1 the frost creeps over our windows again like sugar the summer dew enlivens drooping grasses September a foreword- we are beginning afresh afresh cold railings parting before us the dim halls closing up behind beneath rooms ringing with echoes stirring our dust left long intact the phoenix children 2 only […]
Foyle 2003
… love zack
Summer has flown in (at last) with clouds unseasonable, weighty. The day’s grey and the night is even darker. All the while droughts of laughter, of that ‘one’ we all can think of, can’t we: one who never lit a sky, maybe, but smiled with pearly teeth, with giggling squeals and lit something up in […]
Mirror
This is what’s beautiful. This. Me on the bed by the Window. My pink toenails reflecting the music, the Gaze of my dog, the Gingerbread man on the white rose plate, the Music of language hanging in the air, the Sky cool and gaping blue, Moaning night outside my window. The skin against the sun. […]
Drug Puppy
Amanita muscaria Pop-pop-popping The base sliiiding through my v-v-veins, who cares when you’re riding high c-c-ceeeee me, I’ve got chicken fever growing like shiny crystal in my eyes Bite the dust, bite the dot that’s the essence of the big fat white shot Fantasy in flaaaash vision sparkling gold dust onto my curling lashes […]
Passport Pictures
We lie, empty, on the grass, waiting for the thoughts of the world to pollinate our sleepy brains, and all that I know is how I want them to capture us now; not bleached with effort in a broken booth, but here – our hands stamped with memories, your steam-breath seducing mine, twining round in […]
Fragmentation
That summer words came broken to their lips, falling in pieces, their mouths unheard, sly – or else choked by the sprouting freckles, shy colour in the down of their forearms. Eclipsed by the glance of a hand on the sheet, the moths and the white noise hum of heat in the air, aching and […]
Anatolian
I walked into industrialized cafés throughout asia minor and I kept thinking of the prehistoric starbucks back in America as a kind kind of mother church and of each mohammedan swinging on Vienna’s gate to an’ fro at the order of Kara Mustafa Pasha. Turks handled the pelts of an American newspaper as they would […]
Three Poems for a Girl
1. The Grass Path More tiring than the snaking sidewalk ascent built for two is the return with the ghost of a kiss but sans company over mud ants bruised leaves by the concrete downhill through the humid girl-breathed air on the grass path home. 2. I am walking outside where it is […]
the lady’s most unbecoming…
This day’s delirious declaration of the never-never blue; the expense of jubilation, and the most irrepressibly You – This must be heaven’s exclamation, to- day’s the Day I’m pro- Creation; if you carpe I’d be diem – all my fortunes I’d lay open! This much beauty’s Exhortation – the final damning of all rhyme and […]
Seven Reflections
i She has taken my eyes. All I have left are pink fingerbowls, dark shadowy orbits. I grow goldfish here, suspended signals of love In brimming waterholes rimmed with blood. Fantails flail out like fingers pressing into thick orange lashes. In this illuminated glass tank, I sense the people staring at me. The fish […]
The Living Air
The way the hand’s small arabesque curls into the dark straits between bodies, caught up short by skin’s warm shore, the smell, elusive, of a dreaming formed some days ago, found just round the corner in the bark of white young trees like the flicker of a flap that you forgot of an old bed […]
The March Goat
Needles prick my fingers. I distinctly remember tattooed muscles; numbers and Semitic features. I remember the piano teacher. His smile and his wife’s biscuits, brought once a month for my sisters. Of course, he always stunk of varnish. Yes, yes, I remember all this now. The brown shirts and the pounding boots like […]
hot blooded. my my my.
hot blooded. my my my. sleepy world boy are the youngsters out tonight I’m waiting for my eyelids to sink in themselves and my goosebumped skin to even out with my butter knife, like frosting. I’m so ravenous my hands turn into claws, sharp and padded shadow casts. I’m an empty cup […]
The Heat
When the heat comes, it falls Just like a heavy tablecloth Folding into little rivulets and sloppy waves. But instead of landing on glossy wood And billowing slightly under the chink of glass and china Instead of rustling to the hum of pleasant conversation The heat sinks into the rough, scarred road Into the rough, […]
Hymn no. A4
Travel west of the A4 past London feel Whiteness burning eyes fixated Layers of fields stretching pylon cables slack And the next, alight burns with vegetable oil the tree trunks are cracking invading outwards running through linear tubes swallowing my eyes splitting liquids in hollow sockets but driving, Grandma sits in solitude, unperturbed, […]
Nicholas Liu
A winner of Foyle Young Poets of the Year 2003.
Chloe Stopa-Hunt
Chloe’s poems have appeared in a range of publications, including Oxford Review and Magma. Reviews and review-essays have featured in Asymptote, Poetry Matters, The Oxonian Review, Cake, The Alligator, Mslexia and Poetry Review. Chloe is currently the poetry reviews editor at Cadaverine magazine and a senior editor at The Oxonian Review. Chloe was a Foyle […]

Helen Mort
Helen Mort was born in Sheffield. Her first full-length collection, Division Street (Chatto & Windus, 2013) was shortlisted for the Costa Prize and the T.S. Eliot Prize and, in 2014, won the Fenton Aldeburgh Prize. Her latest collection is No Map Could Show Them (Chatto & Windus, 2016). Helen is a five times winner of […]
Judith Huang
Judith Huang is a winner of Foyle Young Poets of the Year 2001, 2003 and 2004.