ve never done this before.

When I heard the news, I dreamt that you opened your eyes and so I told them you were fine, but they dragged me away and piled on the dirt. I woke up afraid, yet I was never scared of you, so why start now? There’s no use.

Tomorrow, I will be brave and say goodbye. If it sounds like a greeting, please let it, let it be the start of letting you go. I will stroke your hair and stay calm and won’t think of dirt unless it’s your garden, where the magnolia blooms early still, puckering, pink.

The garden, where you made friends with spiders and moths, scooped them up into your capable hands, staved off wasps daring to hurt your baby’s baby napping in the shade. Plucking chives for dinner. Humming to your favourite rose. Gloved fingers in the soil, the soil, fizzing with life, you’d say, cracking eggshells, raking, singing in the mid-day sun.

Tonight, I weigh each memory of you in my hand like I am handling rare seeds. Then, loose on my feet, I come close to the veil, where you sit in your favourite chair, smiling a conspirator’s smile. You lean in and gently push me back into the fold of life.

Agnieszka Wodzińska is a writer and art historian based in Scotland. Agnieszka’s prose tackles memory, obsession, and the making and breaking of rituals. Her short story “Commune” was included in April Showers Publishing’s Winter 2025 Zine.

Ruth Quill

I love being in a place long enough
to form an attachment to the public transport line
that brings me back to where I stay

call me Francis the train guy
but the Pågatågen and Victoria Line / kind dates who dropped me to my door
the 99 / a lift from a friend
the Lothian 26 / an artifact of home

and now after a long day
the sliding door of the 39a bus / my fence
the easy green of the U4 metro / my lawn
to my door, mine

Ruth Quill is a Scottish poet and freelance artist based in Leith. Her writing is often inspired by childhood whimsy and play.

I wrote this poem while solo travelling in Austria, sitting on the Metro with my pocket journal that followed me around that trip. I was riding a high of having retired Google Maps and feeling a new sense of belonging in the city. I find I still go back to it now, to soothe myself when I am full of nerves about starting something new.

Thomas Sudell

Being a translation of an Old English (Anglo-Saxon) riddle. The tenth-century Exeter Book manuscript in which this metrical riddle is preserved does not record a solution. The solution generally accepted among modern scholars may be found below.

Four strange companions I beheld. Their track

was sable, and their footsteps wondrous black.

Swift was their pace; yet swifter still it grew

as, visiting the realm of birds, they flew

through open air to plunge beneath the wave.

With unremitting industry then strave

the diligent retainer who once more

began to steer the passage of those four

collateral travellers as they made their way

among the treasures that before them lay.

[Translated from Old English by Thomas Sudell]

PROPOSED SOLUTION TO RIDDLE 51

A quill pen held between a thumb and two fingers. The black footsteps are the ink that they leave behind. Lines 3-5 refer to the scribe lifting his quill from the page in order to refill it at his ink pot. He then resumes his writing, guiding the quill among the splendours that adorn his illustrated manuscript.

Thomas Sudell is a graduate of Oxford University (2015) where he studied English with a speciality in Old English. His translation of the Old English poem ‘Maxims II’ has recently appeared in Issue 32 of Littoral Magazine (October, 2024).

Frank Thomas Rosen

Central Train Station Leipzig, January 1st, 1989, 2 AM

Inspired by Maxim Gorki

As to find ourselves
Buffered
Barely lit
Delayed

Withdrawing
A working-class shiver

Your swollen tongue
Down my throat

Ancient Solyanka
A brand new year

My last drop
Of the Blue Strangler

Our glasses in very slow motion
And the sun to rise in the west

Note: The Blue Strangler was East German slang for a popular, state-subsidized vodka brand.

Frank Thomas Rosen grew up in East Germany and moved to the United States in 1997. He taught English at colleges in Ohio for ten years before becoming a nurse practitioner (FNP). His latest collection – auschwitz of the digital age and other poems (new cognitive poetry) – was published by Cherry Castle Publishing in 2019. Rosen’s poems have appeared in Ambit, Dongola, The American Journal of Poetry, Belt Magazine, The Skinny Poetry Journal and many regional and international anthologies. In his writing, Rosen addresses social injustice, cross-cultural struggle, and environmental challenges.

Ion Corcos

A New Garden

How can I help you
take the dandelions, the grass,     

out of the bricks,
bring the morning, the river

into your eyes,
turn the day, the clouds

into a place to sit?

Winter Stone

The forecast predicts a storm, destructive winds,
fallen trees. Gulls fly over slate rooftops,
settle on antennas. The morning sky starts blue, then turns low;
I decide we will go into Hull, as planned.

A man sits on winter stone under the awning of a coffee shop,
wings hover over chips on the ground, light rain.
When I tell a local that we are going to Withernsea,
he tells us of other places – the moors, fish towns,

and York. As light diminishes, we trudge a sodden path,
quarry names for the birds along the river.  

Ion Corcos was born in Sydney, Australia in 1969. He has been published in Cordite, Meanjin, Westerly, Plumwood Mountain, Southword, Wild Court, riddlebird, and other journals. Ion is a nature lover and a supporter of animal rights. He is the author of A Spoon of Honey (Flutter Press, 2018).

Hannah Linden

Only special places have dandelions growing between cracks in the pavement. The kind of places that leave the holes in the windows to let in the light. Someone was playing with a ball or measuring the weight of abandoned ball-bearings. They didn’t throw away the old piece of rope coiled in the corner under a pile of splintered wood.

Children will be here soon and they will skip, twenty at a time in unison. The older kids will hoist that rope into the nearest thing to a rainbow. And little children will be lying on their bellies blowing at the puff-white of the dandelions making wishes, leaping up to catch the sugars on their tongues.

Hannah Linden won the Cafe Writers Poetry Competition 2021, 2^nd Leeds Peace Poetry Prize 2024 and other prizes. Her debut pamphlet, The Beautiful Open Sky (V. Press), was shortlisted for the Saboteur Award for Best Poetry Pamphlet 2023. BlueSky (@hannahl1n).

Hayden Boyce

12X Bus at Traffic Lights

I’m looking at you looking from the clifftop out to sea.

I’m looking at you looking from the clifftop at the horizon
where the sunken sun has left a soft, pink glow on that far cloudline.

I’m looking at you looking from the clifftop
and learning how I feel by reading into how you feel.

I’m waiting on you looking from the clifftop as I wonder where we go from here.

Doomsday Hand

Friends, there was a time where it was good form
to extend a hand to those who reach back into the mists.

We are not yet washed away, but the taste is in the air.
Petrichor petrified, infused with noxious pangs
for millennia trapped under ice.
Dearest friends, it is only us that we speak between.
A promise of future became hope,
                                     became myth.

There is a hand on the clock
which does not reach back for us.

Hayden Boyce lives in Brighton and works as a mental health practitioner in the NHS. He has self-published two books of poetry, HOME (2019) and FIRE POEMS & Afterglow (2022). Hayden can be found on X (@boyciieee).