Iain Britton: ‘sunlight squints at distortions
trapped in tinted glass /
a ceremony breaks black bread
the wind creaks the floorboards /’

Conor Robin Madigan: ‘The south borders of the country rage in conflagration. His happiness at this moves his feet back and forth upon themselves under the covers and he fits an entire halved buttered toast into his mouth before smiling through his orange and soda. After his meal he tries to pull his legs from the tangled bedclothes but falls to the floor and flounders there until he hears the caretaker coming down the great hall and his anxiety mounts him to commit to freeing himself. At once he vanishes to the bathroom. Such a mess of a man.’

Alex Houen: ‘Spring out of touch makes the blood count for nothing,/
Sugar. Till I saw you and felt an instant tense erase/
all before me – a microwave pinging its chicken burrito/
back to adolescence. ‘

‘And so they dug me up. And so he picks my skull out, having heard me named by our rugged chorister of death here in the graveyard. Like Lazarus brought back from the grave, though in my case left to moulder a little longer. Another of his I’s; another of his eyes. Erasmus says the king has a thousand eyes, and in two years time he’ll be one of The King’s Men. To see him stare like that, right through me (as he sees through every one of us these days). He sees through my inventions, including the one that bears his name. Makes me wish for a moment to be dressed in flesh again, if only to tempt him to a jig, the way we used to, before his melancholy and his antic disposition. And this little indisposition of mine, in the form of my mortal annihilation.’