Download Sportn’t Download a text-only version of Sportn’t April Egan reads ‘Dock Leaf Liturgy’ from Sportn’t: Stas Forte reads ‘Obituary For A Body’ from Sportn’t: Mercury Tarantino reads ‘Sad Golden Eyed Boy of Olympus’ from Sportn’t:
Young Poets Network
Robert Hooke Reimagines London
“[Robert Hooke] achieved fame as Surveyor to the City of London and chief assistant of Christopher Wren, helping to rebuild London after the Great Fire. He worked on designing the Monument, Royal Greenwich Observatory, St. Paul’s Cathedral, whose dome uses a method of construction conceived by Hooke, and Bethlem Royal Hospital.” – The Monument The […]
Avore
When I’m alone I use the lost language, gathering up giltycups for your grave, thinking only of how much you loved yellow, how you’d stretch your hand to the sun in the archet, watching it settle in the grooves and galaxy of your palm. We’ve been having cazelty weather since you went, my love, the […]
Item 293.7 Rural History Museum, 30/04/2221
In two hundred years all archaeologists will find of my life will be plastic bungs. I fall asleep on them. I am the princess who can’t feel her peas. They leave me bullseyed, looking as if a tick has bitten and left redness as its triumph. All they will find are these stoppers which prevent […]
brother and sister climbing dead oak
pretend you’re kicking the heart of the tree. you’re crushing me. you need to swing over that branch. i know how your legs work. we have the same body, remember? i’ve lived in our chest two years longer than you. are you gonna keep your maiden name when you get married? it’s also your maiden name, you idiot. i’m not a […]
An Edict In Destiny (Or: Helena Looking Back)
I’m tracing the pressed flower on the page, dipping fragile sunrise, the place where we could be two angels. See, we wanted that paradise: two girls lying in the woods, safe in the cocoon of friendship, like they’re both fated for each other, not pursued, not men pushing out the lines, just Hermia and Helena. […]
Sharon, Massachusetts
After Gaia Rajan The horizon ruptures in the shape of my name. Dana, Dana, it calls while I sleep on my belly in the woods. I will dream about the sky, how it unfolds like a bruised lid, how deer dung marks constellations in the dirt. Later, I will drive myself across town. I will […]
On Becoming a Changeling
The forsythia, like all stars, is dying its impermanent death. Gold, bronze, gone. I yank my old hair from the brush, leave it in parcels on the doorstep for the birds – magpie, robin, song thrush. The pheasants make their road accident sounds, twisted metal out their mouths. I am still and heavy so long […]
April Egan, Stas Forte and Mercury Tarantino
The writers and artists in this group are the first-prize winners in Young Poets Network‘s 10th anniversary challenge, with their zine Sportn’t.
Dana Blatte
Dana is commended in Young Poets Network‘s 10th anniversary challenge.
Creagh Factor
Creagh is commended in Young Poets Network‘s 10th anniversary challenge.
Kristine Ma
Freya Cook
Freya is commended in the Keats challenge on Young Poets Network, part of The Poetry Society’s celebrations of Keats’s bicentenary in 2021.
Jude Leese
Jude is the third-prize winner of the Keats challenge on Young Poets Network, part of The Poetry Society’s celebrations of Keats’s bicentenary in 2021.
Olivia Tuck
Olivia is the first-prize winner of the Keats challenge on Young Poets Network, part of The Poetry Society’s celebrations of Keats’s bicentenary in 2021.
The Darkness Falls at Thy Behest
for Grandad Beyond the window, summer is packing up, the way we used to gather the leftovers, fold the picnic blanket and carry it – and the hamper – back to the car’s open boot. Once, you’d have told me why the air seems to cling. Now, the long shadows stare as you lie, your […]
I Wear a Set of Lungs as a Necklace
I’ve never held an orange which has fully dried out, with its cloves loose and falling apart. I’m only experienced in fresh oranges, cloves displacing juice, a candle wrapped in tinfoil, dolly mixtures on cocktail sticks, the church a once-a-year attendance. The belltower is a place I’ll never visit again. Pulling joy with ropes after […]
Into The Tunnel (And Out Again)
I’d rather play in the park, I think but at least it’s not school. I’m somewhere completely new. It looks nice and clean but all the grown-ups look so sad and I don’t know why. They tell me it’s a fairly simple procedure but I’m not so sure I would have to sleep in this […]
Stolen Syllables
Ode to Mr Motivator
lifting cans of rice pudding over my head counting to eight on the metronome of my hips eight more eight more in the living room yes! I can balance on one leg and stay there like a tree half uprooted I had not thought of my body as a party I had not thought of […]
Migraine
I do not want to be. I am a negative – if the grey light grazes me, I will bloom into uselessness, sepia spreading to my curled edges. I do not want the light to leak anymore. I lunge across my lurching floor and drag down the blinds, then fall onto my still-made bed; the […]
Love Poem to Stephen the Phlebotomist
How bored you are, explaining phenotypes to me. I stammer about GCSE biology; I have forgotten T cells exist, I have forgotten clots, platelets, osmotic pressure, I have forgotten my birthday. You hand me another form; like mine, your hands are small. I wonder how many times a day you ask which arm, how many […]
The Human Seasons
in memory of g. a. w. All we have are the notes in our phones and a lemon before it rots against the ceramic fruit-bowl, blue memento mori, the crazing writing age in webs. Not the dusty kind, stuck to cilia and the dark corners of a buy-to-let; I mean the alive webs, silky and […]
tipping point
today, my lungs feel like the sky, ballooned and loose and free, legs billowing like a sailboat on the far east, the horizon just before the drop, tangled limbs and summer and laughing. today, i go miles without stopping, and miles more. it’s been a while since i felt alive. it’s because i ran every […]
For the Four Months I was Too Depressed to Feed Myself
You first found the sickness in your mouth when your tongue fuzzed and split, a fast motion image of soft fruit in decay playing out in your bathroom mirror spit out into culture growing on the grime of your sink, white foam on the banks of the red sea revealing rust flavoured canyons sunk between […]
Alannah Young
Alannah is commended in the Human Cell Atlas challenge on Young Poets Network.
Lauren Mappledoram
Lauren is commended in the Human Cell Atlas challenge on Young Poets Network.
Kitty Joyce
Kitty is the second-prize winner in the Human Cell Atlas challenge on Young Poets Network.
Anna Bailey
Anna is the first-prize winner in the Human Cell Atlas challenge on Young Poets Network.
Centriole
Glass tank in a biology classroom; I count the centipedes. See? Hundreds of subtle, creeping things, life’s sediment, seldom stirred. Quantification is human nature; three celery-green eyes encircle the wrist of a fairy tale witch. A trio of centaurs, lamenting in triolet form. A census. I count centipedes in the biology classroom; time scuttles past […]
Epithelium
Liminal: fairy-blue, like the spaces between diagnoses. The centre of a trembling that hollows out a city, or a marriage. Organza petticoats made from blackbird feathers and staples. The curve of a tongue on the back of the word lullaby. The writhing of mango skins in water as seeds float frost-like on the surface. […]
Apoptosis
two sisters pushing their hands two together, two sets of fingers, thumbs – candy popping round their mouth, pastel shards of it – each vowel sound posed an opposite to hiss like capsizing dinghies – approachable gossip to figure out a kiss or fight, popped spots, acne scars, posed in the dark as if they’re […]
The Distance Between Us
Mapping my body along its tissues, I trace the curved lines across my palm, up veins branching like B roads and touch my face – people say I look like you. Our eyes crinkle the same way when we laugh and our throats creak like rusty weather vanes. Stretching my arms, I imagine white fascia […]
Membrane
Pulled taut, the silken surface of the Seine comes to kiss my toes, recedes, and comes again; moves around my feet but swathes to meet the mellow rain. My skin understands: what must stay in, stays in. Like a tongue held hostage in foreign terrain. Words taught falter and sounds wane. When water falls on […]
Cytoplasm
Blister on my finger grows, the chasm between bone and the outer ring of skin, the skin filling with glassy liquid, the inside of the plaster like an open egg and I am queasy at the sight of my weeping fingernails, the eager yellow jelly, all the yolks I haven’t eaten, the whites of someone […]
Anime Boyz
Contains strong language Download a screen-reader friendly version of this zine
Cassie and the Flood
Cassie had creases in her cheeks, they were wrinkled like fingers that had spent too long in the bath; Cassie had a leak, she had a tearaway tear duct that was responsible for the flood, her clothes were soaked through, they stick to her skin like a wet suit. Every suit Cassie wore was […]
Wings
(Chords: A, B, C#, E) I could never meet your expectations Always out of reach Never gave me an explanation I could never be free Clip my wings so I can’t fly Tear my down every time I try I know I could never be in her place When I needed you you just […]
Bad Vibes Only
Contains strong language Download a screen-reader friendly version of this zine
The perfect caress has a velocity of three centimetres per second
Confession
Contains strong language Download a screen-reader friendly version
A Tale of Two Counties
Contains strong language Download A Tale of Two Counties (zine)
Mushroom Garden
Download Mushroom Garden (zine)
GM Kuhn and SZ Shao
GM Kuhn and SZ Shao are commended in the Collaborative Challenge on Young Poets Network, with their zine Mushroom Garden.
Priya Abularach and Hannah Beitchman
Priya and Hannah are commended in the Collaborative Challenge on Young Poets Network, with their poetry/collage piece Confession.
Jack Cooper and Daniel Shao
Jack and Daniel are commended in the collaborative challenge on Young Poets Network, with their piece of music and poetry, ‘The perfect caress has a velocity of three centimetres per second’.
Ellora Sutton and Hannah Hodgson
Ellora and Hannah are commended in the collaborative challenge on Young Poets Network, with their zine A Tale of Two Counties.
Libby Russell, Emily Fletcher, Celia Mostachfi and Lydia Wei
The writers and artists in group are commended in the collaborative challenge on Young Poets Network, with their zine Bad Vibes Only.
Lauren Lisk and Simran Misir
Lauren and Simran are the third-prize winners in the collaborative challenge on Young Poets Network, with their song ‘Wings’.
Lydia Wei, Em Power, Adelina Rose Gowans, Sanjula Narayanan, Ann Dinh, Anne Rong, Carly Chan, Mae, Melissa Sibilla, Mica Pascual, Nina Joseph, Peach and Sherri Keys
The writers and artists in this group are the first-prize winners in the collaborative challenge on Young Poets Network, with their zine Anime Boyz.
Kia Matanky-Becker and Miles Simpson
Kia and Miles are the second-prize winners in the collaborative challenge on Young Poets Network, with their music and poetry piece ‘cassie and the flood’.
She strikes the ball like a match
for Chioma Ubogagu Good God! Watch her, how she swallows the crowd-song, how boldly she strikes the pitch’s borders with her toes, warping the white lines, the way she knows to reduce each sun in the stadium lights to a ball, how she kicks into the midst of each fiery […]
disappearing from victoria before the fire alert hits catastrophic
Squirrel
Swift and agile Sleek and prehensile – Skittering across bark And as dexterously over brick – Squirrel. The arch survivor – A thief in woodland A bandit of suburbia, Beautiful peanut pirate. You skim the rigging of Rotary washing lines And old telephone wires: Your sail-tail A Spinnaker of balance – A back garden acrobat. […]
[Rabbit]
In Portland we don’t use the word, we dance around it – furry things, we’d say, the furry things are in backfield again. As a child I only knew I should never look directly at them, the same way I knew not to look at the sun. It was wrong. It would hurt later on. […]
In Praise of Desolation
A sunlight-mottled river shunts its weight Towards the sea, having nowhere else to go; Even the evening’s syrupy light can’t glaze it Into something pretty. The days are slow, So I come back often to this crease in the city’s palm, Where you might see a rabbit stare from the gorse Then vanish as quick […]
watching the match at the field on berkeley road
Contains strong language next to the vineyard tree pub extra ordinaire free gravy on the side with all chips and running down the carvery yellow walls as brown shadow coats rusted telephone poles in something pretty home of the famous hooke team their sweaty shins and boys crying after hours behind the mccoll’s dogs pissing […]
At The Farm
Leaves falling through my open window, I hear thorn bushes rustling in the wind. I see trees dropping apples, Birds rustling their way through the thick branches To reach their nests. Eagles swooping down on my house, Searching for rats. Horses running from the barn. I hear the sudden noises of the cows mooing, Ants […]
Mould
They were here when I arrived; decadent strata of spots in rich orange, red, and green, a pointillist Zhangye Danxia on the ceiling of my student en-suite. I tried to kill them, but they came back, appearing out of nowhere like an absurd flash mob so I shower each morning under a hundred spiteful […]
Transformation
walking down the side of my house, i count the number of steps it takes to cross this white field of pebbles. for months, i could not touch the world. i only knew it through the window in my room. now the wind bounds past me like a dog. someone has overturned a stone in […]
myopic man
man heaves up stairs man pauses on step seventy-two man spits a prayer man ascends man gropes doorway man forgets keys man forgets keys in back pocket man pushes through man finds air man plunges onto rails man seeks the bars man has cold cheeks man catches a cloud man lets it go man plucks […]
Grace Q. Song
Grace is commended in Gboyega Odubanjo’s People Need Nature challenge on Young Poets Network in 2020.
chenrui
chenrui is commended in Gboyega Odubanjo’s People Need Nature challenge on Young Poets Network in 2020.
Finn Farnsworth
Finn is the second-prize winner of Gboyega Odubanjo’s People Need Nature challenge on Young Poets Network in 2020.
I Lost My Innocence in a Hospital Room, and No-One Handed It in
A Golden Shovel
IN WHICH PAPA (A SAILOR) GOES DEAF
Through the Lens of @realDonaldTrump: A Decade of Twitter Politics
so you want to talk about the ap*calypse
the end times in numbers: 4 horsemen 1 cancelled judgement day 1 giant rip through the sky 1 ocean brimming with plastic 1 people at risk remember self-care! pumice from the endless eruptions is effective on dry arms. steaming pyres also have a cleansing effect on skin, if you have any left. have a blackout […]
What I Learnt from Reading the News
after Kate Bingham I learnt that words don’t mean anything, That your hands do all the talking. I learnt that you don’t always have to tell the truth And I learnt that there’s always a loophole To weasel your way through. I learnt how to take offence at an inanimate object And how to play […]
someone calls me the c word and i respond
there are worse things to be. i could be, for instance, dying, or alive, but just enough to be taking up space. i could wade through a body that does not belong to me. yes, i could ravage, rumble, sour your milk, bite your children, poison your evening news. i could enlist my grandparents to […]
Hannah Aston
Hannah is commended in the Poetry and Political Language Challenge on Young Poets Network, in partnership with the Orwell Youth Prize.
Emma Chan
Emma is commended in the Poetry and Political Language Challenge on Young Poets Network, in partnership with the Orwell Youth Prize.
In My Wallet
How to Flirt at Your Best Friend’s Funeral
Content warning: grief
Semantics
Content warning: rape
Rian Paton
Rian is a commended Foyle Young Poet in 2019. They wrote and judged August Challenge #4: The Spoken Word Challenge on Young Poets Network in 2020.
Jessica Yu
Jessica is the second-prize winner in August challenge #4: The Spoken Word Challenge on Young Poets Network.
Evelyn Blythe
Evelyn Blythe is the third-prize winner in August Challenge #4: The Spoken Word Challenge on Young Poets Network.
in response to eliezer wiesel’s night
this is the moment skeletons became atheists. gold lodged in the back of throats and stuck, rigor mortis like you never had a chance. and maybe the soup tastes like corpses, or maybe the soup tastes like god. or like angels, and cracks in the barbed wire. because skeleton is a synonym for survivor, in […]
How to Kill a Tiger
The sky reddening like an unbruised body— and you, gone for days now, calcified in this unshed nightmare where the tiger is closing its teeth over your wrist again, dozens of rabbit carcasses littering the halls again, tiger slipping quiet through the nights, […]
get out of my face
Somewhere out there is a statue of me where my face isn’t as long, my sadness shorter. I meet with her head-on. I tell her to turn in the direction of the power ballads and the attractive folks that sing them. I’ve just seen a face, says Paul McCartney in the middle of 1965, and […]
the complexities of water
Scaffolding
Halfway through the horror movie, the lights give out, the whole city held under a blanket. Turning the other cheek. Some phantom hand finds mine. I will learn to love you softly is what the house would say, its belly emitting a quiet dust rumble, drops in the kitchen sink like fingers drumming a wooden […]
Pins
I The mini liberators of women, hoisting those hems to the Heavens, giving their legs room to breathe. II The silver capped scholars, keeping those iridescent specimens in place for little curious eyes. III The diligent sewers’ stabilisers, holding together linen squares so they can stitch their designs to life. IV The silent supporters, presenting […]
Body
Body lies on the bottom step. How did it get there? we ask. Body is bloody. Hair matted. Nails dirty. Body ’s hand falls near the light. We are glad Body has made no mess. Clean fall. No Body would notice. What should we do? Body says rug. Wrap me […]
Jasmine Kapadia
Jasmine is the first-prize winner of August Challenge #3: Repetition & Imagery on Young Poets Network.
Ottavia Paluch
Ottavia is the third-prize winner of August Challenge #3: Repetition & Imagery on Young Poets Network.
Lauren Lisk
Lauren is a top 15 winner of the Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award 2020, and is commended in August Challenge #3: Repetition & Imagery on Young Poets Network.
Iqra Naseem
Iqra is commended in August Challenge #3: Repetition & Imagery on Young Poets Network.
Joan of Arc Gives Me a Buzz Cut, or Lux Venit in Nomine Vocis
Joan of Arc and I lay head-to-head in the wash of a meadow frothing Queen Anne’s lace like a corrupted lung. Her fingers dabbling my palms like water, that martyr and I speak of our own voices: mine, stolen; hers given like a sack of entrails. Did the voices twitch, I ask, did they wriggle […]
Exposure, Part II
For Wilfred Owen Contains strong language our bodies ache on the streets where we rattle plastic cans for change we watch the flocks of low drooping eyes scuttle by like brambles in the north wind we have become part of the scene patient hopeful crying out but nothing happens on the corner a preacher […]
Julius Caesar Visits the NIST-F1 Atomic Clock
20:30 from Stockport
I saw Humphrey Bogart in a train station, Crewe, three o’clock in the morning, and he looked as faded and grey as I felt stumbling half asleep off the late service. When I was ushered out the doors, he was just there by the taxi rank, leant up on a pillar, smoking, lit up […]
What is Happening to Jesus of Nazareth and What You Can Do to Help: a Thread
You may know Jesus. That preacher/teacher/healer/magic man with the clear silt skin. You may have seen him around town, raising the dead and making friends. Maybe he cleaned up your acne, maybe he showed you the gold humming of God. Take a look at his Tumblr: @carpentryqween. 1/? Jesus is a rebel leader/activist/socialist/pacifist and last […]
Rosalind on 2mg Estradiol a day
“Do you not know I am a woman?”(Act III, scene ii, As You Like It) My lover and I no longer speak. We leave notes in the mist on one another’s eyes. Once, he carried me through fields of sheep when I began to doubt that softness could be born. My lover doesn’t see the […]
Frankenstein
Delhi, 2020 Delhi today is like a dried-out battleground / after one final revolution. Sentries in khaki thrash / young men on peculiar vehicles / for something I don’t understand. I hide my sewed-up face / in dark alleys; people look at me from the other side of their windows / scared. I’d have […]
John Dee at the Apple Store
Show me your teeth, God. Tonight, at the Apple Store under the unshut moon. Visit me tonight, God. Fog this spirit mirror with your Word — blind me with this new handheld eclipse. Oh, but my head sings with standing so long as the marrow of this sun-bleached bone. Church as mirage. Along its aisles […]
Ferenc Rákóczi in the Pantry
Ferenc II Rákóczi was a Hungarian aristocrat who led rebellions against the Habsburg empire in the early 18th century. He is widely considered a national hero in Hungary.”Rákóczi” is also the name of a popular Hungarian breakfast salami. Dear, kind Ferenc: I am in love with your meat-printed face. I fan this last pious slice, […]
Irma Kiss Barath
Irma is the second-prize winner in the Poetry and Political Language Challenge on Young Poets Network, in partnership with the Orwell Youth Prize. Irma is also commended in August Challenge #1: Re-mixing History, Fiction and the Unexpected.
Erik Rüder
Erik is commended in August Challenge #1: Re-mixing History, Fiction and the Unexpected on Young Poets Network.