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poetry

Archaeology: Twelve Miniatures

Poetry

November 2021

Abdelfattah Kilito

TR. Clare Finburgh Delijani

TR. Marina Warner

Poetry

November 2021

Picture    Adam has just tasted the forbidden fruit; he’s bitten into the apple and he’s condemned to roll it in his mouth for...

Poetry

October 2021

In the Chinese Ceramics Gallery

Sarah Howe

Poetry

October 2021

  Earthenware model of a horse, unglazed   I, too, am a survivor. My eroded coat dappled with lichen...

poetry

September 2021

Two Poems

Amy Acre

poetry

September 2021

   AZRAEL   at the age you are now your father’s body had built a nest for an...

Poetry

Issue No. 31

Four Poems

Shripad Sinnakaar

Poetry

Issue No. 31

GADAPA (THRESHOLD)   Pedavva cried her last words, ‘Gadapa duram, khaadee deggera’   Gadapa is the site of our...

Poetry

June 2021

THREE POEMS

Joshua Blackman

Poetry

June 2021

  MODES OF BEING   A new hobby of mine is repeating a word until it strays from its...

Poetry

May 2021

THREE POEMS

Yongyu Chen

Poetry

May 2021

  ARTICULATION OF SOLACE FOR W   We are mothering ourselves. We are articulating solace for each other. We...

FROM OUR ARCHIVE: THREE POEMS

Poetry

Issue No. 23

A K Blakemore

Poetry

Issue No. 23

MAY   you slid into my life as though a witch’s smock — a sun poem.   fat bee on a bright brick wall...
minutes were different in ward-time continuous difluoromethane and stale skin and sterilising fluid from the ventilation units replaced sundials the electric pulmonary system laughed at dressing-gown- outpatients waiting for cups of blood and honey and metastasised papyrus from a heart ventricle dazed and limp 400 feet above the aerials on the hospital roof they washed and talked to the body before draining and re-filling with formaldehyde and other solvents and then ushered into a hermetically sealed coffin or ziploc sandwich bag I climbed past the 17th hospital floor with my mother the day after a woman in a brocaded suit got down on two knees and whispered about our seven great matriarchs from a Romani family a knock on the door of each sister when another one died we both listened to the flux of compressed air up the lift shaft and the breath caught best by the radiation suite on floor 20 and level LG before the morgue the stairs changed from linoleum to concrete and I tripped over stacked wheelchairs and filing trolleys head pressed against the mirror in the lift for an overdue inheritance of glass divination or splayed-hand- palmistry I was born in the Jessop Wing and watched it being demolished while I passed on the school bus ten years later they struggled to take blood and smiled at never making it to heroin with that circulatory system while my grandmother’s cyanotype roots hummed with warfarin sometimes I used the toilet by the hospital chapel after leaving school and walked corridor to corridor not another doctor for miles between here and 1979 time dilated between IV lines and ventilator drops and bedside alarms and wind pulled through structural cavities we did not know what the family name had been before the air on the roof became anti-septic
Hospital

Poetry

February 2021

Maria Giles-Holland


 

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