Benjamin Wolfe: ‘She was unclean and unpredictable. Like with a rat or a possum, I knew that she was too small to do me much physical harm, but I was still horrified by the idea of her squirming under my hands and around my ankles.’

Barry Schwabsky: ‘m’lord dug up the bones of your ancient glory
in this sheet the crease resembles a mountain
later melts into a warbling landscape
this life is not the safest place to hide out’

Nigel Wheale: ‘You demi-puppets that
By moonshine do the green sour ringlets make
You whose pastime
Is to make midnight mushrooms’

Tom Lowenstein: ‘In the bitterness of this self-preoccupation
you have contrived exquisite paradoxes
which are clinched with easily deployed rhymes.’

Ian Seed: ‘Just a few hours before, we’d tried to make love. It’d been coming on for weeks now, part of the unspoken reason that Monique and Julien let me stay there. Julien had confided in me once that he could no longer get an erection with Monique. They’d been together too many years, sweethearts since their days in high school in Zurich. He had another lover.’

Annna Forbes: ‘Relative to the swift execution of an antelope
the damage is insignificant—much of the scaffolding endures
and down in the cellar’

Steve Xerri: ‘When the momentum of defeated new Rome
slumps, you come awake dumped in a prison camp,
far from any centre of power, your iron certainty
beginning its long erasure under doubt.’