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.