Introduction

Welcome to Issue 5 of Seaford Review, featuring poetry and poets from around the world. As usual, we’ve had a wonderful time reading all the submissions we’ve received: we’re always astonished by the range of formal experimentation, voice, and concerns expressed in the poems we receive. It’s a real privilege to be trusted with work that is so fresh and varied and vulnerable.

Nevertheless, as we go through the process of selecting poems which make into the issue, we’re often surprised to see a theme or themes emerge. It seems fitting that, as spring finally seems to be arriving in the UK, our current issue contains so many poems touching on youth — Steven Green’s A/S/L or Conrad Rayner’s Everybody’s baby come to mind — and change — see Amy L. King’s IT WAS THE SUMMER OF MY 27TH YEAR. The poets in this issue are writing deeply into the present moment, from Claire Sosienski Smith’s angsty, “generation rent” poem THE BATHROOM to Deron Eckert’s humorous and acerbic take on AI. Alison Clara Tan’s unsettling Broken Pantoum in Horses and Wave Interference shows us how established forms can be remade to speak to a world which every day seems to be increasingly uncertain, fragmentary, and disturbed.

We hope you enjoy reading these poems as much as we did. Please spread the word — let us know which poems you enjoyed, and why! — and share the issue with friends and family. From the editors at Seaford Review, we wish you all a comfortable and settled start to April.

— Chris, Luís, Jack

Table of contents

• Steven Green

  • A/S/L

• Ellora Sutton

  • I want to be your girl

• Conrad Rayner

  • Everybody’s baby

• Amy L. King

  • IT WAS THE SUMMER OF MY 27TH YEAR

• Francis-Xavier Mukiibi

  • You Show Me How to Peel Lychees

• Claire Sosienski Smith

  • THE BATHROOM

• Alison Clara Tan

  • Essay on Rage

  • Broken Pantoum in Horses and Wave Interference

• Deron Eckert

  • The AI Slop Winter Village Displayed

Steven Green

Steven Green is a London-based poet from Birmingham. His work has appeared in the likes of Bruiser, Clarion and Gold Dust Mag as well as in anthologies from Broken Sleep Books and Morocco Bound. He is currently working on his first pamphlet.

A/S/L

It’s the only chance you get
to know you’ve been seen.
You have to log in and out
and again. My friends use
icons to draw elaborate pictures
with their screennames,
accompanied with song lyrics
from an older brother’s
record collection. I attempt
symmetry like I’m a blind sculptor
asked to make a face
with as many straight lines as possible.
I like big blocks of text.
I like tying up the billpayer’s
phoneline. You can tell me
anything, up late bathing
in the blue aurora of the screen.
One night i got bounced
from a chatroom for laughing
at a guy who asked if we have
any Barenaked Ladies fans
in the house. Not cool, dude.
I went into another one
and pretended to be a girl.
A man in Chicago asked
if I’d shave my pubes
and mail them to him.
He’d cover postage, and throw
a few bucks my way,
show me a real good time,
typing out my name
with his whole mouth.

Ellora Sutton

Ellora Sutton is a poet and PhD student based in Hampshire. Her work has been published in Magma, The Poetry Review, Oxford Poetry, etc. and she is the poetry reviewer for Mslexia. Her debut collection, Little Bitch, is published by Verve Poetry Press in April 2026.

I want to be your girl

Use me
like a spit-valve,
empty me of all thought—
I mean—
treat me, allow me
to function
as the spit-valve
affixed to your day’s long tuneless
crowbar. Fill me
with your guts, your froth,
your offal, your pips and stones,
your phlegm and knucklebones,
your screwed-up pages and hot glue.
That fishbone you almost choked on at lunch—
slip it down behind my eye, beneath my eyelid
like a note, a key. The meat you won’t touch
because you can hear it
and it sounds like a filthy machine.
The wetness of it
is my wetness, my deep wage
of spit.

               /

                          Flush the beautiful night
                          from my throat
                          like an unscathed bird.
                          Marvel at my breathing.
                          Breathe with me.
                          Stroke my hair.

Conrad Rayner

Conrad Rayner is a poet and facilitator from London. Recent works feature in Bash Magazine, the Resonance Anthologies 2025 and 2026, and with The Fool’s Press. They have hosted workshops with a range of collaborators, including arts supperclub When They Meet and Resonance Poetry. They are currently working toward a debut pamphlet, and in the final stretch of BA in Creative Writing at Goldsmiths, University of London. They are currently working toward a debut pamphlet, and are an upcoming writer-in-residence at Shakespeare and Company, Paris.

Everybody’s baby

Amy L. King

Amy L. King is a poet and writer living in Manchester. She won the inaugural Derby Poetry Festival prize in 2023 and was longlisted for the Aurora Prize in 2025. Her work can be found in Magma, fourteen poems, Under the Radar, Dust poetry, DIVA magazine and elsewhere.

IT WAS THE SUMMER OF MY 27TH YEAR

and everyone I loved upped sticks for London.
I got to bleaching their skirting boards,
rehoming baby spider plants, demolishing
the knock-off Cornettos in the freezer. June was a chorus
of van doors slamming shut. It was a season of change
and I bore it like a raging sunburn; peels of me
flaking like confetti in the gutter. Someone always
had a tennis ball, a tinny speaker. The stink
of freshly cut grass, a cheap candle with an endless wick.
One morning, my landlord cut a hole in the wall
and the rats finally spilled out. I laughed a lot
that July. Slept in the garden on an old bed sheet,
lived off crisps, dips and cheap larger
someone else was buying. There must have been times
I wobbled: a sad picnic table on its last
rotted legs. But there was always a woman
who knew the best spot for a wild swim, drove
a beat-up car, had nowhere else to be. The city
was one giant smoking area with a new friend
down every alley. I kept promising to visit
my parents, give blood before the next tattoo.
Things were fine! The rain understood
when to take a month off. I started flossing before bed,
telling anyone who would listen best August
of my life, waiting for the leaves to crisp, the balmy
relief of an early night. What happened to the delicious
joy of waking on each other’s sofa.
Keeper of the spare key. By September, their texts
arrived, swearing it’s not the same without you,
someday, they’d come back.

Francis-Xavier Mukiibi

Francis-Xavier Mukiibi is a poet of Ugandan heritage from North London. He was the recipient of an Eric Gregory Award for his debut pamphlet, Mutabani & [ ]ther Poems (Little Betty, 2025), and won Silver in the Creative Future Writers’ Award for 2024. His poems appear in Under the Radar, Propel, Magma, and Poetry London, among others.

You Show Me How To Peel Lychees

In the kitchen, lychees coddled
between thumbs on the island, a cloth
of breeze through a crack. Above us,
a pendant lightens the fruit, an arrow
to the spot where bark skin hues
closer to bright pink than brown. This
is where a lychee feels raw, a soul
before it hooks onto body: boneless, moist
beneath the shell. You dig a fingernail
through the rough. How thick it sits
on the flesh, a cuddle of humps unwilling
to be breached. You’ve mastered this, nail
cleaving like a gust through foam. Mine,
too bitten, blunt. Next to your hand,
a plastic bowl fills with them, undressed,
slick, honey-glistening on the bulbs.
Same way light catches your corner white
eyeing my modest attempts—a mixture of
play, of pity. Does this get easier in time?
Every peel, flesh with permission to feel
the first lick of our breath.

Claire Sosienski Smith

Claire Sosienski Smith is a poet based in South East London. They are a part of Resonance Poetry Collective, a queer-led collective that puts on free events in and around Peckham, who are one of the current collectives in residence at the Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art. Claire’s work has most recently been published by 14 poems, discount guillotine, and eff-able: a spicy anthology of queer crip poetry.

THE BATHROOM

The bathroom swallows everything I give it.
Here is the flush that unspins its way beneath
the street, the plughole and its metal breath,
fluent in dust and bones and all things.

Is the entire world my bathroom? Is everything
a commode if you're creative enough?

Sarah says a house built in the sixties is best,
wants to live somewhere designed for people
with access to birth control, quality psychedelics,
quaaludes and good weed.

I am keeping myself in cycles of clean and unclean,
patient as I wait to unfold myself into a bath. I am a
prehistoric fern, an outstretched hand, the raspberry
fruit roll-up I take from my pocket and offer to you.
You place it under your pillow.

Through the cracks in your sleep, you say:
harbour      linen     linoleum
wavy    leaf       livered

And I am overtaken with an urge to touch your lips
as if I could hold open the words and climb inside.

Alison Clara Tan

Alison Clara Tan is a Southeast Asian writer based in London. Her poetry appears or is forthcoming in fourteen poems, wildness, The Kenyon Review, Gutter Magazine and Washington Square Review, among others. She is a Barbican Young Poet, a Brooklyn Poets Fellow, a member of the London Writers Centre's Poetics Lab 2025, and has been a resident artist at the Hawkwood Centre for Future Thinking.

Essay on Rage

I’m no saint / I was up
all night breaking a heart,
killing a man / I walked
with feet backwards /
wasted hours brushing
away / this madness / three
burnt leaves from the
windowsill / I was up
all night / calling birds
of prey from a shameful
sky / my vision blinded
by white wings / slicing
across terrified glass /
but love me / anyway /
toss kisses down
the oubliette / bind
my tiny hands / fast
of the butcher’s blade /
turn, now / watch me
shadowbox bruises,
breathing / say Alison /
why say such terrible
things / I wanted only
to hold you.

Broken Pantoum in Horses and Wave Interference

—for Joshua

                                    Iceland trains horses to write out-of-office emails.
                                                    —NZ Herald, 29 Jan 2024

Did it hit you like a truck
when you woke up? Horses in Iceland
can write your out-of-office emails. Instead
of wearing your keyboard
as a fashion noose
what good is all
your pride—what can it do,
When horses in Iceland can write.
You’re either lonely or don’t know how lonely you are.
So what good is all your pride? What can it do
though the consequences
aren’t predefined
of being lonely
and knowing how lonely
we are. If Wave 1 is my energy and Wave 2 yours, the consequences
aren’t predefined. Such is the corollary
of a subtle mind.
If Wave 1 is my energy
and Wave 2 yours
they’re both constructive
and destructive sometimes. Such
are the corollaries
of two subtle minds where
one writes poems, and one codes.
We’re both constructive. Destructive,
sometimes—like the stupidity of
a miscalculated joke. That’s why I write poems, and you code
the split between sympathy
and empathy when you’ve been
stupid, miscalculated your joke. If I slow
down and just
imagine it: the split between sympathy
and empathy
is being understood. As
to understand—
slow down. Just imagine it: horses sliding
down fjords in the light of being understood,
as to understand. Graze factors
with me in Iceland.

Deron Eckert

Deron Eckert is a Pushcart-nominated poet and writer who lives in Lexington, Kentucky. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Appalachian Review, Atlanta Review, Wild Roof Journal, Blue Mountain Review, Rattle, Stanchion, The Fourth River, and elsewhere. He can be found on Instagram at deroneckert.

The AI Slop Winter Village Displayed

generates milquetoast holly jolly jazz to lull us
into complacency—a term typically used to describe
anything we have grown accustomed to hearing or seeing
—albeit slightly askew and cut short by the loop.
Then, there are the spines of pageless books—
unless you count the marshmallow-like blocks wedged
between the covers as pages—stacked to the ceiling
of every window in the square no matter whether
they’re windows in a café, apartment, or patio-facing bar
that appears to serve only marshmallow-stuffed books
along with a handful of muffins without a single spirit
or person in sight, as if we are being reminded by a program
that once we are all gone, the only thing left of us will be
stale baked goods and the words we left on the page,
and even those can be kneaded away. But the music is fine
enough for the dogs to listen to while we are away.
Studies say they like to hear music more than voices,
and our pups will not even glance at the screen anyway.
They have too large of a window to an outside world
that consistently reveals too many real scurrying chipmunks
and skulking stray cats to get lost in the discrepancies
of something so worthless to anything living as a fake
reality playing background music over a twelve-hour
snow shower that never accumulates to anything
worth fussing about longer than the time it takes me
to lace up my weathered brown leather shoes and bid
the pups adieu with the reminder you and I will return soon
and the assurance that we are not going anywhere,
especially this wonderlessland even dogs don’t like,
which does nothing for me either on my way out the door
other than bring to the surface a deeply rooted acorn
of grandparent-to-grandchild advice that has grown into
such an established white oak in the recesses of my mind
that it could now be chopped down, charred, and shaped into
a barrel brimming with barrel-proof bourbon meant to be
taken straight: Never trust a thing a dog doesn’t like.

We have put together a little treat for you all, to celebrate spring here in the UK. We are really excited to share this anthology of the Seaford Review with you, our first four issues (from 2024 and 2025).

You can download the anthology below, either as a PDF or EPUB file. Please do share on social media and make sure to tag us (and your favourite poems of course).

Issue 5 of the magazine will be coming out very soon, and tonight we are celebrating the anthology and the new lineup with a live online reading that you’ll be able to watch or listen to in the coming weeks.

Seaford Review Anthology (issues 1 4)

10.7MB ∙ EPUB file

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Download

Seaford Review Anthology (issues 1 4)

10.7MB ∙ EPUB file

Download

Download

Thanks for being part of the Seaford Review community; we appreciate you all so much.

With love and solidarity always,

Chris, Jack, and Luís 🌊

Introduction

Welcome to Seaford Review Issue Four, which features poets and poems from all walks of life: in this issue is writing by Will Russo and Chris Gylee which examines masculinity — playfully and with creativity; poems by jake s. frances ferguson and Joey Wańczyk which delve into the queer experience; and poems by Sarah Louise Morey and Becky May which examine loss and growing up (Sassy pink bicycle, Plantings).

Not to mention the many other wonderful pieces of contemporary verse which populate this edition: C. H. Lieberman’s Laura Palmer, which takes us into a dark, Twin Peaks-inspired world, tinged with longing; Sophia Georghiou’s poem Your Mother Knew, which interrogates the relationship between mothers and their sons (and girlfriends); and Caroline Druitt’s We threw a break up party, which takes a dark and humorous look at the end of a relationship.

Issue Four marks one whole year of Seaford Review: our first issue was published almost exactly 13 months ago, on November 18th 2024; this is our first “repeat” seasonal issue. We’d like to thank you for choosing to spend your time here, and are very excited to announce that in the New Year we’ll be sharing an epub anthology of work that’s featured in our first three issues.

In general, we’ve been overwhelmed by the volume, variety, and quality of work we’ve received since we started out; not to mention by how well the magazine has been received by the community of poetry writers and readers. We hope the poems in this issue bring you as much joy as they brought to us.

—Chris, Luís, Jack ❄️

Table of Contents

• Will Russo

  • All Boy

• Rose Ramsden

  • daily affirmations

• Joey Wańczyk

  • Telekinesis

• Caroline Druitt

  • We threw a break up party

• C. H. Lieberman

  • Laura Palmer

• jake s. frances ferguson

  • Colby Gordon says we are trapped in memoir

  • the speaker of wulf and eadwacer visits The Fox, Birmingham

• Chris Gylee

  • Song for Bravery Riding

• Sophia Georghiou

  • Your Mother Knew

• Sarah Louise Morey

  • Sassy pink bicycle

• Becky May

  • Plantings

Will Russo

Will Russo is the author of two chapbooks: Dreamsoak (Querencia Press, 2023) and Glass Manifesto, winner of the 2023 Rick Campbell Chapbook Award from Anhinga Press. Recent work has appeared in Dialogist, Burial Magazine, and A Thin Slice of Anxiety. He is poetry reviews editor at Another Chicago Magazine and received his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Find him at willrusso.com.

All Boy

The all boy
proves himself mischief

rewilds uncontained
praise, an excuse.

Straggler, wallflower—
wedgie up the flagpole.

What docks in you like the scar on the nose
dad once called perfect.

A band of all boys nothing
but rubble, force to unstop.

Everything sways on a tide of blood silent as night
in a suburb. Plain as a girl.

Nothing else fit. Pleasing
and female, flower into your next drenched thing.

Rose Ramsden

Rose Ramsden is a writer based in Surrey, UK. She has a BA in English Literature with Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia and an MA in Creative Writing: Poetry from Royal Holloway. Her work has been previously published by Propel, 14poems, bathmagg, and rejected by many more. You can find her on Instagram @RoseRamsden.

daily affirmations

my daily screen time is fine / my spine is strong and sits in the
ideal S shape / I do not luxuriate in my skull’s dirty bathwater
/ I soak in the sound of stars and summer / my inner child is
full from honey indulgence / I have appropriate and
proportionate emotional responses / I tackle trauma like a
boxcutter / compartmentalise / condense / everyone is very
impressed / hot girls collect sylvanian families / ketamine will
never hurt me / the crisis support worker thinks I am charming
/ calories are a conspiracy / everyone on this bus wants to fuck
me / I am whimsical and flourishing /

Joey Wańczyk

Joey Wańczyk is a poet from Indianapolis, Indiana. He currently lives in Eugene, Oregon where he is an M.F.A. candidate at the University of Oregon. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Meridian, Shō Poetry Journal, & Change, and Frozen Sea, among other publications.

Telekinesis

I know how I reek like desperation, stench of a corn-fed
farm boy. Wasn’t raised off the land, no, but all
Indiana owned that stench. It wasn’t so pretty
the things I did for fun. Didn’t want to turn out
typical, but there I was chewing on a wheat stick,
watching shadows marry the edges of my shape
to asphalt. At the blacktop behind school, I mashed
the spring helicopter seeds into green paste, a potion
I pretended was magic, still wanted to believe in something
super-real, like dragon rollercoasters out in China.
Told the queer girls from class there was a baby
bunny trapped in a sewer grate, and after they ran
to investigate, I swiped their loose change and claimed
I made that rabbit disappear with the might of my mind.

Caroline Druitt

Caroline Druitt is a writer and facilitator living in London with her cliché cat, Suki. She runs creative writing workshops in unlikely places, including saunas, pub gardens and strangers’ kitchen tables. Her work has appeared in The North, Lucent Dreaming, And Other Poems and The Alchemy Spoon, and has been commissioned by Apples and Snakes. She has been longlisted for the Out-Spoken Prize for Poetry, shortlisted for the Bridport Prize and the Aesthetica Creative Writing Award, and commended in the National Poetry Competition. She is a 2025–26 London Library Emerging Writer, currently working on an experimental hybrid memoir about chronic illness.

We threw a break up party

decorated the hallway dresser: mini candles with a personalised scent and trinket 

bottles hung with tiny luggage tags: absinth makes the heart grow fonder. There was 

dancing, lustful looks across the lounge, the ceremonial slashing of His/Her towel 

gowns, couple friends fantasising about untying the knot. We’d prepared games, trivia, 

‘Who Said What First?’ followed by charades: ‘Act out the Argument.’ Relationship 

scorecards marked 0-5. Anonymous feedback forms. I went to fetch the piñata for the 

climax but the neighbour’s kids had got there first, sat slug-like in the front room with

rainbow smudged mouths. To save the night we agreed I’d offer myself. Our guests, 

eager for their turns, wondered who might make the winning split, what treasure 

could come streaming from inside. My feet swung low like pendulums as they hooked 

me to the light.

C. H. Lieberman

C.H. Lieberman (he/him) is a transmasc writer, performer, and visual artist from South London. He is the author of the award-winning play Bunny Man. His poetry has featured in & Change, t’ART Magazine, Trans Tongues, and others. His artwork also featured on the cover of & Change Issue 10.

Laura Palmer

“the worst thing about love is
i remember it.”

— I get so jealous of euthanized dogs, June Gehringer1

These days I’m scared of cutting myself when I shave;
there are so many blood vessels in my face, and
so many ways to contaminate the blade.

We lose a chunk of the highway every time it rains
and I get to have such interesting conversations as:
“How many cigarettes have you smoked this week?
Is it more or less than last week?”

Everything that happened here was so long ago
it’s hardly worth mentioning.

I walk to the diner, because it’s healthier than driving
and my doctor is hell bent on keeping me here.
There is less of you in the world with every passing year
but at the very least I can say that someone
thought about Laura Palmer in the diner today.

jake s. frances ferguson

jake s. frances ferguson (they/them) is a London-based Irish poet and a PhD student at King’s College London. Their poetry has appeared in Propel Magazine, Fruit Journal, Queerlings, Impossible Archetype, and Poetry & Audience. Their poetic project ‘wulf and eadwacer and i’ was long-listed for the Ivan Juritz Prize 2023 and their erasure poetry was displayed in the 2023-24 Forgotten Battles exhibition at the Royal Armouries Leeds. You can find them on Instagram @jakestefan181.

Colby Gordon says we are trapped in memoir

time isn’t cis     its dendrites break and glimmer
can’t cleave a from b x or y      there are no genes
i was greened from a leaf     and as a child i always
knew i was an emily dickinson poem     all those
afterimposed slashes      gasps for an air unteemed
a deferral of “i”s        i knew i was different when
i watched marie antoinette and wanted to become
the soft pastel light       in a sofia coppola film
i’ve had an unchanging identity       as windtrembled
grass / dana scully / the hushed downy purple
in the mourne mountains / a line from mrs dalloway
about taxi cabs and seas and danger / the touch
of a beautiful stranger’s hand       on my shoulder
flustering my pronouns       i’m disparate in how
i walk through streets / hallways / men’s bedrooms
i don’t taste like labels       i’m a kin to the folds
in my lover’s shirts         lingering there slantwise
bunched plural      and still      one historied body

the speaker of wulf and eadwacer visits The Fox, Birmingham

and what is it anyway?     this inkstain i was     i’m not one
for crying over     the air’s tentative     the tension of its motion
lessness      unhefted and exiled      but i’m not unvengeful
something was here and then it wasn’t     if something hears me
tonight i’ll retell any version       how i’m an unabandonment
how seconds strip your sting’s stem     from my skin’s circuitry
i drink a spicedrum dietcoke     lemonslice the memory      acute
bearing the whelp of my meat     across this sticky floor i am
floaty and prepositional     a wedge between stones     fickle
islands      i forget my parents      removed from the sectarian
fractioning       glitter of empire crusting like an exoskeleton
across the bar      another islet     forwardflares me into a dream
of their hands their neck     a kiss we cleave becomes its own ūhta
that darkness before dawn       hour of nocturns and the harshest
brawn of desire’s seep      in a loverless bed     this person gleams
through me like a spell of fainting       and i know how touch
can seem from the outside like a battle       how it unlatches
one grammar from another       from a /you/ they unmade
into composite     as if it were a godgift       to be consumed
into the bleared tapestry    of their elegiac         recitation

Chris Gylee

Chris Gylee (he/him, Stockport UK, 1983) is a queer writer and artist living in rural Finland. His poems include the micro-chapbooks Ten For ‘A’ and Songs for Our Future Selves (both Ghost City Press). His writing has appeared in & Change, Frozen Sea, Fruitslice, GARLAND, Impossible Archetype, and Under the Radar, amongst others. www.chrisgylee.com / @chrisgylee

Song for Bravery Riding

Nothing wrong, really, with wanting to be a small-time god
Lust pigeons flocking, eyes beady & bright, we all coo you

            Call us & we come running, no need to advertise
            Muscle slip-sleek over bone, ancient vision aloft

Air Max squeaking freshness, size nines toeing this brilliant slab
We watch your short show, flame-shapes vanishing in our blind spot

            Little devils & nightshades swallowed, lye lapping
            No substance left when we empty the vat, simply colour

Plain shades, metaphorless, pears pear-green, cherries cherry-red
If you wanna rut, put up your hand

            We are a Palace of perpetual sinners
            We steal out into the first mist, disco-line skin goosed with anticipation

Arms lining the edge of the clearing, funny bones against silver bark
No tracking it, little deity, just rough promises, all our days ripe for devotion-stacking

Sophia Georghiou

Sophia Georghiou’s work has appeared in The Journal of Creative Writing Research, Poetry London, Lineage, the6ress, and other poetry journals, with poems forthcoming in additional publications. Her poetry has been shortlisted for the Bridport Prize and longlisted for the Pat Kavanagh Prize. Her debut collection Gloria Trillo, forthcoming, received the 2025 Eric Gregory Award.

Your Mother Knew

Your mother knew I wanted it.
Your mother knew I wanted it so bad
she unscrewed the locks to your bedroom.
Your mother knew I wanted it she knotted the curtain
and drilled it to the ceiling. Your mother knew I wanted it
she fixed cameras in the kitchen, watched you laugh
when I put two lemons in my bra. Your mother knew
I wanted it she tackled me during a friendly game
of football, tightened the bandage of my leaking ankle.
Your mother knew I wanted it she managed to sniff-out
the stash of unused condoms. Your mother knew I wanted it
she sent your father in while I was taking a shower.
Your mother knew I wanted it so bad
after a month of no bleed, reluctantly rubbed
the small of my back. Your mother knew
there was nothing she could do. I loved you,
so your mother let me stay over on weekends,
pretended to ignore my howls while you pushed it in.
Your mother knew exactly what was happening
when she gave the dog her hand to lick and her rings
came loose, her fingernails lifted and when the dog,
none-the-wiser, got sick, she left it to shit
everywhere, over every carpet in the house.

Sarah Louise Morey

Sarah Louise Morey is a London based writer, educator, and co-founder of The Writing Shed. She is a graduate of the Goldsmiths Creative and Life Writing MA. Rooted in life lived in New York, Istanbul, and London, her writing examines construction of the self, relationship, and place. Her poetry can be found in Lineage published by Oblique House. She was shortlisted for the Free Verse Poetry Prize 2025.

Sassy pink bicycle

a four year old belongs to you—
no matter the weather—you wait
outside the launderette
— laid out
side stretch on cement
not longer than a yard
wires nestle
in rubber sockets
a life — arrested— must be
going on three months— fuschia
folded — caught by a chain— looping
yet frozen— someone
put you together with hopes high
each day I wonder— upright
splayed out— split open
— the day when we won’t
meet anymore— exhale
as I turn the corner
eyes land on you

sassy pink bicycle
my first bike — royal blue
training wheels tacked on—
of which you have none—
accomplished— the body waits—
polythene rope threads through
spokes— under tread—
to swing — off city
black diamonds pavement—
heart that plucks lavender
— faithful steed
raspberry runner —stilled
though hungry
for salt crusted palms
shrieks of legs to spit
out — how to stop this whooshing
cloud — air sun gravel—
hands cup pearly—
you are as real as fenestration
shadows stretching
on my two a.m. carpet
you are loved

Becky May

Becky May is a Manchester-based poet who used to live in Spain, Her work has been published in PN Review, Propel Magazine & 14 Magazine, amongst others. She is on the panel of judges for the 2025 Manchester Cathedral Poetry Competition. Becky is passionate about poetry as community and loves running workshops, hosting events & supporting fellow poets. She can be found on social media @beckymaywriter

Plantings

1.
The local paper clears space for hope,
their photographer in Saturday corduroy,
issuing instructions from behind his Nikon,
my eight-year old foot steady on the shovel,
conkered hair tilting towards my father,
weekday suit swapped for white anorak,
a sapling in his hand, slotted in its hole,
a tooth placed in a gum, my tongue remembering.

2.
Thirty years later, nobody notes our names,
tripod angled on the pitch of my father’s drive,
the red boiler suit he lent me for the afternoon,
grubs of soil on his awkward, summer knees.
He cradles the silver trunk, the first of three,
blinking its garden-centre leaves in unfamiliar light.
This wordless afternoon, we’ll cut turf, tamp earth,
soothe trees upright. Gift them space to grow.

What can you tell us about your Issue Three poems?

Grocery shopping with a woman from Hinge very much does what it says on the tin. It was a while ago, maybe a year? I’d gone on a few dates with someone I’d met at Goldie Saloon—I took artistic liberty with the “from Hinge” based on a conversation we’d had. But yeah, we decided to have a chill evening in, went to Tesco and got some girl dinner, as described. Sadly, it didn’t pan out. I’m dating-app sober but I often think it might be worth it for the material.

I quite like is a really lovely memory of my friend John and I. My poetry stanza organised our own retreat in Avignon with Rachel Long, with the plan being for a couple of people to pair off and cook dinner for the whole group each evening.

John and I made many mediocre things, but started with devilled eggs as a little appetiser. I set him the task of making sure the eggs were hard boiled. He tried to take them off the hob 5 minutes early and I was like, “they’re not done,” and he was like “they are,” and I was like “just to be clear, this is the hill you want to die on?” and he was like “yes.” The eggs were not done.

Tomatoes were also sliced.

What poets and poems are you in dialogue with?

There are so many household name poets I love—Frank O’Hara (all of it, but especially To the Harbormaster, which Google tells me I visit often), Tomas Tranströmer (The Couple and After Someone’s Death), Emily Berry (Love Bird and Dream of a Dog1)—to name a few.

But I take just as much from my friends and contemporaries as I do established writers. Rich Ware writes about the contemporary queer experience with such reverence and empathy, Tangerine is a great example of this, as is Swallows, which I’m not sure has been published yet. (Rich, if you’re reading this, please advise).

John Wildsmith’s (soft boiled egg, see above) poems are almost orienting for me. I read them, and I remember what I’m doing it for. His poem Going Church is one of my favourite poems.

Though I wish he’d stop editing the first stanza.

Phoebe Gilmore’s remind me of whipped cream—they’re so light and airy on the surface but are deceptively heavy and could probably clog your arteries (in the best way). The best example of this is her as-of-yet released meme series which is so soft, really incredible..

Carol Peace (who is also an established sculptor) is so unashamedly herself in everything she does, especially in how she writes. She reminds me to not take myself so seriously. “I know it’s pretty cliché, but maybe I can get away with it because it’s me (laughing emoji).” She self published her own, stunning, collection, a testament to her “fuck it, I’ll do it myself” attitude.

Stevie Green has this poem about his school friend kicking a bin in frustration that’s hilarious, and tender and nostalgic. And he just randomly dashed one off the other day, the sugarbabes are back. He reminds me of Frank O’Hara like that. He writes memory like I wish I could.

I don’t know him personally, but I also loved Tom Bailey’s pamphlet, Please Do Not Touch or Feed the Horses, the lines “It’s so sad when someone dies. They take all of their thoughts with them.” is, in my opinion, the perfect couplet.

What drew you to writing poetry?

Ben Lerner, no contest. I picked up No Art, which includes his pamphlet The Lichtberg Figures, by chance in Waterstones in November 2023. I was immediately, completely obsessed. I think I sent everyone I knew the first poem in the pamphlet, beginning the dark collects our empties. The last line is a killer.

Cut to a month or so later, I had too much prosecco on Boxing Day and signed up to the beginner Faber poetry course, which started three weeks later, with Richard Scott and Rachel Long. It was a Christmas gift to myself, having written maybe 3 ½ “poems” in the month preceding. Everything stemmed from those 12 weeks. Kind of wild to think about.

What’s your first poetry memory?

Sitting in that Faber course on the first day, Richard (Scott) had everyone describe their favourite colour as an intro. Rich (Ware) talked about his burnt orange couch, another girl her bottle-green nail polish. I think I prattled on about some abandoned tattoo concept with a marigold.

What’s on your bedside table? What books, trinkets…?

Right now, Meditations in an Emergency by Frank O’Hara (emotional support copy), Goodlord by Ella Frears2, and a Folio Society print edition of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. My dad’s panama hat, a photo of us at the zoo when I was a kid, La Roche-Posay sunblock, mascara, and two cans of black beans I picked up from the off license, took out of my tote and have yet to take to the kitchen.

What’s your favourite text about the sea? Or beaches?

To the Harbormaster, Frank O’Hara. Only because I, too, am always tying up and then deciding to depart.

What can you tell us about The Prophecy and the Lawnmower?

My poem The prophecy and the lawnmower is one of a number of poems that I’ve written about my relationships with men. The afternoon mentioned in the poem happened several years ago, but that day has remained with me ever since because it highlighted for me the difference between societal expectations regarding marriage/monogamy, and the way that I have chosen to live my life—I am openly polyamorous and bisexual. My neighbour really was obsessively mowing his lawn that day and I could really hear him, so, in this poem, I wanted to suggest the luxuriousness of (sexual) openness vis a vis the restraints or ‘straightness’ of most peoples’ lives. The idyllic English lawn and a man fixated with keeping it perfect seemed a fitting image.

The poem was incredibly difficult to craft. The idea to use the future tense came from Andrew McMillan's poem, Finally, in which he uses the future tense to hint at the repetition of relationships. So, while my poem refers to a specific day, the use of ‘will’ makes the event more universal, I hope.

What poets and poems are you in dialogue with?

I am very much influenced by poets who are able to approach the subject of sex openly. This includes, of course, Kim Moore and Andrew McMillan (both tutors of mine at MMU) but also many American poets including Kim Addonizio and Olivia Gatwood.

I am extremely taken by the way that Sean Hewitt is able to approach sensuality.

Furthermore, Mancunian poet, Carson Wolfe, a classmate from MMU, has also influenced the way that I approach writing about sex—their pared-back style and honesty on the page have been majorly informative in my writing.

Finally, Bad Betty-published poet, Jemima Foxtrot, has also been influential in my work. The way that Jemima speaks about sex work, for example, is empowering.

What is your writing practice? Where and when do you write? By hand, laptop, phone notes…?

I always write hand-written notes first in erasable black ink whenever I can, and transfer it to a laptop when it seems to carry some hope. Unfortunately, I can't write poems in permanent ink, so I always make sure I have a whole pencil case full of erasable pens of all colours.

Everywhere I go I carry a pencil case, plus the latest book I’m reading, plus two A4 spiral-bound notebooks. One notebook is labelled ‘words from other poets’ (in which I jot lines, words, adjectives, similes etc that have resonated), and one is labelled, ‘drafts and ideas’. Of necessity, I have a large backpack.

Do you write in other forms?

I am a playwright and also a flash-fiction-writer. However, poetry is my first love, and I only dabble in other written forms when my poetry is safely ‘stashed away’ and everything I want to write is up to date.

What drew you to writing poetry?

I was in a 20-year-long abusive relationship. At night I’d put my kids to bed, with stories and fairytales and laughter, but once their doors were closed, my reality was very different. So, in 2017, I began a 6-year Open University degree (general arts) to help me through the loneliness and abuse of the evenings.

Of everything that I studied over the years at the OU, there was one single unit on creative writing, and the assignment was to write either 12 lines of poetry or a couple of pages of prose ... and I thought (in my innocence) that 12 lines of poetry was easier, and that was it! I was struck by the poetry bug... This was in 2021, and by 2022, I had left my job and I was signed up for a creative writing course at my local university (Derby). I now have a BA from Derby (first-class), an MA in poetry (distinction) from MMU, and I start my PhD in October!!

What’s your first poetry memory?

I was 12/13, and I submitted a hand-written poem to the editorial of my local newspaper about how it felt to be an adolescent. It was published. My teachers were in awe, and my classmates hated me.

What’s on your bedside table? Books etc.?

I’m currently re-reading Goodlord by Ella Frears, Eleanor among the Saints by Rachel Mann, and there is always a something by Sean Hewitt on my bedside table, too. I’m also listening to Before War—On Marriage, hierarchy, and matriarchal origins on Audible by Elisha Daeva who explains in detail about how polyamory is the natural default.

What one image do you want to send that speaks to your poem?

A reproduction of this painting by Peder Severin Krøyer, has been in various walls (sometimes bathroom, sometimes kitchen, sometimes bedroom) throughout my life. For me, it perfectly epitomises the constraints of public life, and the sensuality of private life.

What can you tell us about Bruise like the face of Jesus?

I wrote this poem a few weeks after I fainted at a Boxing Day dinner party. It was my first time fainting – a new experience to explore poetically. A bruise developed on my inner thigh which vaguely looked like the face of Jesus. I was interested in the way the body carries marks – the bloodwork of a fall.

What poets and poems are you in dialogue with?

I’m currently in the final push of completing my MA at Goldsmiths University of London and have been revisiting a lot of older work by Rachael Allen, particularly her 4chan poems in her pamphlet Faber New Poets 9. Rapidshares /r/ remains a favourite of mine. Allen is so skilled in capturing a certain kind of girlhood nostalgia in this poem. My project for my MA is exploring the similarity between the culture of memes and poetry.

What is your writing practice? Where and when do you write? By hand, laptop, phone notes…?

I usually write lines in the Google Docs app on my phone so that I can develop it straight away when I have some quiet laptop time. It’s turned into a bit of chaos recently as I’ve found that Google Docs is rubbish and I’m trying to transfer over to Word documents — I’m now dealing with two graveyards of drafts instead of one.

What poem do you wish you’d written?

Dream of a dog by Emily Berry. I read that poem again and again and always find something new and delicate in it.

Tell us what’s on your bedside table?

Paracetamol, contraceptive pill, water bottle, jewellery and Cat Bohannan’s Eve: How the female body drove 200 million years of evolution (it is a huge book, I have only read three chapters of it, but I have really enjoyed it so far).

What song helps us get to know you better?

This question is a lot of pressure, so I have just gone to my liked songs on Spotify and the most recent one I have saved is Fame is a Gun by Addison Rae – a great tune for getting ready, which is universally the best part of a night out.

What can you tell us about your two Issue Three poems?

Both of these poems came from my desire to explore and retell the Welsh myth of Gelert and Llywelyn. Long story short — a prince, Llywelyn, loves his dog Gelert. One day, Llywelyn thinks Gelert has killed his child, so he kills Gelert. He is wrong. Gelert was only protecting the child. This story was told to me when I was at school by my teacher and it fascinated me — the relationship with the dog, the bloody scene in the nursery and the way Llywelyn was so quick to believe the worst in his friend. I set out to write about this and thought about bell hooks’ quote: ‘The first act of violence that patriarchy demands of males is not violence towards women. Instead, patriarchy demands of all males that they engage in acts of psychic self-mutilation, that they kill off the emotional parts of themselves.’ So, this was my focus. I was thinking of Llywelyn as going through the stages of psychic self-mutilation, killing off his emotional self due to becoming the King of Wales (a fantasy I wanted to indulge as we never had this in history).

By the time we meet Llywelyn in these poems, he has changed. In Deganwy Castle — a poem I wrote when I was in Berlin — he is reflecting on a time when he was innocent but used violence to communicate his strength to other boys. It is a mirror for the man he is now, destroying castles and homes because he believes that is power. And of course it is not. This is why he meets Cythraul in the next poem. He has become a tyrant, and all tyrants meet their ends. Cythraul is the Welsh word for Satan or Devil. Llywelyn’s self-mutilation has led him to this and who is waiting for him? Who is the person he really wants to see? Gelert. The best friend he killed. Llywelyn’s tale was always told to me as a tragedy, so I wanted to expand on that and give it a modern lens. To see Llywelyn as the kind of man who kills the only person who could have saved him.

What poets and poems are you in dialogue with?

Lucille Clifton is my guiding light, my joy and my inspiration. Her range, skill and storytelling abilities are just perfection. I always go back to her poems about the Bible and the angel reporting on Adam and Eve; sublime. Eileen Myles is another that frees me from the shackles of rules and just tells me to write. The phenomenal Louise Glück, such wondrous precision of words and thoughts. I’m very much a product of the authors I love and when I’m writing poetry, I am constantly reading it, I’m insatiable. I was fortunate enough to be at a writing residency at Moniack Mhor when I was working on most of these poems (as I’m hoping this will be my second book) and I devoured their poetry library. It’s like a beat that needs to keep moving in my head and that can only happen with others’ words.

What is your writing practice? Where and when do you write? By hand, laptop, phone notes…?

I work full-time as a language teacher, so I work at night. After dinner and some film or TV time, my partner goes to bed, and I go to the laptop for a few hours. If I’m writing poetry, I start with a pen and paper, I can scribble in the margins, move lines around, hash out ideas. Sometimes it comes, sometimes it doesn’t, and I need to come back to it. I’m a big believer in not forcing it but also being disciplined — it’s a fine middle line to strike, knowing when to walk away, knowing when to stay and push on. I’ll type the poem up when it’s somewhat finished on the page and by typing I am putting it through its first draft. Some poems take about thirteen drafts, others just come as they are. I struggled a lot with Deganwy Castle but when I realised the shape of the poem, it fell into place. Shape is really important to me. I don’t really know why but I need to understand the arch of the poem, the way the lines sit together, how it looks. Cythraul was the opposite. I knew its shape, I knew its message and it just burst out of me. My beautiful, dead, tyrant shouting for his best friend.

What drew you to writing poetry?

Philip Gross. When I was at the University of South Wales (what was known as the University of Glamorgan when I was there), Philip ran a Children’s Writing course which I took. Part of that was writing poetry which I decided to have a go at. I’d not written poetry before. I’d been writing short stories and novels throughout my teens but was scared of poetry due to its rules. It was Philip and another tutor, Barrie Llywelyn, who taught me to throw the rules out and just write. I’ve written about the elitism of poetry, the way it can alienate instead of attract but as I’ve experienced more poetry — especially modern poetry — I have realised it is a vessel to communicate anything we want. It can be free of form but also adhere to a form. Its strength is its creation and obliteration of rules.

Sandra Bullock Lost In Space

The Power of Poetry

My university tutor said to me once, ‘a poem is a poem because the poet says it is’. In that simple declarative sentence a wall that had been built many years before fell down. I heard the mortar crumble, the bricks collide, the dirt spew out. And I felt excited. Poetry, without rules. What a new concept…

Read more

a year ago · 2 likes · Thomas Stewart

What’s on your bedside table? Books etc.?

I always have way too many books on my to-read pile, but this brings me joy as I never know what mood I’m going to be in. I’ve just finished Boy Parts by Eliza Clark which was gnarly and wonderful. Also The Difficult Ghost by Leila Guerriero, a story of how Truman Capote wrote In Cold Blood. I’m reading a lot of fiction at the moment, as that’s what I’m primarily writing, although I may have just started a new poetry project, we shall see. I have Christos Tsiolkas’ The In-Between (I love Tsiolkas’ style of writing). Galatea 2.2 by Richard Powers. Her Majesty’s Royal Coven by Juno Dawson. The Book That Wouldn’t Burn by Mark Lawrence. The Italian by Ann Radcliff. The War Between the Tates by Alison Lurie. Bunny by Mona Awad. Hour of the Star by Clarice Lispector which was a gift from one of my students. Marlon James’ Black Leopard Red Wolf. In terms of poetry, I have Danez Smith’s Bluff (Smith is one of my favourite living poets) and Diane Seuss’ Modern Poetry (excited for that as I thought frank: sonnets was a thing of genius). Oh, and a biography of Stanley Kubrick.

What can you tell us about None of my friends want to talk about heaven?

I started writing it in a bookshop cafe where I’d picked up a copy of Kaveh Akbar’s collection Calling a Wolf a Wolf. This was one of the first poetry collections I read from start to finish when I’d just started writing poetry. Lent by a friend, the book found me at the right time just as it re-found me at the right time again.

One of my all time favourite poems is Aquí te amo (Here I love you) by Pablo Neruda - specifically the line a veces amanezco, y hasta mi alma está húmeda (sometimes I wake up and even my soul is wet). To me, Neruda’s wet soul image inadvertently captures the helplessness and surrender that Akbar explores in his writing around addiction and recovery, something which I’d been searching for a language for in my own work.

What poets and poems are you in dialogue with?

Sarah Ruhl is a poet and playwright I find myself in dialogue with often. The way she talks to God or Gods in her work revolutionised how I think about how poetry connects us with something larger than ourselves, whether or not we keep a religious or spiritual practice elsewhere in our lives.

Hera Lindsay Bird, Eileen Myles, Kim Addonizio and Rachael Allen are some poets I find my poems talking to lots at the moment. Lifelong chats with Mary Oliver, Sharon Olds and Frank O’Hara as much as Fiona Apple, Frank Ocean and Brittany Howard.

Apart from the above, this particular poem’s internet-pilled register is very much a delayed response to Sheena Patel’s novel I’m a Fan, which floored me when I read it and has stayed lodged in my brain the three years since.

Do you write in other forms? If so, how do you toggle between them?

I write for theatre a lot, but I don’t see playwriting as a necessarily separate practice to writing poetry. Often I’ll have the seed of an idea and try it out in a few different forms to see what works best, toggling between dialogue, monologue, something more poetic or descriptive or abstract. Sometimes I’ll spend months inside a play, not writing any poetry at all, but then occasionally I’ll spend months on poems, not writing any plays.

Playwriting is a longer process because it’s generally a longer form; by virtue of this there are more formal and structural conventions which you sort of need to lean on if you want to sustain an audience's attention for a whole evening. Without some kind of robust structure this would be really, really hard to do. I’m thinking less about structure when I write poetry, or perhaps thinking about it differently, but with both forms in different ways, I’m thinking about atmosphere and rhythm.

What is your writing practice? Where and when do you write? By hand, laptop, phone notes…?

On days I’m not working my day job, I typically make a coffee and then sit down to free-write in a notebook first thing in the morning, for about 10 minutes. Then I’ll open the laptop, look over what I’ve done the previous day and edit for a bit. Sometimes I have a plan of what I’m going to write for the rest of the day but more often I’m channeling half-formed ideas into messy first drafts. Most things don’t make it past that stage but if something’s sticking I’ll keep going with it. In the afternoon I usually read a play. In the evening if I don’t have plans I’ll try and write more. If I get stuck I’ll go for a walk and that usually dislodges something, as does seeing a friend or watching a film or taking a shower. On day job days, I write on my commute.

What one image do you want to send that speaks to your poem?

Ana Mendieta’s Imagen de Yagul, from her Silueta Series. I love Mendieta’s art and what she says about it being a way of reconnecting her body with the universe. Her work across sculpture, painting, video and performance channels something vital about the body and nature; temporal displacement and the conditions under which women live. These are themes I try to reckon with through language and performance, in my own work.

In 1985 Mendieta fell to her death from the window of the 34th floor apartment in Greenwich Village she shared with her husband, the poet and sculptor Carl Andre. She was wearing only her underwear. Neighbours had heard the couple arguing and Andre was charged, but later acquitted, of Mendieta’s murder. She was 36.

Introduction

Welcome to issue 3 of the Seaford Review, summer edition. We hope that you are staying well — wherever you are — and enjoying some moments of sunshine. The photo above is from one of our group trips to Seaford; the sky was perfectly blue, we got incredibly muddy walking along a river, and we ended the day with ice-cream and discussions of poetry, boys, and psychoanalysis (as ever).

In this issue we have our first Seaford poem, ‘Directions’ by Bidhya Limbu and it’s such a beautiful and fun dedication to the place that sparked our desire to make this magazine. We have thirteen poets in this issue—a bumper crop for us!—simply because we could not narrow down the selection any further. Each of these poets and their work spoke to us so vividly. Some of these poems seem to speak to our very souls (Jack and the sea; Chris and Gelert; Luís and brat Prince) yet we all vibed so hard with them. The three of us send these poems to you with love and solidarity. Please keep sending us poems, even if you haven’t been successful yet. Happy reading and writing friends.

—Chris, Luís, Jack.

Please note: the formatting of certain poems doesn’t display correctly in the Substack app: you might be better off viewing the issue in a browser window (preferably, a desktop browser).

Table of Contents

• Jacob Burgess Rollo

  • Action Stations

  • Contact Sports

• Aisling Towl

  • None of my friends want to talk about heaven

• Luke Worthy

  • Iconoclasm

  • a blushing sky, a busted riverbank

• Peter Scalpello

  • Oh, Emptiness

• Yanita Georgieva

  • Purple

• Elizabeth Gibson

  • fuchsia/anaesthesia

• Emily A. Taylor

  • Grocery shopping with a woman from Hinge

  • I quite liked

• Patrick Paridee Samuel

  • brat Prince

• Alison Tanik

  • The prophecy and the lawn mower

• Thomas Stewart

  • Llywelyn destroys Deganwy Castle

  • Llywelyn the Tyrant meets Cythraul

• Rebecca McCutcheon

  • SOS

• Phoebe Gilmore

  • Bruise like the face of Jesus

• Bidhya Limbu

  • Directions

Jacob Burgess Rollo

Jacob Burgess Rollo is a poet from Dorset. His work features or is forthcoming in The London Magazine, fourteen poems, The Little Review, Outcrop Poetry, The Madrigal, and elsewhere. He was commended in TPW’s Poetry Prize 2025. He is currently a master’s student studying Creative Writing at the University of Cambridge.

Action Stations

To hurt, as in: the act of letting pain occur, for someone else.
To invite, as in: to offload the choice
of who might actually attend your drinks event.
To swim, as in: the act of swimming you.

For, to know that you process the cold far better than me
has also been to learn that I will likely leave
the river with you floating in it still. 
To watch you splash about. To swim you, with my mind. 

Yes, I’m often squinting, oddly. And you’re finally getting out. 
There is literally nothing wrong with your hair at all.

Contact Sports

At scout camp, I have
the misfortune of sleeping
bag-to-bag beside a short
boy that everyone has taken
a dislike to. I find myself
beside him in the lunch
queue, and even the urinal.
The tin trough, gurgling.
The splashback on our aqua-
shoes. The two seats of a
kayak fill with me and him
as kids twist across a lake
like well-fed ducks at play
with their capsizing. With
one safety knife between
the two of us, we’re made
to cut a dead trout down
its side-seams and pull out
all the fish guts. The boy,
with his good arm, chops
the head off. This seems to
make him happy; this seems
to make him want to place
a finger in the trout’s mouth
and goad it into puppetry.
Two months prior, a bike
crash had him sitting in an
ambulance, prodding the bone
that saluted from his forearm.
The nerve-ends: twinging in
return. The lone things our
bodies are held up by. Each
tendon. Every rope-swing. The
three teeth, missing from his
gumline. He says to sign his cast,
with an X – or something like
my surname. Not sure why
I’m being formal, but it counts.
Just moments from his skin.

Aisling Towl

Aisling Towl is a writer from South London. Her poems are published by DUST magazine, shortlisted for the Bridport Prize and nominated for the Pushcart Prize. She has featured at venues including Richmix, Handel Hendrix House and Brainchild Festival, and for organisations including Merky Books, Freedom from Torture and Sofar Sounds. Her plays have been staged at VAULT festival, King’s Head Theatre, Omnibus Theatre's Engine Room, Concord Theatricals OOB festival, Cambridge Guildhall’s Old Courtrooms and Belgrade Coventry’s Jag Studio, and are published by Bloomsbury in the UK and Samuel French in the US. She studied history at Goldsmiths and is currently Peter Shaffer Playwright in Residence at Trinity College, Cambridge.

None of my friends want to talk about heaven

after Kaveh Akbar

You’re in his DMs I’m in the vestry
holding hands for serenity prayer.

Kissing at local strays, inviting them to follow me into
public bathrooms. Not in a sexy way

in a lonely way. Detachment loses its glamour
when you’re washed up-shore alone.

I spend hours each week saying my name into the phone,
listening for your likeness.

You call to ask if I want to join your group chat of
former women. Share experience.

You’re planning some kind of uprising
online. I tell you we’re none of us public figures and

I don’t want to waste anyone’s time. Time, shoot
through the hands

of my unmaking. I’ve got my own way of doing things
but I do wonder

who gets left behind. These men who have haunted
my twenties; stubborn spectres

pushing love away then complaining of loneliness
like it made them unique.

I won’t believe we’re the same. Neither now nor
never. That unlike you I saw it

coming and I never would have stayed.
Nothing can grow here. But I don’t know

how to stop the flood; our fates sewn into the swollen
riverbank, soaked through.

You might not believe me but I pray for us
on days it’s not too painful.

Luke Worthy

Luke Worthy (he/him) is a queer poet and fiction writer living between Sheffield and Amsterdam. His work has appeared in Poetry Wales, fourteen poems, The Poetry Society and anthologised in various books including Broken Sleep’s Masculinity: an anthology of modern voices. He was runner-up in the International New Poet’s Prize 2023. In 2025, he was highly commended in the Fool For Poetry Chapbook Competition and third place in the Young Poet Network's eco-poetry challenge. He is a member of Hive Poetry Collective and Managing Editor at Plant-Human Quarterly.

Iconoclasm

I complain so much today. The sky gives me backache. I moan
about the weather, the sheet-like flatness of the land like some biblical

backwater on a mural. In the Great Church of Breda, a mosaic
of expressionless saints gatekeep a tomb. I get up close to the gashed

stone by the knave, conjure the smithereened mask
of Mary and her faceless boy – a chipped, flaky thing.

The audio guide says the vandals waited all night in the cloisters,
were religiously committed to sabotage, a blunt pickaxe

concealed in their cloaks. The damage reminds me of the Y9 era
I spent gouging my mug from artefacts - laying down photos

on the fireplace, untagging myself, cropping a chunk of me
away. I craved the abyss of my face and the things that brought

it. I cannot bear what I’ve let speak for me. There’s still always
a sword pressing my cheek, a hollow I’m about to unfold.

a blushing sky, a busted riverbank

      and his calves are lighthouses
                    from a strip of Portuguese coast,
                      and his hands
                           glaze up my sides
like flitches of sticky meat
     que fofo, he whispers
                       and his feet turn,
                             curl like tide
                                        Lukewards
my legs are lines hooked
                      to the port
                            of his back      his chest
                            drapes above
                            like a fresco cast
                                           in wet plaster
                                my heart: a gushing gravy
                                  boat

             and my doubts
      are snakebites on his wrists
                            that unravel in breath,
            to his hardness – a slipstream,
                               a wand of sugar glass
                                           and when he holds my neck
                                      like a swan,
                                                   I shatter

Peter Scalpello

Peter Scalpello is a poet and psychotherapist from Glasgow, based in London. Their work has appeared in Five Dials, Granta, The London Magazine and the New York Times, among other publications. Peter’s debut, Limbic, was Highly Commended for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, shortlisted for the Books Are My Bag Readers Award for Poetry, and adapted into a stage production at the University of Edinburgh. Their second book, Mirrorstage, will be published with Cipher Press in 2026.

Oh, Emptiness

All speech is failed music — Jameson Fitzpatrick

I pace around outside the entrance
of a building site, smoking, as he exits
his body on a strategically overstrained NHS
ward, from the same act’s lingering, cell-
altering effects. I admit the bleak irony
in reprising a stage of loss determined by
what you choose, also,
to keep doing. The fantasy of choosing
what’s done inside you
by your own hand, mortal,
dimming, like a match lit for no reason
but habit. As if it could connect us
across planes now. Later,
                                  hovering
                                  in the bath I’ve taken to
                                  spoiling myself in, I notice
                                  how my hastening heart rate
                                  sends reverberations, a rhythm, out
                                  of the scaffolding of itself and through
                                  the water, shifting inanimate
                                  detritus, and wonder
                                  if this throbbing could still
                                  move you
                                                    as we perform
                                                    the act of erosion
                                                    in harmony.

Yanita Georgieva

Yanita Georgieva is a poet and journalist. Her debut pamphlet, Small Undetectable Thefts, received the Eric Gregory Prize in 2024. She is an alum of the Southbank New Poets Collective and the London Library Emerging Writers Scheme. You can find her work in The London Magazine, Poetry Wales, Poetry London, and elsewhere.

Purple

To adequately honour the Phoenicians, we strip our beds and gather our linens then boil them in communal pots of lavender. Only then can we begin to thank them for the pigment they invented. Legend says the colour drooled out of a dachshund’s mouth. Another says the gods wrung it drop by drop from an army of sea snails, twisting and pulling them down the shores of the Med. Others believe it was a ploy to win over a woman, who was ultimately unimpressed. Klein lathered his canvases with blue until the colour burned through the frame, poking small holes in the dress of the attendants. At night, curators tucked them under feather blankets. That’s how it goes. Sometimes your eyes are so green, I have to turn away from them.

Elizabeth Gibson

Elizabeth Gibson (they/them) is a queer, neurodivergent poet, performer, and facilitator from Wigan, based in Manchester. They have been a recipient of the New North Poets Prize from The Poetry School, and their poems have appeared in Atrium, Banshee, Butcher’s Dog, Dust, fourteen poems, Magma, The North, Under the Radar, and the anthology He, She, They, Us from Pan Macmillan. Elizabeth’s debut collection is A love the weight of an animal (Confingo, July 2025).

fuchsia/anaesthesia

– one –

it pulses like a fuchsia diamond,
above the old library and warehouses.
I push my forehead against the window:
whooooosh, ghost-rocket climbing

– two –

then the bang, the colour, the relief
that cause has effect, seed has flower

– three –

I feel it in my ribs, like how I feel a beat
just before my body jerks in a dream.
When I dropped my blue breakfast bowl,
in that brief moment

– four –

between it left my numb hand
and crashed down into milky ruins,
I was there, with it, falling through the air.
When she peeled and stuck electrodes
and wetted the metal and I shivered

– five – six –

I could only tell my body, I can’t stop this,
or stop you, but I will stay with you.
And, when they tell me to count to ten,
I know I will be

– seven –

under before we even reach

– eight –

In the end, she doesn’t ask me to count:
she says, imagine, you are in your favourite
place in the world. You are home.
I am in my flat with fireworks.

Emily A. Taylor

Emily A. Taylor (she/her) is a writer based in London. She is the founder of the Queer Poetry Collective and The Poetry Society’s Islington Stanza. Her work has been published in t'ART, Ink, Sweat & Tears, The Madrigal Discursion Issue, Metachrosis Literary Magazine and is forthcoming in Propel. You can find her on Instagram or Bluesky.

Grocery shopping with a woman from Hinge

Six aisles later, you browse for girl dinner:
blue cheese, biscuits already in my arms.

You relax your pelvis at the plums, rustle
their balayage skin, first orange,

then rose. Each one finds its likeness
in you, the deepest iris, my darling

netting. My darling plastic netting,
to tear through you. The ones we tongued

before have spit themselves into pits
about an olive bowl. As for me, I am pears

for your hands, an experiment in raspberry
and water cracker. The two second slip

between cornichon and Chardonnay.
You, devilled eyes, too white to fry.

I would never dream to scald you, just
firm you nakedly in water slow to boil.

I quite liked

ignoring you as we cooked dinner,
the closeness of a done egg to its
knife. How, when you slice tomatoes,
your undeft hand blames the yolk.

Patrick Paridee Samuel

Patrick Paridee Samuel is the author of And Another Thing (Broken Sleep Books) and the chapbook A Suite of Heads (Ghost City Press). His most recent poems appear in Allium, Boudin, Frozen Sea, and Villain Era. He received an MFA from Columbia College Chicago. Originally from the Midwest, Patrick currently lives in Nashville where he works in university press publishing.

brat Prince

Girl is so bored.
So unimpressed
styled goth.
And late. So never-
meet-your-hero
vibes. As usual
I glamorize. Water
where my marble
was. Nice to meet
you cracking AIDS
jokes. Commercially
minded your audience
singled out as fags.
Girl the bravado.
Your insta story
brags about fucking
a former student Pisces
after greasy ass baskets
of fried dive food.
I was there. I snap
shot and zoom in on you
cheersing a champagne
bottle to frame. The lonely
gore in drinking blood
full Lestat de Lioncourt.
Another vampire.
Your predecessor
giving me the dead
eyes. Like hey
big boy. Nice neck.
How housebroken.
My post-club culture
pump of pure blood
sober yet boring.
Your camouflage
mocks the packs
Lestat hunts. Born
to the woods.
From these parts.
Human suffering
disgusts you like
totally a turn off.
Girl is too cool. So
cavalier. Your appeal
in bougie bracelets
against bad juju.
Keeping me at arms
length. My veins
cave. I guess you
forget me. Typical
mythical bitch shit.
Boy-chaser. Mirror
fucker. Scene
stealing stunt
double. Lestat
howls from behind
our backs. Wolves
as if you’d know.
For your crusade
an armor of golden
crosses. Just one hanging
there from your neck.
Practically nothing
as we hug or shake
hands or whatever
kind of goodbye
stops us.
It’s your pretend
fangs that suck me dry.
Siring a dark gift
I’ll never want.
As if I were one
of your children
fleeing or left for dead.
Except I’ll never
visit New York. Text
you when I do. Alex
is a darling
penname. A front
for interviews.
The damned quoting
the damned.

Alison Tanik

Alison Tanik is a Nine Arches Press Dynamo Poet 2025-26 and was an Associate Poet for the Derby Poetry Festival in 2023. Her work has appeared in a number of anthologies and has been shortlisted/highly commended many times including Mslexia Pamphlet Competition 2024, Oxford Poetry Prize 2024, and Creative Future 2023 & 2024. She headlines at poetry events nationwide under the stage name, ‘Who the Fuck is Alice’ and has an MA in poetry from the Manchester Writing School. She may be found on Instagram.

The prophecy and the lawn mower

It will be a warm day, a Friday, late afternoon.
My window will be open, and I will hear
my neighbour at the front of his house,
not far from me, cutting his lawn.

And I will be in bed, naked, waiting for you,
sheets thrown back, listening for your car,
legs and arms spread because of the heat.
And all the while, I will hear the mower.

It will stop and start, stop and start,
because, at the end of his garden,
at the low stone wall, my neighbour
will cut the engine, calculate the turn.

The lifeless machine will be shuffled
to the head of a new row, lined up,
the choke pulled, and he will begin again,
dragging perfect stripes behind him as he walks:

one light green stripe towards the house,
one dark green stripe towards the wall:
one light, one dark, one light, one dark,
walking in straight lines with his mower.

And his son will be playing one-man tennis,
knocking the ball against the garage door,
counting aloud how many times he can hit
and I will hear - Look at me, daddy! Look!

And the lawn mower will stop just for that,
and I will half-hear the praise, and then the boy
in the primary-school-blue cardigan will count
again, with the thud, thud, thud of the ball.

And I will be lying on my bed listening,
waiting for you to arrive - to come
into my house through the unlocked
side-door, and, when I hear your car,

I will also hear the mower faltering,
and you will come into my room barefoot,
trainers left at the bottom of the stairs,
your body tight as the strings on a racquet.

And I will spread wider in an act of welcome,
and you will be less than half my age,
and you will tell me that I am a goddess—
or that this is the afternoon that I will become one.

Thomas Stewart

Thomas Stewart was born in Cardiff and lives in Edinburgh. He is the author of Real Boys (Polygon, 2024) and two pamphlets, Based on a True Story (fourteen poems, 2022) and empire of dirt (Red Squirrel Press, 2019).

Llywelyn destroys Deganwy Castle

I dug up the beach and the sun held out for me. I collected clumps of sand the size of sunflower heads into buckets, patting their pen with my fingers. I wished them good fortune. Made a kingdom like one might a piece of origami – folded corners into towers, creased edges in the shape of a trundled bridge, a fanged gate, a dolphin flag. Each brick a silent prayer. 

The sun abandoned, the waves rang closer, a gaggle of lads found me, and laughed. I smelt their desire for domination mixed in with my own confused sex. They taunted. Said they were going to knock the castle down. They hung around in threats, milked the pathos, wanted me to cry, piss, swell. Call for mama. 

But I was alone against the sea with all her secrets. And the laughter plundered every cloud and coming star. In the world of divination I smelt their domination in domination I smelt their divination. I knew what was coming. Looked upon my prayers already eroding. 

I stomped my feet against the beach. Cracked beneath my heel was the head of my castle, the bridge whose face the sun had yawned into, the turrets and the gardens, the gate and the flag. Powdered into salt. Every dream, scrubbed. Futures chipped like teacups moaning on the sand. I prevented the theft of myself. And with it, my wishes waxy, cursed and foamy by the coming of the heavy drunken-gutted waves.

Llywelyn the Tyrant meets Cythraul

(or, Llywelyn dies on the battlefield and goes to Devil’s Bridge)

Watching myself through a half crown of mist 

	drawing across a bridge where a shepherd, 

a stack of bones like the tassels of birthday balloons, 

	says hello. He has horns atop his head, like question marks. 

Dogs for company. Y diawl does not do lonely. Gelert 

	I say through a breath clogged with winter. 

Gelert, I hymn to the yellow-eyed hounds, disguised if only 

	to show me my wrongs. I know he is within them, 

I know he has come here so I may never forget. I 

	will find my place behind the devil’s shoulder. 

Rebecca McCutcheon

Rebecca McCutcheon is a poet living on the Essex coast. Her work has appeared in The Poetry Review, Propel, berlin lit and The Interpreter’s House. Her debut poetry collection, Down, is published by Out-Spoken Press.

SOS

a knife                     waiting                   three                          lined up
sleeps in                  for its                      times each                in
the bag                    moment                  day                             procession

heaving                   my legs                    I lie                            waxing
helpful                     like                          about                         like a
excuses                    a saltire                   love                           pigeon

on the                      blood                       the holes                   when I try
bathroom                in my                       that                            to remove
floor                         mouth                     I make                       you

the SOS                   her top                    in the                         recovery is
bus                           deck                        car park                     an infinite
stands                      a halo                      I died in                     watchtower

Phoebe Gilmore

Phoebe Gilmore is a poet and office coordinator from London. Her recent works have been published with Propel and Oblique House and she was shortlisted for the Bridport Poetry prize. She is currently working towards a collection centred around endometriosis - a condition she was diagnosed with last year.

Bruise like the face of Jesus

I looked beautiful when they found me face down
outside the dinner party, arriving to a brief sleep platform

on top of a Microsoft snow drift. To the other guests
I was a sound of heavy sloughing, briefly sleeping on my front,

unfamiliar patio pressed against me - a sad man
on a shared train. Your face on my inner thigh, I’ve seen you before

that 2010 news article about the holy toast. Faith - a last minute
airport souvenir. Apart from funerals, weddings

and Christmas synaesthesia, I have never gone to church, but I like it
when, together, we all sing.

Bidhya Limbu

Bidhya Limbu is a Nepali-Singaporean writer and early-career bereavement care researcher living in London. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Hajar Press, The Quarter(ly), Midway Journal, and elsewhere. She is a Brooklyn Poets fellow and has received support from the Kenyon Review Writers’ Workshop. She is a student of grief.

Directions

1. You cannot begin where I began, but you can start at Streatham Common.

2. The train to Brighton departs from platform 1.

3. Two changes, one at Gatwick airport, then another one at Lewes1.

4. Alight at Seaford.

5. Turn right out of the station approach2, take the first right into Church Street, then right again into Dane Road.

6. Follow this road. It’s seven minutes until you reach the seafront34.

7. Go closer to the sea. Sit, for a while5.

8. There are trails on both sides of where you are. Go left.

9. Follow the shore for fifteen minutes6, until you reach the trail head.

10. Exactly six hundred steps to the first bone-white cliff edge.

11. 7That’s when you know you’ve arrived8.

12. Keep walking9

13. It’s uphill for another mile or two. A valley will follow, then a river, then more sea10.

14. At the creek, take off your shoes. Play11.

15. The way back is the same way you came.

16. When you’re at the stone beach again, take a pebble home in my name12.

17. Go.

18. Go13.

What can you tell us about this poem?

This poem started as an exercise for a class at the Writers Studio. Each week, we analyze a model poem and then write an exercise using the craft of the model but with our own material. The model for the exercise that became this poem was Jack Gilbert’s “Elegy for Bob” from his collection Refusing Heaven. I was intimidated because Gilbert unspooled huge emotions with such honesty. I started with a close trace to figure it out. My breakthrough was seeing how he stitched together short evocative scenes to heighten both love and grief. That helped me also figure out how I needed to break from his poem to get to mine.

What poets and poems are you in dialogue with?

I remember reading Chen Chen for the first time and marveling at how poems could be wickedly fun (see: “I Invite My Parents to a Dinner Party”). I also remember listening to Solmaz Sharif read “Social Skills Training” and holding my breath through the entire thing. I’m still trying on different styles and figuring out who I am as a writer, but I want to evoke the emotional connection that I got from Chen and Sharif as well as many others. There’s something to learn from every poet I come across, and I’m elated that I get to write alongside their work.

What is your writing practice? Where and when do you write? By hand, laptop, phone notes…?

I write on weekend mornings because there are fewer distractions—my husband and most of my friends are not morning people. I write by hand to come up with ideas and switch to the computer when I feel like I have material to work with. I enjoy writing to music. Lately, it’s been the cast recording of Maybe Happy Ending or Max Richter’s recomposition of Vivaldi, The New Four Seasons. But the most important thing for me is my writing community. Through taking and teaching classes with the Writers Studio, I’ve found a community of supportive, dedicated writers. I also made a few poet friends I’m exchanging work with! It’s much harder to procrastinate when they’re expecting a draft of something. And once they’ve given me generous, perceptive feedback, I don’t want their work to go to waste, so it pushes me to revise things in a timely manner too.

What drew you to write poetry?

I wish I could say it’s because of a poet I really admired or because poetry creates new possibility for language or something else aspirational. I went to poetry because I can’t fathom writing anything long. Not that poems are easy for me. It’s daunting to arrange a small number of words so that they project a big idea, emotion, or paradox in a layered and beautiful way. But I’d rather try that than attempt a short story.I have a good friend who’s a fiction writer, and I’ve always wondered how she does it. She enjoys writing prose so much that it pushed me to face my fears. I’ve started dabbling in flash (fiction and creative nonfiction). Maybe one day, I’ll write something longer than 750 words.

What song helps us get to know you better?

Andromeda by Ryan Beatty.

What’s on your bedside table? Books, etc?

I just finished Blackouts by Justin Torres, so that’s there along with Severance by Ling Ma, The Tradition by Jericho Brown, and The Sky Was Once a Dark Blanket by Kinsale Drake. My husband also crocheted me a little basket to hold various knickknacks. Somehow, that discourages our cat from knocking things off.

What is your favourite text about the sea?

A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki.

Stephen K. Kim’s poems appear or are forthcoming in Ghost City Review, Fifth Wheel Press, and elsewhere. He can be found online @skimperil.

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What can you tell us about this poem?

What If I Told You That is part of a series of poems I’m working on that take their titles from prompts on the dating app Hinge. I’m interested in how answering these prompts ‘poetically’ or within the form of a poem can complement or contrast to the ways users of the app might answer them. At the same time, I’m fascinated by the ways we curate digital selves and present them to the world, how layered these seemingly trivial or ‘quick’ (read: laboured over!) responses can be.

I’m also interested in what I see as the surprising similarities between digital mediums of written language (be it a WhatsApp message, dating app bio, or even a work email) and poems. In both cases, we often have concise, thought-out combinations of words that say one thing on the surface while multiple other meanings or feelings simmer underneath. In What If I Told You That, I wanted to play with a speaker who both reveals and conceals a frankness and sense of vulnerability. In this way, I also consider What If I Told You That to be somewhat adjacent to or in conversation with my poem No Worries If Not :) published in Issue 13 of fourteen poems, for the ways it presents a joviality on the surface to mask sensitivity underneath.

What poets and poems are you in dialogue with?

It feels wildly audacious to say, but Emily Dickinson. I remember reading her poems as an undergrad and thinking: “wow, poems can do that?!” She is the queen of ambiguity and layering multiple meanings in almost every single word of a poem. I love how she substitutes word classes and uses familiar words in unfamiliar ways. Her poems on the page may appear small in stature, but they are mighty in what they manage to contain, what spills out when we read and re-read them. Although I know I’ll never get close to being able to write like Dickinson (who could?!), I also know I carry her influence with me whenever I write. Or maybe this is just an excuse for having a penchant for writing short-form poems ha!

Oh, and some contemporary poets and collections that I’ve been reading and obsessing over lately are: Danez Smith’s Bluff, Dorothea Lasky’s The Shining, Richard Scott’s That Broke into Shining Crystals, Elisabeth Sennitt Clough’s My Name is Abilene, and Maria Ferguson’s Swell.

What is your writing practice? Where and when do you write? By hand, laptop, phone notes…?

Pretty much every poem I’ve ever written starts its life through writing by hand. For me, I need that tangibility. Writing can all too easily be attributed to the mind and thought, to the cerebral, but in starting with my hand moving across a physical page I am reminded (unconsciously) that writing also lives in the body. I once attended a (life-changing!) workshop led by the brilliant CAConrad who spoke about the importance of writing in cursive. They spoke about how cursive writing is freedom – it gifts us the ability to write at the speed of our thoughts and therefore to break away from internal editors.

Once I have something down in my notebook, I’ll transition to typing on my laptop. Moving from gripping a pen to typing with my fingertips is like a signal to my brain that we’re shifting gears, moving from a purely generative state to one of revision. From writing to re-writing. This often happens in the same sitting as the initial writing by hand. I like the first pass of edits to occur within the headspace that initiated it, if possible. How long I stick at edits varies wildly. Sometimes, I’ll get that brilliant hyper-attentive feeling which makes it impossible to look away from the poem and what it is trying to say. Other times, I know I need to give the words time to breathe and so I leave them to percolate without me, while I percolate without them.

What’s your first poetry memory?

I was actually quite late to leap in love with poetry. It’s something I’m sad about and to be honest a little resentful of… it’s such a big part of my life now that I can’t help but think about the lost time! My first poetry memories are from reading poetry at a young age in school and being so self-conscious when trying to express what I thought. The poems we were studying often didn’t resonate with me or at least not in the way they were being taught. There was that feeling of pressure to get it ‘right’, which I know isn’t uncommon. Now I really enjoy introducing people who don’t often read poetry to poems I think will speak to them or running poetry workshops with people who have never tried to write poems before. It’s so rewarding to see people light up as they connect with poetry for first time.

What song helps us get to know you better?

My Body’s Made of Crushed Little Stars by Mitski. The way Mitski’s songwriting holds the big and the small, the intimate and the cosmic, the personally immediate and the publicly historic, together (often in the same breath!) with such ease is so satisfying to me. It’s also something that’s characteristic in many of my favourite poems. How good it feels ­– or rather how seen I feel – to shout: “My body’s made of crushed little stars and I’m not doing anything” or “I better ace that interview / I should tell them that I’m not afraid to die!”

Hetty’s debut pamphlet Inhabit is published by 14poems and is available to buy online now.

Listen to Josh read his Issue Two poem “Being Beautiful Is Not Enough”

What can you tell us about this poem?

I wrote this when I was going through a period of not particularly liking myself, during a summer heatwave where I felt overbearingly aware of my body — sweat, clothes sticking — and also the city in the heat, hot concrete. I was struggling to sleep in the evenings due to the heat and how early the sun rises in summer and floods the house. I was also grieving the end of a friendship and not communicating with anyone about how I was feeling. The poem especially the considers the space between disconnect and hyperawareness.

What poets and poems are you in dialogue with?

Dean Young, Richard Scott, Richard Siken, (Meanwhile), Dennis Cooper (After School, Street Football, Eighth Grade).

What is your writing practice? Where and when do you write? By hand, laptop, phone notes…?

With poetry, I usually start off with writing observations, thoughts, scraps of text in my phone Notes. It isn't until I have the bones of a poem that I transfer it to my laptop, which gives more space to the poem and helps with understanding the formatting of the text.

What poem do you wish you’d written?

Romanticism 101 by Dean Young.

Do you write in other forms? If so, how do you toggle between them?

I write mainly short fiction, but also mess around with collage and film cameras. My approach is visual and instinctual — I prefer to allow the idea to pull me along and see where it goes rather than plan. But also, poetry feels more reflexive — I'm responding to the world and my own thoughts & feelings in real time, while I actually sit down and work at prose. I'm not saying prose is more considered, but I sit down at my desk to write prose, while, like photography, I'm out in the world writing poetry.

What’s on your bedside table?

The new Catherine Lacey book, Issue 2 of Left Cultures, a lime & eucalyptus candle, a lamp with a bendy neck, a Praktica TL58 film camera.

What song helps us get to know you better?

Introduction

Welcome to issue two of the Seaford Review, a new magazine for poetry. This issue — our first spring issue — contains poems from ten poets, with themes ranging from a celebration of sexual desire in Teddy Webb’s On Snogging and Hetty Cliss’ What If I Told You That, through to poems which take us to places of grief and consideration, such as Giles Goodland’s beautiful poem Rain, or Stephen K. Kim’s moving Elegy for Joe. As when putting together issue one, we were surprised and delighted by the strength and variety of work we received, and there was much back-and-forth over which poems should make it into the final issue. We hope that you enjoy reading the finished product as much as we did making it.

As poets ourselves, we know it’s not easy to have one’s work read and appraised by others; neither is it lost on us that Seaford Review is still very much the “new kid on the block”. We were thus moved and honoured that so many poets of all kinds of backgrounds felt able to trust us with their work. We are still learning how to be editors and manage the running of a literary magazine, and are grateful for the patience you afford us. So, to everybody who submitted this time round: thank you. Your work is quite literally what makes the Seaford Review what it is.

— Chris, Luís, Jack

Table of contents

• Joshua Jones

  • Being Beautiful Is Not Enough

• Caitlin Allmond Sherret

  • Queer, as in Odd

• Giles Goodland

  • Rain

• Stephen K. Kim

  • Elegy for Joe

• Kendra Whitfield

  • What I Learned From My Mother

• Nathan Evans

  • Pleasure Gardening

• June Archbold

  • Saint Audrey

• Teddy Webb

  • On Snogging

• Sitron Panopoulos

  • The Old East: The Kneeling

• Hetty Cliss

  • What If I Told You That

Joshua Jones

Joshua Jones (he/him) is a queer, neurodivergent writer & artist from Llanelli, south Wales. Local Fires, his debut short story collection, was shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize & Polari First Book Prize. He has published various pamphlets of poetry, including A Fistful of Flowers in collaboration with Caitlin Flood-Molyneux (2022), Three Months in the Zebra Room (Hello America Stereo Cassette, 2024), and The City on Film (Bread and Roses, 2024).

Being Beautiful Is Not Enough

Never the soft flesh of the lychee fruit, always the toxic pit.

Fizzy pop smoothed flat in a summer evening, sweat
is not desired beauty tactic. Breathing in the smog of a life is
not a desired beauty tactic. I have been known to be attacked
by the knowledge of myself.

I am not my swimming shorts, but rather a tick
feeding on my own thigh, expiring
under a palm slap. I would not recommend the taste of my own blood.
Five am showers drown out birdsong. Has anyone considered
the speed of light is simply too fast. I won’t sing, I can’t even talk. Sorry.

Conversation is communion
                   And communion is guilt. Everyone knows that

Or so they say. Who’s they?
I don’t know. We haven’t spoken in a long time.

Caitlin Allmond Sherret

Caitlin Allmond Sherret is a makar and performer from the Highlands of Scotland. She has been named as a Traverse Theatre Young Writer and one of the Scottish Poetry Library’s Next Generation Makars. Her work has been published by Heroica, Snack Magazine and FOMA Press. Find her on Instagram @kitkatpoetry_

Queer, as in Odd

Queer as in odd.
Queer as in strange.
As in, misplaced, out of place, out of body.
As in, saying unnatural when you actually
mean a little too natural, a little too close to
nature, a little too far from this world of
plastic and plaster that we’ve sealed ourselves
into.

Queer as in evening. As in twilight. As in the
2008 film Twilight, the awkward press tour
where Kristin Stewart squirms under flood
lights and sinks into a chrysalis for protection.
As in the concept of a chrysalis, when the
caterpillar or butterfly or both are so deep
in change that it’s just a bag of soup and
brains. As in bogs and swamps and woods
and moors, and those who live on the edge
of them.

Queer as in that aunt your mum mentions
sometimes with a mixture of exasperation and
awe, who lived all her life with her sister except for
one summer in the south of France, who shut her
front door one day and walked out and never
came back, spoon still in the sugar pot, oats
still in the cupboard.

Queer as in how there are always cowboys or nuns
or deckhands or ladies’ maids, how there’s
always a reason for two guards to stay up all night
watching the horizon. As in all the good married ladies
who remember their best girl friend and the way her
hair fell just so when she laughed. As in the Romans
and their many excuses to sit naked in each
other’s company.

Queer as in Orlando. As in Mrs Dalloway. As in
the way I looked at myself in the mirror that
first day I realised. As in the feeling you get when
you read back over what you’ve written and spot
the links you couldn’t see before popping up
like mushrooms in a perfect circle.

Giles Goodland

Giles Goodland's books include Of Discourse (Grand Iota 2023). A Spy in the House of Years (Leviathan, 2001) Capital (Salt, 2006), Dumb Messengers (Salt, 2012) and The Masses (Shearsman, 2018). Civil Twilight was published by Parlor Press in 2022. He has worked as a lexicographer, editor, and bookseller, and teaches evening classes on poetry for Oxford University's department of continuing education, and lives in West London.

Rain

Rain is water defined by collapse: step over the sheets, they assert the moment it brilliantly fell. In this way absolute accords with air. It arrives facelessly with a firm handshake, but when touched, slides over your skin. It hunts the rung-true air, hoofbeats flowers in road-dust, crosses cities as a bunch of keys searching for a lock. The same loop of evening plays at the point the news changes from past to future, and each family for a moment considers the temporary obliteration of the map. You’ll hear its speech from the storm drain, printed out later as leaves.

Stephen K. Kim

Stephen K. Kim (he/him) is a queer Korean American writer and college educator in upstate New York. He enjoys spending time with his husband and his cat. His poems appear or are forthcoming in Ghost City Review, Fifth Wheel Press, and elsewhere. He can be found online @skimperil.

Elegy for Joe

After Jack Gilbert

Only I sit at the Tenth Avenue café we’d do breakfast
the morning after, stuttering when the waitress asks
if you’re on your way. Nobody but you remembers
languid bike rides along the Willamette, how we’d
stop and sprawl on the riverbank to appraise
the joggers as they zipped by in skintight spandex.
It was you, cowboy hat askew, beckoning me
with swinging hips to the dance floor as Whitney Houston
blasted around us at a Hongdae bar. You standing naked
at the mirror, me changing the sheets as we discussed
if we’d invite that night’s third to bed again.
No longer will you grin coyly, leaning against the wall
of a grungy Hell’s Kitchen club, and whisper into my ear
how I should approach the clean-cut bartender because
he wasn’t your type though he shared a haircut and build
with your last ex. It’s half past three. I down
my last dregs of cold coffee and leave. Fathoming how
love is not love without the contingency of grief.

Kendra Whitfield

Kendra Whitfield lives and writes on the southern edge of the northern boreal forest. When not writing, she can be found basking in sunbeams on the back deck or swimming laps at the local pool. Her poetry has been published by Beyond the Veil Press and Community Building Art Works.

What I Learned From My Mother

I remember the semi-trailer swallowing the hood of my mother’s red Cutlass Supreme. Everything moving in slow motion as the bed slid closer and closer to the windshield. My feet moved like molasses cakes, trying to scramble back, backward, over, away, but the seatbelt held me tight. It was Christmastime and we were delivering a turkey to our cousins. It thawed in the backseat for hours while police investigated the scene. The truck dragged us 50 metres and only the size of mom’s land yacht saved us. We gridlocked traffic for four hours the Saturday before Christmas and it was the first time I saw my mother cry on cue. “Men can’t stand it when women cry,” she told me and winked. I was 10 years old. The next time I saw her do that was when the police came to the door the night my father died.

Nathan Evans

Nathan Evans’ poetry has been published by Muswell Press, Royal Society of Literature, Manchester Metropolitan University, Fourteen Poems and Broken Sleep. His first collection, Threads, was long-listed for the Polari First Book Prize; his second collection CNUT is published by Inkandescent; he hosts BOLD Queer Poetry Soirée.

Pleasure Gardening

for the RVT

1662 The gratification of gossamer desire
         was centuries-manured into her
         Vauxhall plot: bridge & boat crowd
         had flocked to find senses titillated
         by restauranteurs, rope walkers
         in revealing leg-wear transporting
         them to stars & rent boys in rustling
         arbours returning them to gutters.

1862 She scrunched her skirts & squatted
         in a corner of what had once been
         playground of kings (& queens);
         there she remained—hem blackened
         by road junction, brickwork ribbed
         like crinoline & colour of piss stains
         —a tavern royal only in name.

1962 The queens returned with servicemen
         from frontlines. She welcomed them
         —maintaining a merkin of legality
         with hymen between stout-sipping
         pensioners & female impersonators
         synching & strutting a kidney-curve bar.

1987 Optics sightlined & stage centre-set
         for Savage put-downs, she fought
         bigot-gloved bobbies as she fought
         all viruses—capitalism especially—
         at each proud tit an underpuppy;
         she became Boudicca-upon-Thames.

2012 Well, what do we think she was doing,
         squatting in South London slum land?
         Shit is a nutrient; water-closet rude bits,
         wash out wildness & weird insects,
         you get Gail’s growing in straight lines;
         this a good gardener overstands.

2024 Even warrior queens can fall, in the end;
         that Capital is a cunning one—milking
         the old girl for all she’s got under cover
         of having her strapped to supporting
         machines—when all she needs, really
         is a sneaky ciggie, a swig of gin & to feel
         that filthy laugh rattling her doors again.

June Archbold

June Archbold (she/her) is a poet, writer and filmmaker from Suffolk, living in London. Her work explores queer alienation, industrial decay, the fear of nature, and acute self-flagellation.

Saint Audrey

When drunk on visions, you professed to me
that “it was only right” your neck should bulge,
for all the necklaces and vanities
of which you, in your reckless prime, indulged.
I’d never know, ascetic now you are.
Remind this lapsing nun your ancient ways.
The matins rushing past your Vespa’s bars —
our vinted dawn. From ash comes sudden shade.
Your lauded miracles held not a glim
to all our secret toasts. The waters’ rise
in your absconce just proves my sext can’t swim —
it’s said you only meet somebody twice.
             Unlike you, death’s terse for me — or will be.
             I can’t get old; my sisters... they would kill me.

Teddy Webb

Teddy Webb is a poet and essayist based in Brighton, UK. Her work, which explores themes of lesbian history and reclaiming our connection to nature under capitalism, has recently been published in Teiresian, Opal Age, and Butch-Femme Press. She has been shortlisted for the Bridport Poetry Prize.

On Snogging

The kids had it right: feverish
under bleachers, sweating out straight
decades of repression in poorly fitted 
sports bras and dollar store boxers -
when we poured our lips 
into those sickly teenage kisses 
we were the wisest we have ever been. 
Remember how sex felt like the fog
between our fingertips, how
we stared out at it, shy of its shiver yet
heatsick with waiting, aching for it
to kiss our sunburnt necks. I think 
you were misted, then, smoke-drunk,
wasting away evenings with the first girl
to promise her hands to your ribs 
but who these days is making out like that?
Like the nine to five is a distant vision,
like the concert’s just ended and we 
are all frizzed-up hair and tinnitus -
who is loving by cellphone torchlight
with that high school timelessness? 
It could be us, my impatience 
and your lazy river drawl. Come,
Our kitchen is ready for hunger.
Let us knead our floured lips
together against the linoleum
until we exhaust ourselves out of fucking, 
leaving crescent moon echoes
in your cinnamon-dusted shoulderblades.

Sitron Panopoulos

Sitron Panopoulos is a Greek poet and artist living in London. Prior to writing poetry, he developed a play for the Arcola Theatre Lab and released music under the moniker Sitron F. His work has appeared in anthologies by Toothgrinder Press and Carnival Press. He is currently a student on the MA at the Poetry School.

THE OLD EAST : THE KNEELING

1.
It’s one minute past midnight
the sky folds its shirt over a balcony.
Three flights of trees and underneath
a tramline. You thought you’d be a good friend for once
to the sad girls of the balcony
to the tealights and the rye
to the stem broccoli.

2.
Now you are on a tram passing West
past a tower called Alex goodbye Alex
we got the trees and the heartlands
the young men
guarding the heartlands.

3.
Slab a new sky.
Meatier now not skinnier.
A basement bar
a streetlamp counting the cars on the highway.
Here is a slot for a new heart
here is a chest
a pair of lungs
here is the hinge
that locks the cubicle.
Here are six men
waiting for your mouth.

4.
And the light stands frameless over the door
touching your jeans
now on the floor.
Each man that enters here is a balcony
looking East.
A country that’s lost its name.
A family tree chopped to the ground
where your knees get dirty.

Hetty Cliss

Hetty Cliss is a poet from the Cambridgeshire Fens and a graduate of UEA's Creative Writing MA. Her poems can be found in fourteen poems, Propel Magazine, Bi+Lines, and elsewhere. She was awarded the Ware Sonnet Prize 2024. Her debut poetry pamphlet (In)Habit is available to pre-order now and will be published by fourteen poems on 31 March.

What If I Told You That

The sluttiest thing a man can do
is have a clean bathroom. Tonight,
I want to get so loved up I can’t see

straight, you forget my name. The word
atrium is Latin for entrance hall. Holding
eyes with beanied strangers gets me going.

I’ve rotted at restaurants, corpsed under
streetlights. I’ve cycled to cinemas in loose
skirts. What is want but three half pints

sunk. I rabbit to their level. Right now,
I’m greying up the duvet. Cutlery sleeps
unrinsed in the sink. Smears on the window

coat the whole moon, the sun. Maybe I want
to be taken care of. Maybe I’m not an initiator
of any kind. Venus is the hottest planet

in our solar system.
Its heatwave never ends.

What can you tell us about these poems?

I am not entirely sure where or when I first heard the expression “spark bird”, but I recall immediately thinking that there was a lot of poetry potential in those two words, so I went on to do some further research. One of the documents I came across was this blog (mentioned in the poem) where birders shared their “spark bird experience”. The first few entries were, coincidentally, all by male birdwatchers. In fact, the first entry I read contained almost the same line as the first line of the poem: “It was a male dancing on the dunes of Ocean City, New Jersey”. That got me started. The more I was digging into the stories of those birdwatchers and their first “bird-crushes”, the more I could draw a parallel to our experience as gay people in terms of sexual discovery and education, both as young boys and adults. Differently from straight people, we are not taught how sex should work, how relationships should work, or what rules apply in the context of our intimacies. We need to go out there and find out for ourselves. In that, we approach desire and longing unchecked, unsupervised. We step into the woods at dusk, whether metaphorical or otherwise. And the poem attempts to explore that.

Harvest Scenery… really kicked off after listening to an episode of the insightful, funny, outrageous and joyously queer poetry podcast that is Breaking Form. That's when I was introduced to Essex Hemphill's work, specifically the poem Commitments. Commitments dwells on family dynamics in relation to queer identity by describing family gatherings so rich with home-made food as they are with unfulfilled expectations. The settings reminded me of my own family gatherings as a child, and especially of the years as a teenager when I would go and visit my best friend’s vineyard and help with the harvest of grapes, after which a glorious lunch would follow, attended by family members of all ages. There is a verse in Commitments that stuck out for me:

In the photos
the smallest children
are held by their parents.
My arms are empty

It is a very simple and brutal thought I had had myself many times growing up. It made me think of a similar verse I wrote years ago in a poem that was trying to reflect on those days of harvest, unsuccessfully. Hemphill’s poem really gave me an entry point to dig deeper into the subject. That is also why the shape of the poem flirts with Hemphill’s, and some details are borrowed, such as hinting at the speaker's arms and at the presence of a specific photograph. In Commitments, the photographs are mainly used as a premise to allow the speaker to expand on his experience, while, in mine, I wanted the family photograph to work as some sort of volta so that the reader for the majority of the poem is made to believe that they are shown the actual scenery through the eyes of the speaker, in real time, but, in fact, they are witnessing what the speaker is reminiscing; a take on reality. The space that we cannot see in the photograph is to me a place of admission in which the speaker struggles between a sense of affection (I really hope that affection comes through!) and a new understanding of specific physical objects, such as the white vests, the gold chains or the Tupperware. What I like about this poem, when I re-read it, is that I am left with a feeling that the speaker hasn't made up his mind yet. He is still out there looking at what is not in the photograph. Gathering evidence.

What poets and poems are you in dialogue with?

I have been reading an unhealthy amount of Carl Phillips (is there such a thing?) in the last few months. I wasn’t aware of his work, and now I am completely in love with the way his poems move on the page. Also, it really interests me the way in which he observes queer relationships and loneliness. Some of my favourites are Neon or Blizzard from Silverchest and Surfers from his latest collection Scattered snows, to the north.

What is your writing practice? Where and when do you write? By hand, laptop, phone notes…?

I usually write during my morning jog. Okay, that doesn't make much sense. Let me articulate this thought. I go for long morning runs every day (about two hours), and that is the time in which I churn all that I have been in conversation with into a poem, if the poem is willing to manifest itself. All drafts, first and subsequent, are composed this way: I repeat to myself every line of the poem as I do my laps in the park or along the Southbank, thinking of changes in language, form and possible line breaks. By the time I am home, I have the poem (or the draft of a poem) learnt by heart. Only then do I proceed to type it on my laptop. I allow myself minor edits sitting at the kitchen table, but the big decisions are made during the run.

What poem do you wish you’d written?

Years ago, for a whole winter, I wanted to write like Frank O’Hara, then spring came and I wanted to write like August Kleinzahler! That’s the beauty of finding one's own voice: slowly you understand you can only have your own. I am grateful for the poems that deeply impacted me on my journey as a poet. I don’t wish to have written any of them: they would be different poems if I had done! I am glad there was someone else writing them for me so that I could find them, savour them and study them. I can only wish that, one day, a poem of mine will be as useful and inspiring for another individual as those have been for me.

Five poems that have stayed with me:

Matthew Dickman’s Grief because a poet that has the imaginative genius to start a poem by saying “When grief comes to you as a purple gorilla / you must count yourself lucky” should have a national day where people read and discuss his work and his work only.

Kaveh Akbar's Reza's restaurant, Chicago 1997. A moving piece that deals with race, identity and migration through the eyes of a son looking at his father. I love poems with a restaurant setting.

Allen Ginsberg’s A supermarket in California, which taught me I had queer ancestors living and breathing in poetry books when I thought I was alone.

Philip Levine's The Mercy, the first poem I cried to. Not the last.

Jack Underwood’s Your Horse, which I read and re-read wide eyed, unaware that such things could be done in a poem.

What’s your first poetry memory?

I remember being given my grandfather’s WWII journal from the time he had been detained by the Nazis and brought to Poland, I believe, after Italy signed the Armistice with the Allies. Possibly not the fittest read for a twelve-year-old, but I recall being strongly affected by it in a positive way. So much so that during a test in school, I drifted off and started writing about it. At the end of the test, I showed whatever I had written to my teacher and she looked at me and said: “This is a poem” to which I replied “Where can I find others?”.

What’s on your bedside table? Books, etc?

There is a lot of random shit, things I have got on different trips, notes, pictures. It looks more like an altar of some sort. But there are also books somewhere, I promise.

At the moment, I keep a copy of each of the latest issues of Poetry London, fourteen poems and Poetry, Peter Gizzi’s Fierce Elegy, Carl Phillips’ Then the War and a Selected Poems by John Ashberry a dear friend got me for my birthday.

You can read Jack’s poems “Ode to Yu-Gi-Oh” and “11,000 bottles wash ashore with messages from the virgin followers of Saint Ursula of Cornwall”, and listen to Jack read them himself, in Issue One of the Seaford Review.

What can you tell us about these poems?

Both poems speak to my relationship with Catholicism, which becomes less complicated with each passing year. The bog standard traumas of going to Catholic school as a closeted child have been successfully self-mythologised and as an atheist I can now straight-forwardly enjoy the rich mythologies, histories, and artworks of Catholicism. I’m particularly in love with the hagiography of Saint Ursula of Cornwall, who was canonised in the 12th century. It tells you so much about medieval and papal thinking, but that aside, it's just such a strange and powerful story.

What poets and poems are you in dialogue with? Send links if possible.

There are five writers and one epic poem that have completely changed my approach to writing poetry. Mary Jean Chan was the first, with 2017's The Window. I don't recognise myself in what I was writing before The Window shocked me into developing my own voice. In 2018, I had an absurdly transformative trip to Waterstones, where Han Kang's Human Acts and Stephen Mitchells’ translation of the Epic of Gilgamesh caught my eye. Both inspired me to explore character and narrative in my poems, since my natural tendency is to write about the nonhuman and impersonal. Together with Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, Human Acts and the Epic of Gilgamesh are my constant references, inspirations, and companions. I always take at least one of them with me on holiday to reread. And I owe a lot to Selima Hill and Ellora Sutton for the evolution of my poetry's form and language. They always think to do something no one’s done before and always commit to the bit.

What is your writing practice?

I will never write by hand: no copy-and-paste! For the past seven years, anytime I come across a word or phrase or fragment that speaks to me, I add it to an ever-growing Google Doc (currently at 18 pages). When I get an idea for a poem or find a themed submission call I’d like to write for, I go through the entire document and consider how each word, phrase, and fragment I’ve stored could be brought into the poem. This usually gives me two pages of notes to start writing from, which avoids any blank page syndrome. By the time I’ve finished the poem, it’s usually the case that nothing from the ever-growing Google Doc survived to the final draft: which is why it’s ever-growing!

Do you write in other forms, for instance prose? How do you toggle between them?

I work in science communications, so in a typical day I could be writing reports, interview questions, press releases, podcast scripts, ad copy, socials copy... I actually can’t toggle between this and writing poetry. If I’m writing a lot for work, I can’t write poetry. This is something I miss about laboratory research! Often it’d be quite manual, conducting experiments by hand for a few days in a row without even writing an email. I found that a really productive time for my writing, since I could draft poems in my head while floating about the lab bench. I’ve started writing short stories this year and hope that soon I can say I’ve started writing a sci-fi novel...

What’s your first poetry memory?

Performing a slam poem about the villains of SpongeBob Squarepants for a class project when I was 10.

What’s your favourite text about the sea? Or beaches?

The Scar by China Miéville.

What song helps us get to know you better?

One Last Kiss by Hikaru Utada.

Hikaru Utada is one of the few artists my boyfriend and I both like. One Last Kiss is our song.

What poem do you wish you’d written?

Portrait of My Lover in a Car by Selima Hill.

You can read Nathan’s poem “Soy Boy”, and listen to Nathan it himself, in Issue One of the Seaford Review.

What can you tell us about this poem?

Soy Boy, for me, is in conversation with Judith Butler’s notions of gender and sexuality as performance. You know, the whole: it’s not being straight that causes one to act straight; instead, it’s all the ways you act that add up to this idea of straight or masculine or whatever label we’re talking about. The ideas of masculinity, femininity, straight, gay... It’s all an imitation of itself.

So, if it’s all simply an imitation of itself, where is its beginning? If masculinity is a copy, it’s only a copy of a copy. Where is the original? If it’s all a performance, as Butler tells us, do we not just end up with some obscure, camp adaptation of it that’s lost its roots? That’s what I really wanted to explore with Soy Boy.

We’re all human. But somehow, that’s never enough. We feel this need to slap labels on ourselves. And even more so on each other. Why is that? Who determines it? Is there a “good” version and a “bad” version? Like “good” masculinity, for example. What does that even look like? Empathetic? Understanding? Crying? Are these not just attributes to being a “good” human being?

As you can see, there’s a lot of questions - and that’s kind of the point with Soy Boy. In the end, Soy Boy is my way of wrestling with all of these juxtaposing ideas of masculinity, the performance of it, and the strange ways in which we try to define it.

What poets and poems are you in dialogue with?

Andrew McMillan and Ocean Vuong have my heart, collectively. The way they both dissect and interrogate themes of queerness, masculinity, and heritage with so much attention to detail. The way they both play with and manipulate language, making words bend to their will so effortlessly. Read Vuong’s essay on Reimagining Masculinity and you’ll know exactly what I mean. In this, he makes reference to one of my favourite poems, Old Glory, which does a delicious job of interrogating language and masculinity. The poem pops in your mouth as you read it. They’ve both probably single-handedly informed my writing the most. Some of my favourite poems include Thanksgiving 2006, Telemachus, and Notebook Fragments by Vuong, as well as Playtime and Personal Trainer by McMillan.

Do you write in other forms? How do you toggle between them?

I dabble in this and that. I love fiction that reads as poetry, screenwriting as vivid as prose, the kind of writing that slips between forms and genres. My wonderful friend Georgia once wrote a stage play adaptation of Wendy Cope’s The Orange and it was genius. That kind of vibe. Mostly I write something, somewhere, between prose and poetry. When it comes to my writing, whether it takes up half a page or several pages, it’s usually all the same to me. Not something I toggle between. I think Ocean Vuong is a great example of this in action, and you’ll know what I mean if you read his collection Time is a Mother and see how his longer poems blend poetry and flash fiction so delicately.

What's on your bedside table?

A big stack of my most recent reads (because they don’t fit on my bookshelf), including The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yōko Ogawa, Pond by Claire Louise Bennett, and my current read The Vegetarian by Han Kang.

What's your favourite text(s) about the sea?

Our Wives Under The Sea by Julia Armfield is what immediately comes to mind. I’m a sucker for contemporary gothic literature, and when you make the two main characters a gay married couple? Say less. I’m hooked. The sea in this novel is a hauntingly, quietly destructive force. The entire novel itself feels like a tsunami. I could go on forever about this book, but all I’ll say right now is that it makes you lose your mind. In a good way.

You can read Will’s poem “Homosexual Commitment Issues While Hundreds Of Elk Die In Wyoming”, and listen to Will read it himself, in Issue One of the Seaford Review.

What can you tell us about this poem?

I recently stumbled upon a 2004 article talking about how 400-500 elk in Wyoming ate lichen with too much acid in it and died, and around the same time I found this article I was reflecting on a relationship with someone from years ago who was in conflict with his feelings about him and me. In honour of this guy, I found a Vietnamese poetic form called the lục bát (“six-eight”) which is a complex form that is strict in its syllabic, rhyme, and tonal scheme. When it is used in English it loses its tonal beauty, which felt so appropriate in a poem that is so much about deterioration to use a form that in its own way deteriorates when translated to another language. And the rhyme scheme itself even has its own sense of descent or cascading that fit the theme as well. The poem is devoted to situating us humans as moments a part of the ecological cycles of life with the rest of nature, and how there is some sense of cosmic comfort in our transcendence, or spiritual existences, that lies in being-toward-oneness with nature despite of our oftentimes trivial anthropocentric endeavors and worries.

What poets and poems are you in dialogue with?

This particular poem is most certainly in dialogue with Brian Teare’s Doomstead Days which is a brilliant eco-poetical work that centres the queer perspective. I am always writing with Kaveh Akbar in mind, particularly his book Pilgrim Bell, because of his masterful skill on writing the most human form of spirituality I have ever read that often influences all of my work.

What is your writing practice? Where and when do you write? By hand, laptop, phone notes?

I start by writing by hand in my journal and the page(s) often look chaotic and nonsensical, but I need to feel the poem in my body first, then I write it in a Google Doc to see it in a clean format, then I write it back in my journal, and so on. It depends on the poem, but my craft is often a feedback loop between body (hand writing) and mind (structuring and visualising through typing into my computer).

What drew you to writing poetry?

As a teenager it was catharsis. But as an adult I am drawn to poetry as an exercise of surrender. Louis Gluck once wrote “the fundamental experience of the writer is helplessness... it is a life dignified by yearning.” I am captivated by the way poetry demands so much of a connection to the helplessness of desire and relinquishing my self to a process of uncertainty and bewilderment.

What song helps us get to know you better?

I think my whole personality can be summed up in the following playlist: Habibi by Tamino; Limbo by Lissom, Julien Marchal, & Lowswimmer; Ниточка в голове by Synecdoche Montauk; and Joga by Björk.

You can read Troy’s poem “Third”, and listen to Troy read it himself, in Issue One of the Seaford Review.

What can you tell us about this poem?

I’d like to think that Third explores the possibilities of care that can take place between queer people in seemingly unexpected settings and temporalities. In the case of this poem, it’s about a connection two strangers can share after a purely physical sexual experience, and how real this connection can still be, even if it takes place in the middle of the night, walking out of a flat building where they just had an impromptu threesome, savouring a spark that lives and dies from one end of the road to another.

What poets and poems are you in dialogue with?

I think my poems exist thanks to the path paved by the likes of Kim Addonizio, Joseph Legaspi, Wanda Coleman, Savannah Brown, Terrance Hayes, Morgan Parker, Cecilia Knapp, Pascale Petit, and Essex Hemphill. I always go back to Marilyn Monroe’s poems for when I need to connect with a potent part of myself. I’m so lucky to have been taught by Rachel Long once as a Barbican Young Poet, and again as my mentor for my forthcoming collection. This is outside of the fact that I’m also just a massive fan of her poems.

Currently, I’m being held/challenged/moved by Saskia Hamilton, Paul Stephenson, Danez Smith, Frederick Seidel, Eliza Gonzalez, and Dzifa Benson.

What is your writing practice? Where and when do you write? By hand, laptop, phone notes…?

My early drafts tend to come into fruition when I’m on the tube to and from work via my Notes app, or running to my laptop while washing the dishes or hoovering the carpet. Something about inconvenience brings out inspiration, I suppose.

I wish I could say I have a more scheduled and regulated time frame in which I start my poems, but I find that rarely happens with work and other life responsibilities always in the way. I do find the evening time the best time to edit, once everything has simmered down to a close and I can focus a bit better.

Having kind and patient people around me is also super helpful and grounding, fellow poets I can spend time editing, developing drafts with, and just speaking out thoughts about poetry in general.

What poem do you wish you’d written?

I always go back to “Little Black Dress” by Tamar Yoseloff. I love how easy the internal rhymes flow into one another, how concise and well-cut it is, like how a classic and dependable piece of clothing would be. This poem also gave me permission to write about clothing and jewellery as valid poetic objects.

What’s on your bedside table?

I currently have a copy of my new pamphlet, Symmetric of Bone, nearby as I’ve just finished the launch event for it. I have a box of small perfume bottles that my best friend Ayaan Abdullahi got me for my birthday. There’s a selenite sphere inside a bowl. I also have a copy of All Souls by Saskia Hamilton, a poetry collection I’m really enjoying at the moment. I feel like I will enjoy it for a long time.

What song helps us get to know you better?

Busy Woman by Sabrina Carpenter.

You can read Cleo’s poem “To Bear Witness is an Act of Love”, and listen to Cleo read it herself, in Issue One of the Seaford Review.

What can you tell us about this poem?

This poem is based on a real event from the village I grew up in, where two dogs were hung over a bridge. I wanted to use this event to explore the role of the witness — our responsibility to see and record, but also the way that witnessing implicates us and can draw us into uncomfortable parallels and kinships with what we observe.

What poets and poems are you in dialogue with?

Whenever I write “pastorally”, I find myself in dialogue with ancient idyllic writers like Theocritus — the way these poems construct the pastoral as a world with its own limits, rules and edges is very interesting to me. I tend to find the history and traditions of forms or genre very helpful to bounce off of, and as a sonnet, this poem was very much in dialogue with other queer uses of sonnets like Alex Cocker's translations of Michaelangelo (and I guess, ultimately, Shakespeare!).

What is your writing practice?

I have a total inability to write at home, so writing always begins with a trudge off to a library, coffee shop or reading room. People often ask me if I think about poetry on my long walks to a writing venue and the answer is no! I tend to listen to very loud, angry and incoherent music and think about absolutely nothing — perhaps a way of wiping the slate clean before I get started.

What poem do you wish you'd written?

To me, Natalie Shapero is the ultimate magician. Her poems hang together so perfectly and as such discrete objects, but it is really hard to see the architecture beneath it. I have spent more time than I can admit reading The Sky and screaming “how does this work???” to myself.

What drew you to writing poetry?

Although I have tried and continue to try other forms, I am always drawn back to poetry for its sheer density — the way it can hold so much that might be seen as opposed or separate within one object and keep its cool.

You can read J-T’s poems, and listen to J-T read them himself, in Issue One of the Seaford Review.

What can you tell us about these poems?

Nub and Desert Dreams both come from my time in New Mexico. I moved there to make what would be my last serious attempt at finishing a college degree. It didn’t take, but I stayed for several years. The mountain desert does for me something like what everybody I know says the ocean does for them. Both of these poems came out of a 3-month period of prodigious output and creative rejuvenation brought on by reading Joe Elliot’s Index, an 11-page poem of fragments and jumps. I wouldn’t say my poems are anything like Index, but Elliot’s poem broke loose something in my head that let these poems out. Here’s a stanza from Index:

Like unfinished ease, this business goes
The part of you that’s a part of it and it wants to be conscious
The dandelion was not redundant
We don’t lack people here on the effortless coast
The face on fate, a lifelong acquaintance
The difference between manipulation and setting a boundary is
“How do you do?” for a living

Index from Oqposable Thumb (Subpress, 2006)

What poets and poems are you in dialogue with?

To be “in dialogue with” implies the conversation goes both directions, yes? There are poets I talk to a lot online, and we talk about poems, about poetry, we send each other poems and opinions. Then there are the poets, some dead, who I read and take seriously and whose work becomes part of the smell of the house. There are poets whose work I admire when I’m at work.

Here are some books I like very much by some poets I like very much that I think you might enjoy becoming more familiar with:

• Shell Game by Jordan Davis (Edge Books, 2018)

• The Ghost of It by Kyla Houbolt (CCCP/Subpress, 2024)

• Holy Fool by Henry Gould (Lulu.com, 2023)

• Light-Up Swan by Tom Snarsky (Ornithopter Press, 2021)

• What Pecan Light by Han VanderHart (Bull City Press, 2021)

What’s your favorite text about the sea?

I love this James Schuyler poem, The Edge in the Morning. It uses the word cenotaph, which means a memorial grave for someone buried somewhere else or whose body has not been found, and I always confuse the word with otolith, which is a tiny bone in your ear that sounds like a monument. James Schuyler always sounds to me like a man half dreaming, but then you catch on to how quick he is.

The edges of the bay are thinnest at high tide.
It is low tide. 
[...]
[The wind] crumples the bay and stuffs it in a stone pocket.
The bay agitatedly tries to smooth itself out.
If it were tissue paper it would need damp and an iron.
It is a good deal more than damp.
What a lot of water.

What’s on your bedside table?

I just returned a large pile of books from my bedside to the library after having kept them too long. But that has left me with some texts that I am returning to or hovering over because I still have some questions to ask them.

• Ted Berrigan’s The Sonnets

• Walt Whitman’s 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass (positively slim at around 100

  pages!)

• William Carlos Williams’ Spring and All

• John Ashbery’s Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror

• Gwendolyn Brooks’ Blacks

• Gertrude Stein’s How to Write

What draws you to writing poetry?

One of my persistent experiences of life is That’s not quite it. Another is How on earth does all this higglety-pigglety hang together? And while that may turn out to be somewhat true for everybody, I find that I experience it most in language. Or at least, I experience it most pointedly when language is at the centre of my experience. Poems are objects made of language. Also they can be beautiful. And beauty is hardly ever what you think it is. And it’s never what you say it is. If any of that makes you want to read a poem or write a poem, then I may have answered your question.