Poems
‘To be fifteen’ by Victoria Richards – Primers Shortlist 2018
To be fifteen and after the third can of Super Strongbow cider, to throw up all over the embossed wallpaper belonging to that girl in the year above, the one with the bra straps and dirty jokes. She breathes in smoke without coughing, says, “alright?” to the most beautiful boy at school, the most beautiful…
Victoria Richards ‘After Adlestrop (for Helen Thomas)’ by Valerie Bence – Primers Shortlist 2018
After Adlestrop (for Helen Thomas) As usual, it is not widely known that you were there beside him in that carriage, at that station, suffused in sunlight and birdsong when someone cleared their throat as no-one left and no-one came. As usual, you are invisible — the hidden framework, an underpinning without which he would crumble,…
Valerie Bence ‘Catholic Girl Ghazal’ by Rachel Burns – Primers Shortlist 2018
Catholic Girl Ghazal Gotta love us Catholic girls, worshipping Madonna, singing Madonna mimicking her dress, the crop short sexy tops, just like Madonna. We are good Catholic girls, dare to bare our navel girls, chewing Wrigley’s gum hoops in our ears, crucifixes swinging from our necks, sexy like Madonna. Look, now we’re meeting up with…
Rachel Burns ‘Last eclipse’ by Nina Powles – Primers Shortlist 2018
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Nina Powles
’17 Forensic Ways I Know You’
D18S51, There is no-one like you. There is a 1 in a quintillion chance of there being someone like you, but still not you. I would know, with every sense I would know D21S11, I could pick the bouquet of your sweaty t-shirt from a line-up of sweaty t-shirts D3S1358, Who else would naturally select…
Ginny Saunders
‘The Specular City’
The city caught me in strings of orange light. I left behind those still and airless years in which counting each slow hour of suburban dark I sat, wanting my life to take new shape. And so many silences, and the glances of strangers – cold weights on the skin I struggled beneath. Neons, night…
Swithun Cooper
‘How to go home’
Drive back to the house where you were born. Open her old cookbook, press your fingers onto her pen’s scrawl. Take tweezers: tease a hair from your old doll’s clothes. Play a hymn, its melody clear as light
Rosemary Appleton
‘Being a true account of the voyage of Vincenzo Lunardi’
Fire Late September morning, and a chill in the Edinburgh air, but the gathering crowds are warm with wonder, and the ladies feverish for the hot-blooded adventurer – the man who knows how to fly. Thirty bottles of oil of vitriol into a vat of iron filings, and the limp sack of silk expands and…
Beverley Casebow
‘Fairy Tales and Stepmonsters’
I wish I’d held your hand more often. it would have been easy. I wish I’d worried less and made a nest of my fingers for it to curl inside, it used to slip into mine anyway. Do you remember the models we made out of cardboard and paper? Rockets and market stalls and castles…
Ilse Pedler
‘Emma’s Attitudes’
“She is better than anything in Nature. In her particular way she is finer than anything that is to be found in antique art.” Sir William Hamilton Arachne Nursemaid, barmaid, perched on the Flintshire front stoop, weaving Bacchante Dancing at the Temple of Health and Hymen; atop Sir Harry’s table, deliciously displayed Circe John…
Anna Amo
‘The Emptiness of Things’
I pour you into notebooks, stacking them on my nightstand next to the clock, candle, matches– hoping the emptiness of things will rub off on you. Ripping out pages, I burn them one by one, only to discover you’ve settled in corners and on dishes and found your way into the spines of books. Across…
Jen Smat
‘The Park’
In matching green anoraks, rain or shine, they walk here every morning, she a little taller than he, leaning on his arm, three times clockwise round the park, keeping themselves to themselves, keeping to the path by the railings where once they saw a gang of young offenders plant daffodils; admire the clumps of…
Margot Myers
‘Ice Storm’
Shuffling to the bus stop with the boyfriend who’d cut his visit short, cracked plastic wheels of his cheap suitcase juddering on the ice, I clutched at his coat sleeve and missed. Chin grazed, that deep-freeze smell up my nose, gloveless hands stinging. Close up: thousands of bubbles, suspended in ice. Beneath the cloudy layers,…
Nadia Arbach
‘asana’
forward fold rolling down each vertebrae the top of the duvet until i’m a penknife or a nutcracker. swing elbows swing head. ensure the release. massage the belly by squeezing it on the thighs good for the guts. a gutsy move this one it makes the hamstrings shriek. a most decisive vulnerability. shift weight to…
Flo Reynolds
‘Half-empty’ by Romalyn Ante – Primers Shortlist 2017
‘The Philippines must be half-empty; you’re all here running the NHS’ – Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh Drug: Migrationazoline (available in full or half-empty bottles) Indications: ____– prophylaxis of parents who nag like masonry drills, ______saying they did not send you to college ______to be a health-centre volunteer ____– ulcers on the lips for eating…
romalyn ante ‘Baby’ by Amelia Loulli – Primers Shortlist 2017
Most people drown without _______making a noise or splashing. See me here Baby, watch me _______lying out plank, below the surface, all that stillness, all that _______peace, see how long I can breathe down here alone. You must _______trust me, I am your mother after all, don’t think about the firefighter who _______lies to the…
Amelia Loulli ‘To The Wounded Among Us*’ by Sarala Estruch – Primers Shortlist 2017
But everyone is wounded a little. What are hearts but purple, pumping wounds? What are we but hearts travelling in skin suits? Today we are tired of listening. This morning we woke with our ears full, cochleae still reverberating with gunshot and the bombs we detonated yesterday in yet another failed coup to colonise…
Sarala Estruch ‘Athenian Light’ by Kostya Tsolákis – Primers Shortlist 2017
I was born into it in late September, when it’s sweet and hued at sunset like the seeded flesh of figs. Smog meddled with it at the time, hanging over Athens like bad history. And growing up, what use was lyrical light when stuck two hours every day in an airless school bus, my biggest…
Kostya Tsolákis ‘Elders of the Pot’ by Jasmine Cooray – Primers Shortlist 2017
They sit in a rainbow of re-used jam jars, watch the traffic of the kitchen, hold proverb and gossip in their gnarled shapes and powders. Every wooden spoon is yellow to the neck. Turmeric, coriander, mustard seed land on the heat of inherited pans, smoke their sour huck into the corners of the house, leak…
Jasmine Cooray ‘Garam Aandey’ by Aisha Hassan – Primers Shortlist 2017
Those ancient cobbles hum with heat long after sundown the shrill cry of the boy with the thermos full of hard boiled eggs for sale the donkey pulling the cart of bananas – refusing to move as the doodh wallah on his bike delivers the milk door to door And here is rain that is…
Aisha Hassan ‘Old Town’ by Imogen Forster – Primers Shortlist 2017
The churches wear black hoods and on the inebriated street bars shine, all glass and varnish. Voices talk beer and whisky. A boy kicks a bottle down the stank, pigeons sip daintily in the grooves between worn granite setts. The hunchbacked street is an arête, a dry fishbone. Closes fall away from its spine, swallowing…
Imogen Forster ‘The May-Tree’ by Yvonne Reddick – Primers Shortlist 2017
Your embrace was the Shelter Stone when the ferns began ____________________to unscroll their questions. You planted a may-tree, and said the whitethorn could not match the bloom in my cheeks. By summer, you swore you’d carry me from Edale to Kielder, to show me the dens of lynx. My vows were the Ring of Steall….
Yvonne Reddick ‘Second-hand’ by L Kiew – Primers Shortlist 2017
___(Penang, 1932) _________(i) Lao ma believes the dead cling to their possessions. My dress is red shantung; its last occupant is heart-broken and tugging on my hem as I step onto the polished floor. My partner is her ex- husband. He holds me out at arms’ length, cold and stiff. I waltz around, around. When…
L Kiew
‘Limpet’ by Anna Bindoff – Resurgence Prize, Highly Commended
You told me after all these years, in one Of those sweet, unexpected, piercing lines That we’ve become like limpet and a stone Whose borders can be nowhere else aligned. I wondered if you knew the home’s a scar, Abraded by rotation at the brim And strange exchanges keep them there, shell stars In constellation,…
Poetry School ‘So’ by Roy Woolley – Resurgence Prize, Highly Commended
On the dirt road that night, a broken thing with the new patterns leached from its wings – but no clearer signs, hence no way of knowing the destination this rough road might become if I followed the scents these greyish flowers had already lost guiding me. Scanning the thorn-fields and with hours before reset,…
Poetry School