Peter Riley: ‘Outside and otherwise there’s nothing,
nothing left, nowhere to go and nothing to be
except the past. Which comes ready sliced.’

Peter Larkin: ‘elementary credentials not posing this clearance as landscape,
oak chokings its non-sedimentary counter-host’
nest-racks weren’t purged for new instruments, merely
a tree’s vertical layers can be so exposed, parodied’

Kate Ashton: ‘they did not choose virginity
once understood the hunger
for despoilment they knew’

John Matthias: ‘Sometimes you’d
Exaggerate quite consciously—
As for example asking a grocer
Where you might find the
Mangelwurzels (sweet red beets).’

Fred Johnston: ‘The red orb blackened as it gained height
And it was coming to me
Batted with a dancer’s ease
Certain, effortless, a pure dream of a thing, a spin too soon

There’s an unhappy moment of recalibration.’

Rupert M. Loydell: ‘We’ve all wished for sentences expressed in the interrogative and read selected highlights of someone else’s words; we’ve all wanted a brand new computer and more sun.’

Lea Graham: ‘It’s the irreverent cherubs bored with Jesus, Jesus, Jesus at the bottom of the Sistine Madonna who camp it up. Mary has just blown in from warmer climes.’

Pui Ying Wong: ‘The air took on the color of acid paper
where poems that once shone
receded into oblivion.’