A pain in the neck. Brume spuming at the eye’s dead centre, odd digits prodding sockets, inner ear’s even keel. Eely fevers no anal -gesic can truly cure. Half-mask …
Poems From Glasshouses (Stuart Barnes/Leigh Backhouse)
ENDONE® Oxycodone hydrochloride 5 mg Blister-white tablet engraved with ‘ENDONE’ on one side, break bar the other. It does not take the place of your doctor or pharmacist: opium or …
SHAPING THE FRACTURED SELF (editor: Heather Taylor Johnson)
Axiology (Anne M Carson) ‘There is a crack in everything That’s how the light gets in. – Leonard Cohen If I was ceramic I’d be kintsukuroi, pottery which has been …
Olive (Stuart Barnes)
O love, how did you get here? O embryo Remembering, even in sleep, Your crossed position. I didn’t call you. I didn’t call you at all. Love, love, the low …
Elementals (Stuart Barnes)
Who are these people at the bridge to meet me? They are the villagers— Two. Of course there are two. First, are you our sort of person? The word of …
Mykonos (Stuart Barnes)
after Sylvia Plath’s ‘Lesbos’ Friction In that block Of flats. From six A.M. you’d modernise. I’d hammer, call you Sookie, sook. So scared to relish bareback. Designer duds rook …
Former Child Star (Stuart Barnes)
after Sylvia Plath’s ‘Child’ Your half-moons are the ten absolutely fabulous things. I want to streak them with Covergirl, Puck, Museums of dew Whose waves you intonate – …
Lipograms: five nursery rhymes reworked (Stuart Barnes)
(a) Humpty Dumpty rocked on the well, Humpty Dumpty tumbled to Hell. The King’s twelve fledglings, the King’s four colts couldn’t put Humpty together, the dolts. (e) ‘Baa, baa, …
Mother and Son (Stuart Barnes)
For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings That then I scorn to change my state with kings —Shakespeare _ Mid-December 1994. Recently I’d turned 17; my parents had …