Welcome to issue fifteen of The Fig Tree.

This issue’s Featured Poet is West Yorkshire-based Laura Strickland, who hasn’t appeared in the magazine before but who was a guest reader at the launch of Ian Parks’ The Sons of Darkness and the Sons of Light and who also read for the Read To Write group in Doncaster, where she led an interesting discussion on prose poetry. The poems she has chosen are from a project that deals with the attacks on, and murders of, women in West Yorkshire and Manchester between 1975 and 1980. As you will see, the poems deal with a difficult topic with sensitivity, focusing on the women and not the murderer.

This month the Women’s Poetry Anthology will be published by Crooked Spire Press – in addition to the poems that were published in the two online issues it has twenty or so further poems that haven’t been published before. The quality was so high that I took some of the submissions for these regular issues, and there were further poems that weren’t selected by the editors or by me that are certainly worthy of being published. It’s a superb collection of poems and I’m very grateful for the effort put in by my guest editors Stephanie Bowgett and Susan Darlington, and thanks also to Julia Deakin for a really insightful Foreword.

Next month we have a Special Issue of poems inspired by the General Strike of 1926, that look at all aspects of Trade Unionism and social justice. Thanks to another guest editor, Nick Allen, for sifting through what was a terrific set of submissions, bearing in mind how little time I allowed for writing them and the narrow submissions window!

If you enjoy this issue, consider looking at some of the back issues too – even if you’ve read them before they are worth another look.

Once again I hope you enjoy reading this issue as much as I did collating it. You are joining over 700 people who are reading the webzine on a regular basis.

Tim Fellows, Editor

Contributors: Laura Strickland, Ruth Aylett, Rachel Burns, Karen Downs-Barton, Jenny Hockey, Stephen Jackson, Phil Kirby, PD Lyons, Matthew Paul, Jane Pearn, Marguerite Penny and Paul Brough.

The Fig Tree Featured Poet – Laura Strickland

Roll Call

Think  of  us in colour    Wilma     opening  presents  with  her  children   on  Christmas morning     Jayne     at two days old, held tight  by her mother     Yvonne     sunbathing in her  back  yard     Patricia    dancing  with  her  mates  on  Saturday nights    Josephine with  her  arms  round her grandparents    Vera     on  her  doorstep   watching  kids  do   wheelies   Jacqueline   packed   and   ready   for   a  school    trip     Barbara     winning  a gymkhana  with  her  favourite  horse     Marguerite     climbing  on her 50th  birthday at Windermere     Irene     on her first holiday to Spain     Helen     building  snowmen  with her   twin   sister     Emily     fixing   roofs  with  her lads     Jean     at Blackpool with her family, the lights shining behind them

Laura Strickland

Footnote: Ekphrastic on the black and white photos of thirteen women murdered by Peter Sutcliffe between 1975-1980.

Emily

Can you hear the storm Emily?
Listen how it breaks the slates free,

how it clatters them into the yards
and the houses give in.

Tomorrow the bloke from number nine
will ring and say

Can you come down? Bloody roof’s gone.
I’m looking at the pissing sky through me ceiling.

Tonight, let the Gaiety wait –
go to the chippy,

make cocoa for the kids,
pour yourself a drink,

bring a blanket from upstairs,
put Coronation Street on.

In the morning stock up the van,
take Syd to his jobs,

drop the kids off at school,
see Jean and Mary from the mill –

but hold on for tonight Emily
for tonight, hold on.

Laura Strickland

Footnote: In memory of Emily Jackson. First published in Anthropocene Poetry Journal, 2025.

What breaks the silence

from the moment a woman lies alone
face down in fields or parks or wasteland -

a dog barking in the distance
the rattle of a milk van
a car door slamming
a paper boy sounding his bell
the opening of a bedroom window
the siren of a police car
trees breaking under the wind
sparrows squabbling at dawn?

Or is it the squelch of boots on frost
the swipe of hair from her face
and someone saying –

Come on love, can you hear me?

Laura Strickland

Laura Strickland is a carer and poet from Saltaire and was a New Northern Poet in 2025. Her publications include The North, Strix, The Frogmore Papers, Ink, Sweat and Tears, Northern Gravy, Propel, Atrium, Anthropocene and Butcher’s Dog. She was twice Highly Commended in Nine Arches’ Primers and was one of 12 poets selected for Lancaster Literature’s Mosaic 2023 by Caroline Bird. Laura holds an MA in poetry from Manchester Metropolitan University and is a member of Dream Catcher’s editorial board. She was longlisted in the National Poetry Competition 2023 and shortlisted for the Bridport Prize 2025.

The Fig Tree Selection – July 2026

This section features up to ten poems, with a maximum of one per poet per issue.

Geography

Deputy Headmaster ‘Butch’ Day turfs me out
of the prefab classroom for a quip he laughs at,
because it wasn’t what I said; it was my ‘crass’
timing, damming his discourse on oxbow lakes.
In April, Argentina’s invasion of the Falklands
prompts Butch to spend a lesson raging about

‘the Japs’, who ‘worked, starved and murdered’
his closest friends, thus ‘our lads need to stick it
to the Argies’; a syllogism I refute so doggedly
he orders me to wait outside his office at the end
of the day. But instead of a bollocking, he gives
me a pep talk: ‘attitude needs to match wit’, etc.

I see, pinned on the board behind his Mr Whippy
hair, a yellowed cutting from the Surrey Comet:
School disco terror. At the private school across
the way, skinheads defaced walnut panels etched
with names of old boys killed on active service,
then battered Butch’s counterpart into hospital.

Two terms on, the Fairfield’s carpeted overnight;
we snowball the enemy, even their remonstrating
head. In assembly next morning, Butch applauds,
then rants about ‘the shame’ we’ve brought upon
our school’s ‘proud name’. His quiff stays stiff
throughout his unhinged apportioning of blame.

Matthew Paul

The Coast Guard Captain

The first thing you notice,
the rough-hewn surface
with three empty screw holes,
where the bell’s hanger clung
to the cabin of the boat,

the bell itself, once rung
with a bronze clapper
attached to a stretch of rope,
swung back and forth by
the Coast Guard Captain—

and that it rests now,
black metal silent,
near a broken mantel clock
on the bookshelf of his son,
attached to nothing

—slowly losing all memory
of having ever been in motion.

Stephen Jackson

Fuchsias

At lunch, we do not talk
about his murderous struggle
with the four leylandii,
their stumps now ground away —

as if such gestures of effacement
make it possible to think
at any moment he may step
through time, as through
the patio doors, and sit
remarking on the pair of robins,
how the colour of their breasts
is orange like the berberis
in which they perch, or on the way
the hills behind the house seem
filled with spring light, if only
he’d the words to say such things.

Instead, we focus on the dazzling
fuchsias (more your flower than his),
their heavy drooping heads.

Phil Kirby

My Grandfather Says

He likes cycling across the fell
bicycle clips hugging his trouser legs
always donning his flat cap.

He says, it is only spitting,
when it starts to rain.
Says, it will soon get o’er,
when you worry yourself silly.
Says, can’t complain,
when you ask how he is.

You watch as he cuts
honey from the frame,
the knife slicing through
honeycomb, then dropped into jam jars
honey dripping down the sides.

He gives you the knife to lick clean.
Honey his cure for every ail.

You wish you’d done more
when the years spent mining took hold,
his laboured breath at the open window.

Remembering that last time,
you took him for a drive, across the fell
down to Deerness, the sky blue, endless.

Rachel Burns

Margret Who Waits In the Falling Sky

on the grass
by the reservoir
side by side
looking up

pick a star
any one
that’s your star

focus on it long enough
the sky will fall
but don’t worry
your star will draw you up
keep you safe

just so you’ll know
wherever you go I’ll be that star
waiting in the falling sky for you

PD Lyons

Unbound

She knows a butterfly is in the oil drum.
She hears its tissue wings beat
against the steel, feels them
tearing on rust.

The creature emerges, as
magnificent as red, blue
and yellow stained glass.
It rests on the warm metal,
wings pulsing open and closed.

She watches it rise
on a sigh above bright leaves.
Her heart flits with it
skywards, glancing
down once
to her wanting body, twisted
in her chair below.

Marguerite Penny

When I phone the North East

to order another screening kit
after reaching that age, the voice
on the line is Alington House,
toddlers in backpacks, Greenwells
and loaded prams down Claypath
to cobbles around a man on a horse,

to the tunnel down into the market
for cracked eggs and boiling fowl,
always silky vintage frocks
for dancing on college lawns
after the children had gone to bed —

the voice is Doggarts, the coalman,
rainy winter days and friends too close
to keep, a long haul home up the hill.

They say we stow time in a bank
to spend itself before our eyes
the second our brakes give way —
yet all the while it’s live in a voice.

Jenny Hockey

To Blossoms Mum Grew from Rusty Paint Tins

Her answer to a zoetrope of temporary accommodation we called ‘home’ -
the flea pits, floorboards bowed at wormy joists, drab tower blocks - were
the dreame-scapes Mum painted while we slept. Wood was a bitumen edged
sonnet of black beauty, concrete spray graffitied to frame phantom rugs her
imagination cultivated over weeks, months. Scavenged paint green-fingered
the gardens of Roses and Castles, meadows and ferneries from bare patches.
Still to be neat she chalked grids, a book spine used as a slipstick ruler, tho
cherry ripe umbels, vines and knotted brambles straggled unpruned over neatish borders.
The will to create a richer canvas once resulted in the roots and branches of
a poison tree gilded in enamel that wouldn’t dry. We walked a rim of stygian
darkness for days, dared not cross the liquid centre. Mum was a true Roma,
she dwelt among untrodden ways, strew petals on paths of her own design.

Karen Downs-Barton

Footnote: This poem uses a ‘Spare Rib’ form I invented in response to anthologies that exclude female voices. The bold text are titles from A Book of English Poetry * Chaucer to Rossetti * ed. G. B. Harrison, Penguin (1983). Each ‘rib’ presents a decolonised female narrative voicing experiences outside the scope of the original text.

Moving on

The house goes quiet when the last child leaves,
no arguments and dirty clothes on floors,
but when you please yourself, who do you please?

Now they’re at Uni you no longer squeeze
between muddy kit and bike to get indoors.
The house goes quiet when the last child leaves.

You watch News or Bake-off at your ease
without those endless programme-wars.
but when you please yourself, who do you please?

An end to shouting, days of sullen freeze;
there’s nobody to nag to do those chores.
The house goes quiet when the last child leaves.

You halve your shop for biscuits, milk and cheese,
cutlery stays sorted in the kitchen drawers.
But when you please yourself, who do you please?

You thought you’d not be one who grieves
for their smiles and hugs, their groans and roars.
But the house goes quiet when the last child leaves:

when you please yourself, who do you please?

Ruth Aylett

This, at last, is the ceremony

Scarlet beads well up from a bramble scratch, and I think
about blood. Bright arterial fountains, or the thick burgundy
returning to the heart, drawn up from a vein for all the stories
it can tell. Then there is the blood between the legs,
the calendar-stain, the blood of relief, or grief.

The children were playing and fighting in pairs.
He was far off, unconcerned. Sudden pain shocked me,
halved me like an incision clean through, and I folded over.
Something seemed to break, break free, and I reached down.
I held you in my palm, warm, no bigger than a goose egg,

wrapped in red-streaked caul. Flesh of my flesh. My mouth
a silent oh. I hadn’t known, I hadn’t guessed.
What could I do? The children were fighting and playing
in pairs, he was far off, unconcerned. I whispered some words,
I whispered forgive me. And I flushed you away.

Forgive me. What else could I do? But still, after all these years
a kind of endometriosis, a patch of crimson velvet
lodged in my mind, where you start to root, then stop.
Always stop. And I remember, I remember you
and I remember who you might have been.

Jane Pearn

Contributors

Ruth Aylett lives and works in Edinburgh. Her poetry has been widely published in magazines both online and in print, and in anthologies. Her pamphlets Pretty in Pink (4Word) and Queen of Infinite Space (Maytree) were published in 2021. For more see https://ruthaylett.org

Paul Brough is a Yorkshire based illustrator. You can see more of his artwork here

Rachel Burns has been published in literary magazines including The Rialto, Magma, Atrium, and Ink Sweat & Tears. She won the Bylines Sky Hawkins Poetry Prize in 2025. Her first poetry collection is forthcoming from Broken Sleep Books later this year.

Karen Downs-Barton is a neurodiverse writer from a multiracial, working-class background. Her collection, Minx, is published by Penguin and her pamphlet, Didicoy, Smith|Doorstop, was a Poetry Book Society recommendation. Her poems have featured on Radio 4’s The Verb, at Ledbury Poetry and Edinburgh International Book Festivals, and are widely anthologised.

Jenny Hockey is a Sheffield poet and retired anthropologist who has received a New Poets Award from New Writing North. Her collection Going to bed with the moon was published by Oversteps Book. She reviews regularly for Orbis magazine and, with Carol Komaromy, has published a memoir of family life and war (familyhistoryandwar.com). jennyhockeypoetry.co.uk

Stephen Jackson is a working-class poet who lives in the US Pacific Northwest. His poems appear in numerous magazines, journals, and anthologies, with more recent work in fourteen poems, Prairie Fire, the International Human Rights Art Movement anthology, A Human Voice, and the Washington State Queer Poetry Anthology.

Phil Kirby’s collections are Watermarks, The Third History and a chapbook, Towards A Theory of Being Human. Work also recently appeared in Sampler Two from Mariscat Press. Poems in Acumen, Poetry Birmingham, Poetry Ireland, Stand, amongst others. Writing as P.K. Kirby, a teen novella, Hidden Depths, is on Kindle.

PD Lyons was born and raised in the USA but since 1998 has resided in Ireland. Has worked as dishwasher, floor washer, textile mill labourer, construction worker, pesticide sprayer, fire safety inspector, toy shop manager, substance abuse councillor, and women’s shoe shop manager - currently cutting grass in a small medieval village in Co. Westmeath Ireland. Lyons published poetry collections by Lapwing Press, Belfast and erbacce Press and was the winner of the annual erbacce press International Poetry Competition for 2019.

Matthew Paul hails from South London and lives in South Yorkshire. His second poetry collection, The Last Corinthians, was published by Crooked Spire Press in 2025, following The Evening Entertainment (Eyewear Publishing, 2017). He is also the author of two haiku collections and regularly reviews for The Friday Poem. www.matthewpaulpoetry.blog

Jane Pearn’s poetry has appeared in several magazines including Brittle Star, Spelt, Obsessed with Pipework, and Ink, Sweat & Tears. She has been longlisted twice in the National Poetry Competition, and in The Rialto Nature and Place competition. Her third collection, Picking Up Signals, was published in January 2025.

Marguerite Penny lives on the edge of a Yorkshire moor. She is the guardian of a small but busy garden with many and diverse inhabitants and visitors who endlessly enrich her life and to whom she is deeply grateful.

All contributors retain copyright of their work.

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I haven’t produced a newsletter for a while and as there isn’t a regular or special issue of The Fig Tree in June I thought I’d let you all know what’s happening at The Fig Tree and Crooked Spire Press.

Firstly, if you haven’t signed up, book your seat at the online launch of David Harmer’s excellent pamphlet Before It’s Too Late. You can reserve your free place, and get the Zoom link, at https://www.tickettailor.com/events/crookedspirepress/2211236

The in-person launch in Doncaster last Saturday (23rd May) filled the room, with excellent readings by David, Alison Stark, Lisa Falshaw and Mike O’Brien. The book is available to buy online in the shop for just £6 + P&P.

We had some excellent submissions for the 1926 General Strike Special Issue and they are now with Guest Editor Nick Allen. Submissions for the online issue (new poems) are closed, but if you have a relevant published poem, or song lyrics, please send them and we’ll take a look for the printed anthology. The Special Issue will be published on the website on 1st August, and the book will follow later in the year.

The Women’s Poetry Anthology is taking shape and will go into print later in June. There will be an online launch in July (date to be confirmed), with a series of smaller related events to follow. If you want to host an event based on the theme of women’s poetry, or poetry about women, we can support it in-person, or online, or just by publicising it. Go to crookedspire.com for contact details. Thanks again to Guest Editors Susan Darlington and Stephanie Bowgett, with special thanks to Julia Deakin for writing the Foreword.

On Saturday 18th July, we have a special reading event at the Unitarian Church in Doncaster when Ed Reiss will read from his new work Stakeknife. There will be three other guest readers - more details to follow.

We have a number of projects in the pipeline, including one that is not linked solely to poetry, and I am reviewing a number of options for books for 2027. Before that, Ian Parks and I are closing in on completion of two similar projects that have been in gestation, separately, for many years. I can’t reveal the precise details yet, but we are hoping to launch and promote them at the same time, probably in October.

Issues 15 and 16 of The Fig Tree are full, which means that only the issue in November has spaces this year. I may put submissions in hiatus over the summer - please check on the Fig Tree Submissions page before you send anything to check if that is the case. I’ll still acknowledge the submission, but you may face a long delay before any full response.

Finally, if you are in Doncaster (at The Brewery Tap) on Saturday, 20th June I will be the MC for a reading by Mick Jenkinson from his latest book with guests Ian Parks and Sarah Wimbush. Ian and Mick are also reading at the Retford Book Festival on Friday 12th June.

That’s all for now - consider subscribing (if you haven’t already) and get our webzines and news straight to your inbox. Have a great summer.

Tim

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Welcome to issue fourteen of The Fig Tree.

This issue’s Featured Poet is Steve Ely, whose powerful poetry and presence have been appreciated by poetry lovers on the page and in performance. His subject matter is wide ranging and sometimes eclectic, but there is always a strong social or political message running through his many collections.

This year sees the 100th Anniversary of the General Strike, which ran from May 3rd to May 12th 1926 and was a watershed moment in UK Union history. To commemorate this, the Fig Tree and Crooked Spire Press are creating a Special Issue, and possible printed anthology. Submissions open on May 3rd and the initial window will close on May 12th (the dates of the Strike). The remit is wider than just that Strike - more information is on the special submissions page on the Fig Tree site.

The Strike was not a success from a Union perspective. It failed in its goals and also ushered in a new Act of Parliament that prohibited sympathy strikes and mass picketing, but also forced “opting in” to Labour party contributions. This blatant act of political sabotage wasn’t questioned - other donations didn’t require the explicit approval of customers or even shareholders. Attlee’s government repealed the 1927 Act in 1946 but it was reinstated (effectively) by the Tories in the 1990s. It took until 2006 before companies had to get shareholder approval for political donations. The ripples of the Strike and its aftermath are felt 100 years later.

The 2024 Fig Tree Anthology is sold out but the 2025 Fig Tree Anthology is now available.

In March we hosted Coal Anthology readings in Garforth, near Leeds, and Ashington in Northumberland. They were fantastic afternoons of poetry and stories recalling the mining industry and communities. Thanks to Jordan Senior at Garforth Library and to the Woodhorn Museum for providing venues and to Greg Freeman for doing the local co-ordination in Northumberland. Pictures from the events are available over at the Crooked Spire Press website.

Other venues are in the pipeline – if you want to host us at a venue or poetry group near you, send us an email.

Thanks once again to Paul Brough for the artwork.

Once again I hope you enjoy reading this issue as much as I did collating it. You are joining over 600 people who are reading the webzine on a regular basis.

Tim Fellows, Editor

Contributors: Sally Baker, Andrew Barnes, Tracy Dawson, Steve Ely, F.J. Godwyn, Angi Holden, Matthew Paul, John Short, Mel Tibbs, Rod Whitworth, Marjory Woodfield and Paul Brough.

The Fig Tree Featured Poet – Steve Ely

Two Poems from ‘The Melun Diptych’

Virgo Lactans

Shhh! The child has moved his finger from his lips
and is pointing to the curtain, alerting his mother,
who nevertheless continues to gaze
on the globe of her perfect exposed breast
that glistens with milk like sperm: meretrix lactans,
Hoor-
pa-kraat. It is how they snare a man, a King—
for only he may have her. Wasted on the boy
and man alike. The cherubim and seraphim
are scarlet, blue and swole. O daughter of Babylon,
happy shall he be that rewardeth thee,
that taketh thy little one and dasheth him with the rock.

Steve Ely

Acheuléen

Étienne, resting his tool on the lamb of his missal,
before wielding the weapon like homo erectus—clap, clap, clap:
the Grecians are not neglected in the daily ministration.
There were Giants in the earth in those days,
crushing the skulls of mastodons with cordiform biface axes,
and wiving australopithecines—before smashing their delicate
monkey’s foreheads and slurping inferior brain.
Stephen—the servant of his Lord, in whose name
he has performed many miracles and wonders—
confounding the Jewes of the Libertine Shul
with the Petrine key which is his Master’s warrant.
The Saint’s consoling hand. How he would ride
the little red filly and ravish the flesh of the lamb.

Steve Ely

The Melun Diptych is a 1452 painting by the French artist Jean Fouquet. The painting, commissioned by Étienne Chevalier, treasurer to the French king Charles VII, depicts Chevalier and his namesake and patron saint, St. Stephen, gazing at the Virgin as she bares her breast so the Christ-child might suckle, a type of Madonna and Child known as a Virgo Lactans. At Chevalier’s request, Fouquet painted the Virgin in the likeness of the king’s favourite mistress, Agnès Sorel, who had died two years earlier, aged 28. In life, the beautiful and spirited Agnès had scandalised court and church by wearing clothing that that revealed her breasts, a fashion then taking hold among high status women. ‘Virgo Lactans’ and ‘Acheuléen’ are extracted from a five poem improvisation based on the painting, which may be viewed, with contextual information, here:

https://www.smb.museum/en/exhibitions/detail/jean-fouquet-the-melun-diptych/.

Sext: Adoration of the Magi

They found the child with Mary his mother
and falling down they adored him. Matthew 2.11

August noon, seventy-nine. Short-cutting
from the res through waist high barley,
going home for sausage and chips.
I was singing Showaddywaddy, for no
particular reason; re-member, re-re-remember,
re-member, re-re-remember, re-member,
re-re-remember… then! The long mile home,
toes stubbed in too small Adidas Kick, socks snagging
in goosegrass, sun hitting like a plank
through my T-shirt’s thin cotton, the straps
of my fishing box and shouldered rod,
rubbing my clavicles raw: re-member, re-re-remember
re-member, re-re-remember – THEN! crouched before me,
frozen massive in its form, the Grandad Hare,
staring me backwards with geoluread
terrified eyes. At Easter we flushed him
from Thyssen’s field and lost him over the Green Hills;
last summer, we harried him from Frickley
to Burntwood, before cornering him on the Common,
where Trampus tripped and bowled him over,
then lost his sight in East Haigh’s scrub. Now, frozen
in the moment, eye-to-eye once more. The barley shook
and he vanished, rippling the crop like wind,
fleeing straight into the mouths of Chris Slatter’s
serendipitous deerhound-lurchers,
taking their morning constitutional,
which swerving and striking, coursed him tight
to the Carr Lane tunnel, nailing him in the lupin field
behind Pat Nicholson’s house: where we gathered
and marvelled, bikes and fishing tackle dumped
where we dropped them, at the bloody corpse
of the ancient lepus, ‘big as a labrador’,
and the grinning gazehounds that finally
brought him down.

Steve Ely

Sext: Adoration of the Magi was first published in Oswald’s Book of Hours (Smokestack, 2013)

Steve Ely has written several books of poetry, including Oswald’s Book of Hours, Englaland, Lectio Violant, Eely and Orasaigh. He’s also written a novel, Ratmen, and a biographical work, Ted Hughes’s South Yorkshire: Made in Mexborough. He’s also written a number of journal articles about Hughes’s work. White Pony, a collaboration with the artist Alan Parker based on Goethe’s poem The Erl-King will be published by Shearsman Books later this year. He’s just finished a novel, Black Mantis, and is about to embark on a new poetic project - The Hie Places.

The Fig Tree Selection – May 2026

This section features up to ten poems, with a maximum of one per poet per issue.

it has taken years

this forgiveness, this sense of calm arriving
like autumn heralded by the distant thrum
of a flight of geese, ribboned across the sky.

Its peace drops as softly as a Shetland shawl
draped across shoulders bared to a chill wind.
I smell its perfume: gingerbread and gardenia,
my mother’s scent bottle, cut glass
on the polished surface of her dressing table.
I taste its slow ice-cream melt on my tongue.

I bear witness to this moment,
this letting go of suppressed anger,
feel no pain from her resentment.

Before long there will be the sharp bite
of winter, its freezing intake of breath,
the drawing of curtains, the closing of doors.
But she is beyond hurting me now.
Soon there will be blossom on the cherry trees.

Angi Holden

Joe’s Blues

The black fog would wrap him,
smothering his easy charm,
filling his eyes with nightmare.
We’d shy away,
not wanting to share the harm.

Rod Whitworth

Summer Survival

The aroma of wild mint after rain
a blackbird pipes his fluid song
as I weed the garden patio, then
comes a robin with her flash of red.
She used to be a Christmas bird
but all is upside down these days.
Streetwise seagulls claiming roofs
have arrived to forage inland,
confident nothing will challenge.
Seems it’s the law of brawn
in this summer survival scene
but the robin positions close to me
alert for worms I might unearth,
perched on compost, pecking ants.

John Short

The Jackdaw

Open like a book on the path,
its wings could be read
like scriptures.

Head turned, dull eye gazing
across the estuary.
Already its feathers,

dark as nigella seeds,
absorbed the sun
drinking in heat as well as light.

It looked as if it had been placed:
an offering or warning,
desire path bending

around its hollow body.
Lying there, a supplicant,
in some dimension it was flying

discovering the wind.
Of all the dead birds
I have passed, seen and unseen,
this one lives the longest.

Mel Tibbs

Rehearsing a tight ten

I have something I must say now,
but I don’t really know what it is.
It scratches at my surface, trapped.

Trying hard to hone the set,
scripting the part where I extemporise,
wondering exactly where to stand.

I watch old videos, film snippets,
in the hope that some obscure aspect
will chime, invade me by osmosis.

I don’t know why anyone would come
to hear this, much less read the lines
that I tap out so very late at night.

But I’m compelled to be here, to brush
lips with the mic in a fleeting kiss,
delaying a return to tonight’s single room.

I draw on disappointment and an archive
of the classic acts, from Groucho via Emo
from George Carlin to Bill Hicks,

falling short of all of them, mistaking
honesty for self-worth, laughter for value,
held in awe of a character for the times,

a satirist, master of comment, important
in a moment of history, but to be honest,
Lenny Bruce was never really that funny,

and neither am I.

Andrew Barnes

Automobiles and Samothrace

A landfill of cold wet trembling chins
Rides along the M1 highway
With sputtering, coughing motors for mouths
Finding, like a tic tac in a dustbin,
A moment to cry on their commute.

Look to the pretty house, the pretty garden
Receding behind, coming up in front;
Those empty hallways will never meet
Those sad slow feet that traipse around a world
Forgotten by you, after it first forgot you.

A tear-stained shirt collar caught on the CCTV
Watches a soul slough into a fleshy beast
And it gurgles and wobbles and moves like the sea
Wearing the slimy veneer of steel,
Rattling over each pebble in the road.

Look to the leather hands in front
Look to the rubber feet below
Bite the box that beats you
Feel the junkyard in your veins
And the collapsing crane inside your heart.

Then pull the paroxysm back into place,
Dissolve into wet plastic eyelashes
Feel the impersonal hug from a smiling seatbelt
And tie your heart’s shoelace into a loose overhand knot,
As the clock waits for you to fall in.

F.J. Godwyn

The Visitor

One man watches like an audience
for a Channel 4 docudrama.

The visitor raises his hand, expectant
as an entitled influencer on TikTok.

Another unexpected mouth to feed.
Un-minted spuds, boiling hot, let off steam –

swirling. The girl glows in the poor light
of a dead-flame paraffin lamp which warms

a discontented winter. She knows
this bowl won’t feed five let alone five thousand.

Two old women drab-dressed by charity
shop surplus don’t rock the vintage look.

They’re still hoping for miracles
but in reality, expect less.

After working two jobs the peasant
was last in line at the food bank.

He took the last of the potato harvest.
Let us pray the crops won’t fail this year.

Tracy Dawson

Edward

I like to think we met on the beach
between Dunwich and Walberswick

he with pockets full of pebbles, a skull,
a champagne cork, a strand of dried seaweed

me with my fake amber necklace
and rattling hagstones.

He’s wearing a creased linen suit,
says he’s staying in Coastguard Cottage

on the heath by the sea. He points
in the vague direction across reeds,

to where I once saw an egret,
an old man’s ghost in marshland.

But I know he imagines me one of the locals
who never look up from their dull work,

who’s never absently rubbed an artemisia leaf
and thought about death.

Instead, he met Hope, young and wild
as a sea bird, a good listener.

I was always drawn to sadness she said
as the sky’s slow gold dipped over the sea.

Sally Baker

Ghazal for the Earth

In Singapore we keep our classes inside for lunch because of the haze.
Across the causeway, men are burning rainforests. Changing the earth.

I split my pomegranate in two, take out blood-red seeds.
For just six of these, winter visited the earth.

We pitch tents in the Empty Quarter, Rub’al Khali. Sky full of stars.
Hands outstretched as they fall to earth.

She named the baby Atlas. We gave them a picture of Atlas holding the earth.
That’s a name to live up to, my husband says.

It rises above the moon’s stark horizon.
Distant earth.

I planted a clematis called Marjorie. This morning I watch pīwakawaka
hop among leaves. Fanned tail feathers black as earth.

Marjory Woodfield

Footnote

The piwakawaka, or fantail, is a native New Zealand bird known for its beautiful fanned tail and sociable manner.

St John’s Hill

Heaven only knows how my friends and I rustled up
melamine tea-trays and a London-bus-red toboggan,
handmade and painted by Darren Paxton’s Uncle Pip.
Time and again, we bombed headlong to the bottom
and piled in the blue, immaculate snow like kamikaze
pilots, all ends up, as though for Ski Sunday’s cameras.

The fun lasted as long as it took for my woolly mittens
to get sopping. The hill ran down from the churchyard
where, decades later, locum vicar Moira stood itching
to go while a bitter squall out of nowhere bit us hard,
just as I tipped my atheist dad’s bony ashes in the hole.
The Saturday before lockdown saw the same rigmarole

for my churchy mum: still acting up, Moira murmured
prayers; the wind dropped; we elbow-bumped; I poured.

Matthew Paul

Contributors

Sally Baker is a poet, workshop tutor and occasional reviewer. Her pamphlet, Ragwort, was runner-up in the 2025 Poetry Business International Book & Pamphlet Competition

Andrew Barnes is steadily building a reputation in the UK Midlands poetry scene through performance (eg. BBC upload, Happy Heart, Verve open mic), and through publication (including Orbis #207, The Cannon’s Mouth, The Recusant, Solihull Sonnets, Pushing out the boat, Dark Poets club, Obsessed with Pipework, Poetry Salzburg and others) - https://www.andrewbarnespoetry.co.uk/

Paul Brough is a Yorkshire based illustrator. You can see more of his artwork here

Tracy Dawson lives in Yorkshire, she is a Read to Write poet and has had poems published in several anthologies.

F. J. Godwyn is a 23 year old recent graduate from Doncaster. He has, bravely (or brashly), just quit a copywriting job in marketing to pursue creative writing. He is currently getting involved in local poetry groups.

Angi Holden is a retired lecturer. She has been writing most of her life, most recently at a desk so covered in leaves and feathers collected by her grandchildren that it resembles a nature table.

Matthew Paul hails from South London and lives in South Yorkshire. His second poetry collection, The Last Corinthians, was published by Crooked Spire Press in 2025, following The Evening Entertainment (Eyewear Publishing, 2017). He is also the author of two haiku collections and regularly reviews for The Friday Poem. www.matthewpaulpoetry.blog

John Short lives in Lydiate, Lancashire after a previous life in southern Europe. Recently published in Black Nore and Littoral Magazine he has produced a book of travel stories and four collections of poetry. The most recent is In Search of a Subject (Cerasus 2023).

Mel Tibbs lives in South Devon. Her poetry has recently appeared in Bad Lilies, IS&T and 14 Magazine and is forthcoming in Clarion and been longlisted by Mslexia and both the Fish and The Plough Poetry Prizes. She is working on her debut pamphlet about the experience of living in 17 different houses before the age of 21.

Rod Whitworth, was born in Ashton-under-Lyne in 1943 and has done a number of jobs including teaching maths (for 33 years) and conducting traffic censuses (the job that kept him on the streets). He now lives in the Garden City (aka Oldham) and is still tyrannised by commas.

Marjory Woodfield's home city is Christchurch, New Zealand, but she's also lived in Asia and the Middle East. Her writing’s appeared in a range of places, from Saudi Arabia and Singapore, to England, America and New Zealand; in literary journals such as Ōrongohau | Best New Zealand Poems, The Pomegranate London, Acumen, Orbis; and anthologies such as Pale Fire (Frogmore Press) Best Small Fictions (Sonder Press) and Fuego (World Congress of Poets Literary Journal).

All contributors retain copyright of their work.

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Welcome to this second of two special issues of The Fig Tree, consisting of poems submitted by women. The response was amazing, both in quantity and quality, which made the job of selecting a very difficult and lengthy process. My thanks go to Stephanie Bowgett and Susan Darlington for selecting almost all the poems, after I had selected theirs, and to Charlotte Holm for the beautiful custom-made image. After lengthy discussions the editorial team selected Maureen Jivani as the Featured Poet, chosen from the entries submitted.

I won’t keep you any longer – enjoy this fabulous and diverse collection of women’s voices.

Tim Fellows

Guest Editors: Stephanie Bowgett and Susan Darlington

Artwork: Charlotte Holm

Poets: Anne Bailey, Sally Baker, Jude Brigley, Sally Brisley, Rachel Burns, Susan Darlington, Janet Dean, Kimneet Kaur Dhatt, Martha Ellen, Sarah James, Maureen Jivani, Helen Kay, Louise Longson, Marie Papier, Christine Partridge, Jane Sharp, Alison Stark, Hannah Stone, Maria Taylor, Rowena Warwick and June Wentland.

The Fig Tree Featured Poet – Maureen Jivani

Annie Dunn

dressed as Gandhi, entered
a fancy-dress competition,
Bootle Liverpool 1944.

Widow-thin as she was
my great gran charmed
the judge as the town’s best laugh –

her prize, a basket of brisket,
fed all her kids
for a barrage of days –

and how fiercely she blazed:
stolen coals beneath her khadi
hauling sweat to her brow.

Maureen Jivani

Great Auntie Mary

owned the Singer
that made the purply-green

two-tone, box-jacket trouser suit
I wore to a wedding
when I was eight.

Her daughters, rocked
that church-hall dance floor:
such pretty flamingos.

My mother said,
Your cousins did well:
Jane married a doctor

Sally, a dentist.
She couldn’t recall their names.

Maureen Jivani

Great Uncle George

who we were never
to ask about the war

could throw a penny

and catch it on his elbow.

He would tell us jokes
in his froggy voice

palming the hole
in his throat while he spoke.

How we laughed, mesmerised. Terrified.
Never once getting the punchlines.

Maureen Jivani

Maureen Jivani’s Insensible Heart (2009) Mulfran Press was shortlisted for The London New Poetry Award 2010. She has a pamphlet: My Shinji Noon (2010) Mulfran Press. She is published in magazines in the UK, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand and USA. Her work has been published in Alba, Ink Sweat and Tears, Orbis, Poetry Worth Hearing, Strix, The Alchemy Spoon, The Friday Poem, The High Window, Scintilla, Seminary Ridge Review, Time Haiku Journal, Under the Radar, Wales Haiku Journal, and several anthologies. She has an MPhil in Writing from The University of South Wales. She took part in XX Women’s Writing Festival Wales 2014. Individual poems have won first place in Brighton Fringe Poetry Competition. Kingston Poetry Competition, Sefton Poetry Competition, Wrexham Poetry Competition. Individual poems have been short-listed and anthologised in The Berkshire Poetry Prize, and P.H.R.A.S Open Poetry Competition. Her poem for children: ‘Sleepy Monster’ is studied on the curriculum in Australian and South Asian schools.

The Fig Tree Selection - Women’s Poetry

Bonhams, Lot 345: Child’s Nursery Elbow Chair

(The chair, auctioned in March 2018, was decorated by Sylvia Plath)

The chair is lost. Void of purpose.
Its eggshell hearts spurt blood

through lean spindles. Its poppies
droop down a shell that’s blue

for the scuff of plimsoled feet;
the patina of wear from hands

that delight in wormy mud. Its seat -
three balls of wool (freshly washed) -

bound to be woven into a solid
space to hold a candlestick boy.

Susan Darlington

Jim

Newly arrived, he unpacks in a damp bedroom,
uneasy hellos on fry-up smelling stairs
with folk of knuckled fists. He makes his way
to an oily yard to read his mother’s letter
and exhales short-lived clouds of breath.

Back indoors for brekkie, eggs and burnt toast
with Tea-leaf, Cosh and Smart-Arse.
                Mornin’ what’s yer name.
He hides his air mail post and packs away summer
in the breast-hoard of his longing.

At work, the gaffer calls him Jim. A kindness,
to help the lad fit right in. Clock punched. Overalls on.
His mother’s handwriting, Dimitri, my beloved son,
balled up in the warmth of his top left pocket.

Maria Taylor

Gulliver unbound

After I’d been lying on a slab
for weeks like a pig
fed on corn and cabbage

they began to yield
let go of my left foot
a leg an arm my torso –
a stronghold
in their Lilliputian view.

Freed, I could cause a tsunami,
turn their small island
into smithereens.

But I learned to be patient,
grateful for their food, to value
their politeness and care.

When the last rope was gone,
I stood on my feet, no taller
than they were, looking at the world
through their small shrewd eyes.

Marie Papier

With apologies to W Carlos Williams

‘This is just to say’

I have used
your vintage pillowcases
until they became
no more than rags

you were saving them
for best,
because they have
embroidered borders

forgive me
the best is now, and
they were so soft and cool
beneath my face

Hannah Stone

Messages from Bonnyrigg

Always glam, a looker,
well put together,
Mina promenaded into town
each mid-morning for her messages,

lipstick on,
a powder dab or two,
flaking just a touch,
perhaps her treasured pearls,

down to the still-modern precinct shops,
from their pebbledash two bed,
single-glazed panorama
down the sweep of Broomieknowe,

bin round the back by the garages
in six foot square flagged yard,
where she’d enjoy a blether
with that young lassie from upstairs,

through the estate softened by years
of tended rock gardens draped with alyssum,
shaded by the weeping of willow
and tight apple trees,

out onto the main road
she strode past the high stone walls
of the big houses to the right,
the Lasswade folk she didn’t know.

I don’t know when I asked, or why,
what led her to proclaim
she’d never let the contents of her bag
be seen as she returned,

it wouldn’t do
to let the neighbours glimpse
what brand of cornflakes
they consumed at number twenty two,

what messages she brought home,
head held high,
cheekbones sharp,
hair just so.

Alison Stark

The Boys in Year Ten 

The boys outside the school are busy escaping their childhoods,
everything about their stance says attitude. All sass, all swagger,
trousers skim ankles, scuffed shoes, ties barely knotted, 
blazers dotted with stains, they wait for the last of the gang, ready 
to leave the pink of the afternoon, the streak of an early moon 
as it wanes over the silver roofed tech block, falls behind the labs.

In the alleyway the smallest boy lights up, passes the smoke,
a red tipped jostle in the narrow path between graffitied fences,
a cloud of weed smothers sweaty skin until a ball appears,
is kicked between them, whacks the wall hard, bounces back 
to be smacked again. Ahead of them a snaggle of girls, short skirts 
knee socks, their blouses weathering the strain of changing bodies.

The boys catch sight, catch up, all nonchalance and accidental elbows.
The girls ignore them for phones and chatter, don’t give in to banter.
In town they steal sweets, slouch on corners, sneak another fag, until 
one by one they peel off for tea, to video games, schoolwork and chores.

Back home they fill rooms, ooze from sofas, slide under bedroom doors,
tell their mums everything’s boring, or tell them nothing at all.

Rowena Warwick

The Wireless Museum

Homemade crystal sets
               Note how coils are wound
               on cotton reels
               and a cigar box
Never a smoker               dad loved flying

Success depends on the touch
of a cat’s whisker and finding
a good spot
but vibrations easily result in loss of signal
Whole sentences are rare these days

A spy’s unique vanity case
An experimental wire-less
His radio on its shelf
Call sign Gulf 3 Papa Romeo Romeo
Absence clothed in dust and spider’s webs

Both hands are needed
there is no wave change switch for time
His circuits are no longer integrated and
he won’t remember when I tell him
what I saw at the wireless museum

Christine Partridge

Some turn to vinegar

Now it is winter she drinks
only red wine

holds a glass

up against a cloudfiltered sun
peers into its rubygarnet depths

noses at its richspiced fruit

earthiness
pepperscented with cinnamonclove

breathes its forestfloor fungal fullness
tastes velvetoak on her tongue

remembers honeygreen summers

the acid sweetness of whiteflowers
the dry angular elegance

of him—

how his light body
balanced her robust ageing
but – too young – lacking complexity

blandness turned to acid
when left out
too long
in the open air

the finish was sour – the bite
of hard minerals and stone

Now

it is winter she drinks
red wine
alone.

Louise Longson

my German grandmother

i could sit there
for a long time
my gruff silent German
grandmother sewing
on the treadle machine
her feet moving in
rhythm peaceful cadence
is she humming?

i spin around over
the floor heating grate
my dress billows
she doesn’t scold me

i pick all the tiger
lilies i can find and
bring them to her
i find them upside
down in the garbage
and pretend not to see

Martha Ellen

My grandmother taught me to knit

Even though she could hardly knit
herself, I can’t, I’d say. Her reply always the same.
There is no such word as can’t.

She taught me to cast on and cast off.
I knitted a web of red and pink
barely resembling a scarf,
full of dropped stitches and holes.

Grandmother told me
she worked in a bomb factory
and was terrified – one mistake and boom!

Grandmother, a housekeeper
for the local priest, until she married
my grandfather a miner.

Everyone in Esh Winning, a miner.
Sometimes I think I should
teach my daughter to knit
or crochet, but the sewing kits
are gathering dust, the knitting
needles still in the box.

The old black Singer on the
mantlepiece, gold leaf songbird
and wild rose fading, along
with my grandmother’s name,
scratched into its dirt.

Rachel Burns

Choti Choti Khushiyan

That’s what she said
As she pulled out
A bag of Bombay mix from her handbag
Ready to share
A huge smile across her face
Even as the Brit in me declined
She tipped it into my hand
Told me to enjoy
That’s a feeling of pure love
I’d forgotten
It’s been so long
Since I wasn’t asked but told
A gesture filled with love
That I am transported
To moments where life felt so out of control
But at their house
I could put it all down
At their house
I was safe to be a child again
Safe to be loved unconditionally
Regardless of age
In that house
I was permitted rest
And security
To be me
However complex that was
Because just showing up as me
Was enough to deserve love
So it starts with an offer
Of Bombay mix
And ends with a life
Filled with small, small joys

Kimneet Kaur Dhatt

The summer before

Even the tide takes tattered snapshots of what it’s seen
and where it’s been; on the sand, mirror fragments
of blue sky and drifting clouds, cliffs and lighthouse.

This golden space stretches for days and miles.
Their toddler years’ paddling and splashing, progression
from piggy in the middle to handball and stick cricket.

The laughter more than the scowls of ice-cream falling
from cones like stumped wickets. Now it’s nearly over,
I want more. For it not to be our last family summer.

Flies mist the dunes. We chart our way through traces
of others’ visits: dented castle mounds, collapsed moats,
scratched initials and patterns made with shells

the sea has emptied – like a salty album of our past trips.
Part-buried pieces of storm-struck timber scissor-blade
the beach’s paper in a game with no rules, no winners,

only flotsam and litter. The sun’s shadows jigsaw
our faces. At our feet, the marks we’ll leave
to be washed away as time plays on here without us.

My younger son throws a frisbee for his brother
to catch. He misses; the plastic circle disappears
into the waves, and sinks beyond reach.

Sarah James

On Days When I Run Barefoot in the Street

Mum lifts me to the pink Formica sideboard,
wipes my minnow toes with a soft flannel.
It feels as if the feet beneath the foam
are no longer part of me, are now
their own watery selves, ticklish, mischievous.

Mum declares they are my best feature.
I wonder if the teachers should know that.
She wipes away mud and grit. I picture Gran
with permanganate-dyed skin and Dad’s
pared corns. Will my pretty feet grow into that?

Almost biblical, Mum lifts me down.
A soft towel pats dry my thin pink skin.
She smiles that distant smile that grown-ups do.
Look after your feet, she whispers,
they let you walk away; they let you run.

Helen Kay

The Birthday Cakes

The first was a Disney Castle.
You couldn’t get fondant icing
back then, I made it myself
and added the colour.

The Teddy Bears Picnic was next,
perfectly sculpted little brown bears
sitting in a wood by a lake,
I stayed up until 1 am for that one.

There was a Train, a Swimming Pool
with a diving board, a Zoo,
a Bowling Alley in later years.
The cakes were themed on the party.

The Bowling Alley was
the last one I did,
they were too old after that.
That’s the thing about young children

you want to somehow keep
them alive, year after year
as if the cakes would not be eaten
as if the photos would not fade

Anne Bailey

Burden

In an effort to deter
young girls from getting pregnant
they were issued
with a bag of sugar –
a surrogate baby –
to lug around each day.

These sweet encumbrances
were a mixed blessing –
holding temptation inside their paper –
dangers of obesity and rotting teeth.

It was the girls at greatest risk
who found it most difficult
to relinquish the package
once the week was over –

the bowl of the Silver Spoon logo
looking up like a little face.

It was something to do with absence.
It was something to do with love.

June Wentland

The Backflip

                                  In our navy-blue leotards, 
bare feet on gym mats, on polished parquet
in the hall where we have assembly, school dinners,
country dancing and jumble sales, we girls are 
practising for BAGA badges. 
                                 In air fragrant with floor wax, 
cabbage, plimsolls, powder paint and sugar paper, 
I learn to backflip between two friends who are already 
better than me, sturdy, encouraging, one each side, 
ready to catch me if I fall. 
                                 Arms outstretched, I tip my head,
gaze at the ceiling of stars and fluorescent strips,
bend my knees, ready to dream myself upwards 
and backwards in a somersault, propelled by light, 
rushing towards summer, dust motes suspended
and for a moment airborne, weightless, held in time.
                                 Later, I learn to leave the earth 
in other ways, to leave my body, to lose myself.     

Sally Baker

Life Lessons for Little Girls

Your lips learned early about obligation 
swept off your feet    up high      kissed 
by tobacco-whiskered uncles   tickled helpless    
gasping      presumed to be liking it 
because you were laughing  

A kiss    it turned out      was the expectation
of any neighbour or relation 
who fumbled fingers through your hair    
then handed you the sweet or sixpence     
they had found behind your ear
no matter that you wished they had left it there 

held beneath your arms  by relatives    you barely knew 
who spun you out    a future    without the option to say no
Swarfega hands   on Old Spice laps   you didn’t trust 
taught you   to be uncomfortable   but acquiesce
be good       smile        not make a fuss

Sally Brisley

Elderly Prima Gravida

Thank god my mother was dead before
I had my son illegitimately. When I rang
to tell her she would have taken a sharp breath,
her eyes pricked with sudden tears,
her mind on her father’s belt, the one he
would wield if she brought shame on him;
but when I’d said of course I’d keep it,
I’m thirty-one, Mam, I might not have
another chance, I would have heard her exhale
letting out the sour breath of her life.

Now I commit to imagine her smiling,
wishing me well. She is asking when I might
come home, just for the weekend. I am sure
she has left the phone half off its cradle
as she searches for her needles and a spare
ball of wool at the back of the dresser.

Janet Dean

ENVOY

On the path between the grave yard
and the school for modern girls, I fancy 
I hear the whispers of all the poems 

women did not write. Those who came
from farmyard and serving hall, to observe 
their places - carrying a washboard, a sewing 

machine, boxes of seeds, travelling to 
new lands with never a space between cooking, 
just sweeping, rocking, making do.

Sometimes with a shawl wrapped
around an infant, nursing on the doorstop,
time stilled; they noticed clouds stealthing 

over Pwll yr Iuech or a dandelion pushing 
through masonry at Mrs. Evan’s sad house; 
or when the tamping rain, spilling

into drains with gulps of air, swallowed up
leaves; or when the snow fell they shivered, 
seeing the baby’s hair gleam at the coal’s

glow. But never a word to fix an epiphany
of living, no numbers chalked on walls ,
no lines twisted to rhythmic shapes. 

Walking with my collar up, I hear their
voices, defiant and pleading, soft in 
the twilight with unspoken longing -
Choose me, make sure to tell of my 
                                                       unwritten poetry.

Jude Brigley

Towards the end…

she catches sight of herself
as she goes through a tunnel
on the train to Leeds, for chemo.

She catches sight of herself
in the shop window.

She catches sight of herself
in the fitting room at Marks and Spencer’s
while she waits for the assistant to size up
what’s left of her disappearing breasts.

At home she catches sight of herself
in the cherub encrusted bathroom mirror,
a crystal flute in hand. She sips champagne,
imagines red toes, white bathrobes.
Sings: All of me, why not take all of me…
She crosses her arms about her shoulders,
hears her frame click as she hunches over the bath –
gold asp-head taps – milk, and honey, and that.

In the steam is a wavy mirage of someone
she once knew, naked, bodyless, passing through.

The pit of her stomach sucks air,
opaque skin hangs from child-sized bones –
a puppet with loose strings flop-folds cold flesh.

She takes a breath – diminished, tired,
bruised as a fallen apple after the picking,
her nipples like black pips spit onto white plates.

She abandons her wig,
raises her glass,
catches sight of herself
in the ice bucket as she runs a bath,
and she laughs.

She pulls the plug,
catches sight of herself in the water
as it disappears down the plughole,

whispers, Hasta la vista, Baby!
It’s been good to know you!
And she laughs!

And she laughs! And she laughs! And she laughs!

Jane Sharp

Contributors

Anne Bailey’s work has been widely published in journals. She is a committee member for ‘Café Writers’ organising live poetry events in Norwich and on Zoom. Her pamphlet ‘What the House Taught Us’ was published in 2021 by Emma Press. www.annebailey.org

Sally Baker is a poet, workshop tutor and occasional reviewer. Her pamphlet, Ragwort, was runner-up in the 2025 Poetry Business International Book & Pamphlet Competition

Jude Brigley is Welsh. She has been a teacher, an editor and a performance poet. Now in her third age she is a woman in a hurry who is now writing for the page. She sees it as her job to write down the lives of those who came before or she has known - to resurrect the dead, especially women and measure ourselves - what have we learnt? What can we pass on?

Sally Brisley is a poet who came to writing through her training as a child psychotherapist. She is interested in the intersection between focusing in and what we look away from. She spends her time between her home in Essex and her narrowboat based in the Midlands.

Rachel Burns has been published in literary magazines including The Rialto, Magma, Atrium, and Ink Sweat & Tears. She won the Bylines Sky Hawkins Poetry Prize in 2025. Her first poetry collection is forthcoming from Broken Sleep Books in 2026. X @RachelLBurnsme INSTA rachelburns3224

Susan Darlington‘s poetry regularly explores the female experience through nature-based symbolism. It has been published in Mslexia, Northern Gravy, Pennine Platform, One Hand Clapping, and Ink Sweat & Tears among others. Her pamphlets include Never Wear White (Alien Buddha Press, 2022) and The Oracle of Snails (Hedgehog Press, upcoming). Follow her on Bluesky at ‪@susandarlington.bsky.social

Janet Dean is a writer from York. Her novel The Peacemaker was published in 2019, and her poetry has been Highly Commended for the Bridport and Manchester Cathedral Prizes, commended in the Poetry Society Stanza Competition and recently published by Acumen, The Alchemy Spoon, Yaffle Press and Obsessed With Pipework.

Kimneet Kaur Dhatt is a poet from Hull, now based in Victoria, BC.

Martha Ellen is a retired social worker living on the Oregon coast. She has an MFA from Portland State. Her poems and prose are published in various journals and online forums. She writes to process the events of her life.

Charlotte Holm lives in East Yorkshire and is a textile artist, mother and carer. She has had poems published in Black Nore Review, Ink Sweat and Tears, The Fig Tree, and Sixty-Odd Poets, and was also included in the 2024 Ripon and High Wolds Poetry anthologies.

Helen Kay’s debut collection It Was Never About the Kingfisher (Dithering Chaps) was shortlisted for the 2025 Rubery Awards. She won the Cheshire Prize for Poetry in 2024 and 2025. She is known on facebook for her sidekick puppet Nigella.

Sarah Leavesley/James is a prize-winning poet, fiction writer, journalist and photographer. Her recent collections are Darling Blue (Indigo Dreams, 2025), combining ekphrastic poems with a fictional poetry narrative, and Blood Sugar, Sex, Magic (Verve Poetry Press, 2022). She also runs V. Press, publishing poetry and flash fiction. Website: https://sarah-james.co.uk

Louise Longson is a Pushcart nominated poet, widely published in print/online and has authored chapbooks Hanging Fire (Dreich, 2021) and Songs from the Witch Bottle (Alien Buddha Press, 2022), the award-winning These are her thoughts as she falls (Ballerini Press, 2023) and The How in the World (Hedgehog Press, 2025).

Marie Papier, French novelist and poet. Her poems have been published in a number of poetry magazines: The North, Stand, Agenda, The Lighthouse, Orbis, Ink Sweat & Tears and others; online; in anthologies: Smith/doorstop’s The Result is what you see today; Indigo Dreams’ Voices for the Silent; Bristol Stanza’s Calyx; Weather Indoors (on Covid); Walking Words, Poetry Walks in Bristol’s Past and Present; Bonds, Lyra Poetry Festival 2024 & Poets’ Walk. She was shortlisted for the Cerasus chapbook competition 2024 for After Picasso there’s only God.

Christine Partridge is an artist-poet based in Northumberland with a background in science, outdoor education and human development. She sees her practice as an on-going conversation with life, an exploration of our entangled relationships with each other, the natural world, impermanence and time.

Jane Sharp lives in Barnsley. Her work has been published by Valley Press, Dream Catcher, Yaffle’s Nest, Fig Tree, 60 Odd Poets, and various Anthologies and online magazines. Her most recent poetry collection is Cretan Whispers published by Sherwood Handcraft. Her novels, Higgs Bottom and Tears from the Sun are available on Amazon. She enjoys playing the piano and cello. https://janesharp.org

Alison Stark was born a Scot, raised a Mancunian and now lives in East Yorkshire, where she started writing poetry in 2022. As a winner in Guernsey Literary Festival’s International Poetry Competition 2024, her poem circled the island on a bus for a year. She was shortlisted for the Yeovil Literary Poetry Prize in 2025. Her poems have been published in The Fig Tree and High Wolds Poetry Collections. In her other life, Alison is a hospital doctor and clinical researcher.

Hannah Stone is a poet, editor and convenor of literary activities including the Leeds Song festival poets-composers forum. She is currently editor of Dream Catcher journal and collaborates with composers. She has had nearly 450 poems published, including as poem of the week in the Guardian in 2023.

Maria Taylor is a British Cypriot poet who has been highly commended in the Forward Prizes. She has been widely published including poems and reviews in The Guardian, Magma and The Times Literary Supplement. Her most recent collection is Dressing for the Afterlife (Nine Arches Press).

Rowena Warwick is an award winning writer and poet who lives in Oxfordshire. She is a past winner of the Bridport Prize (flash fiction) and came second in the Magma prize. She has been long listed for the national poetry prize. She also likes to play the trumpet, at present predominantly jazz.

June Wentland was born and lived in Hull before the vagaries of life took her to Bath, Manchester and then Bristol. She currently lives in Wiltshire. Her poems have been published widely and her novel Foolish Heroines was launched in 2021. You can find out more about her at www.junewentland.com

All contributors retain copyright of their work.

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In this special issue of The Fig Tree, Ian Parks reviews the recent collection by our Issue 13 Featured Poet Bob Beagrie. You can also see my review of it here.

Before we get to the review, a couple of announcements about upcoming events and readings related to The Fig Tree and Crooked Spire Press. All are free events unless otherwise specified.

Friday 20th March, 7.30pm - Ian Parks reads from The Sons of Darkness and the Sons of Light at Chorlton Library, Manchester

Tuesday 24th March, 1pm - Coal Mining Anthology Reading featuring Ian Parks and Sarah Wimbush plus other contributors at Garforth Library, near Leeds

Saturday 28th March, 1.30pm - Coal Mining Anthology Reading featuring Ian Parks and Joe Williams plus other contributors at Woodhorn Museum, Ashington, Northumberland. Museum admission fee applies.

Saturday, 11th April, 2pm - The Fig Tree Anthology 2025 launch with readings by the contributors at Doncaster Unitarian Church.

Wednesday, 15th April 7.30pm - Ian Parks at the Albert Poets, Huddersfield with fellow Forward Prizes 2026 nominee Victoria Gatehouse.

Sunday 3rd May, 2026, 6pm: Matthew Paul reading from The Last Corinthians at Poetry Performance, The Adelaide, 57 Park Road, Teddington, TW11 0AU

Go to crookedspirepress.com for more details on events and readings.

Now, as promised, Ian’s review:

Bob Beagrie: The Hand of Glory (Yaffle, 2025) ISBN 978-1-913122-82-9

Bob Beagrie is a prolific poet who takes his calling seriously, writing and publishing a wide array of impressive and original collections of verse and supplementing them with readings and appearances at many venues and locations. I had the pleasure of reviewing his previous collection, Romanceros, in 2024 and was delighted to find that all the virtues exhibited in that collection - a developed historical imagination, an active intelligence, and a voice attuned to the nuances of everyday speech - are also present in the title under consideration, albeit in a less concentrated form. Those virtues are supplemented, however, with a wry sense of humour, a narrative gift, and an extraordinary facility for making whatever he writes about compelling and distinctive. The Hand of Glory is subtitled A Biography which instantly gives the reader a clue as to how the poet wants us to perceive and apprehend this work. A challenging and inventive sequence of prose poems (more of which later) the collection sets about to recount the bizarre adventures of the said ‘Hand’ which takes on an independent life of its own, manifesting itself in a bewildering series of manifestations. Beagrie provides a helpful introduction which recounts the history and preparation of the phenomenon known as The Hand of Glory. The Hand of Glory (and there were many) was a mummified hand taken from a criminal executed (usually hanged) for the crime of murder. Whether it was left or right depended on which hand had been used to carry out the deed. Usually taken from the scaffold the hand was subjected to a long and complicated process of embalmment which instilled it with magical powers. The particular hand which Beagrie has in mind can be seen at Whitby museum, and is one of the best surviving examples.

Dark, complex, and challenging, the origins of this particular hand begin in ‘Uselessness - a defunct pit village that had unspectacularly failed to redefine itself’. We are not, at this stage, in the murky world of medieval magic and sorcery where the hands were treated and prized but in the despairing post-industrial hinterlands of modern society. And it is by introducing this habit of the hand turning up in unlikely and unexpected locations that allows Beagrie to do what he does best - that is unleashing his imagination without having to spend too much time (if any) on contextualising the adventures of the hand. The result is what Tim Fellows has identified as ‘weird, horrific, and funny’. The gruesome and the beautiful are allowed to inhabit the same space, as they do in ‘real life’ and to create a tension that makes The Hand of Glory such a compelling read. This sequence of individual prose poems (with titles like Star-Killer, Doomsday, and The Legend of the Hand) sets up a series of challenges for the reader. We are not always sure who is speaking or where, precisely, the action is taking place; we are left puzzled by the outcomes of the several encounters that are presented throughout the text. In many ways I am reminded of Ted Hughes’ seminal sequence Crow where the poet invents his own creation story, his own myth, and inhabits it with creatures from his own imagination. The sort of illogic that runs through the Hughes poem operates here with Beagrie who seems, at times, to be presenting us with an entirely new perspective on the world and on our relationship with the supernatural. There is, too, a deep-seated apocalyptic quality to the whole thing. No wonder the sequence is prefaced by a quote from William Blake’s Tyger: ‘What the hand dare seize the fire?’ We are in the same territory in this remarkable long poem which defies all our efforts to categorise it.

Central to our reading of the poem is the form in which it is written. It begins with a Prologue in verse couplets which immediately strike an ominous tone:

‘but the 5 o’clock shadows
betray the season

the way they swirl
too easily, too far black

across sun-paled roads
the way they pool

in potholes and pockmarks
race harvested stubble fields.’

The lyricism and formal grace of these spare and musical lines is quickly set against the blocks of prose which dominate the rest of the collection. At some level, I feel that The Hand of Glory is as much about the possibilities of the prose poem as it is about its subject matter. Is that we have here a series of prose paragraphs doing exactly what prose paragraphs are supposed to do? Or are we supposed to discover some lyric impulse behind them; some attempt at form that we would expect to find verse? Is the randomness deliberate or intentional? Technically this raises as many questions as it resolves. Prose, after all, has become the common currency of fictionalised narrative for centuries - so why not here? Ultimately the tensions this creates throughout the sequence reflects the social and personal tensions implicit in the collection as a whole. We are never on firm ground. In The Hand of Glory Bob Beagrie invites us to acknowledge and embrace the unexpected and experimental. It intrigues us and it perplexes us. Here is a poet writing at the height of his powers. I have never read anything quite like it.

Ian Parks

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The Fig Tree and Crooked Spire Press are delighted to announce our nominations for the 2026 Forward Prizes.

In the Best Collection category, we are nominating Ian Parks’ superb collection The Sons of Darkness and the Sons of Light, published back in October 2025.

Drawing on inspiration for the Dead Sea Scrolls and his time in a kibbutz, Ian Parks dwells on the duality of human nature through the lives of well-known and less well known individuals, and with a view of how events and people shaped the history of Britain.

This is Marston Moor. We are surely in a time of indecision and change now - let’s hope it doesn’t end in another Civil War.

Marston Moor

I’ve come to the edge of the arable land
where the straight swords are crossing on the map
in a time of indecision and a time of change.
There, on the far side of the swale,

a wall of pikes held back the royalist horse
and where the thin hedge peters out
men from the same country shot them down.
Some say it’s for the best the houses come

to sink their deep foundations in the soil.
For now they’re out of sight and out of range.
So let the dead lie undisturbed
where every rise and dip in that bare ground

marks out the places where they fell
and come here when the sun is sinking low
over the scrub, the footpaths and the open plain
in a time of indecision and a time of change.

Ian Parks

In the Best Single Poem category we can only submit 3 entries from the 9 Fig Tree issues, including specials, published in the period from March 5th 2025 to March 5th 2026. The choice between the over 150 poems that were eligible was tremendously difficult. So many fine poems didn’t make the cut. So, the nominees should feel rightly proud of their achievement, but the ones that didn’t make it should be aware that they all pushed these poems to the wire. Thanks to all our fabulous contributors, but there can only be three, and here they are:

Victoria Gatehouse - Thunder Moon (from Issue 11)

This poem crackles on the page like the lightning it describes and roars with thunderous energy. The images highlight the spark you feel when your child has grown to the point where you know that they are changing, that they have the opportunity and ability to achieve more than you achieved. It’s fabulous.

Thunder Moon

quick summer storm     this charge that builds
all afternoon     strange violet glimmers
beneath the trees     the air curiously alive
each cloud     with its bellyful of waiting

the potential between ground     and sky
has grown too large     travelling from ground up
or maybe cloud down     I could never remember
and when it comes     shock wave of rain

my son strides in     luminous as nitrogen
he is speaking the language of electrons
soon he’ll leave home     study physics with those
who understand     the ions behind the strike

travelling from ground up     or maybe cloud down
I could never remember     but I’ll remember
his moment of explaining     this breath of petrichor
and stone-gleam     this white-hot forking of light

Victoria Gatehouse

Ian Harker - Clear-Out (from Coal Mining Issue 1)

This poem mentions two villages that are next to the one I grew up in. Ian’s ancestors are buried in the churchyard in which my ancestors are buried. Does this means it resonates with me? Certainly. But I wouldn’t let that affect my decision. What affected my decision was the end of the poem, and the last line in particular. It’s stunning - it’s one of those that makes you really wish you’d written it.

Clear-Out

The other thing we found
apart from the coronation flags
in the loft were lumps of coal

right at the back of the outhouse.
They shone deep blue next
to the snowdrops tearing through

the lawn. My grandfather, whose love letters
sat in a black plastic bag at the bottom
of the stairs, never went down the pit,

but his dad did—Colliery deputy under ground—
and after him they’re all miners
back to James Holmes whose body

was eventually found at the bottom
of a ventilation shaft. He was fifteen
and he was buried in the churchyard

in the village that is actually two villages
and you only know which is which
if you are from there. Shirland and Higham

blur into one. My grandad’s letters flare
at the bottom of the stairs. My ancestors’ bones
spark like flints in the dark.

Ian Harker

Mel Tibbs - Bone dream (from Women’s Poetry Special Issue 1)

There were so many fabulous poems in this issue but in the end I went with this stunning poem from Mel Tibbs, that we chose as the opening poem of the issue. Its imagery is beautifully drawn and somewhat disturbing, yet quite literally reveals a beauty and inner strength both in the poem and the persona.

Bone Dream

I roll my flesh down my legs like a pair of stockings
step away on my clean bone pins,

feel the flex of my toes knock against the wooden floor.
I unlace the corset of my stomach and unwrap it

from around my middle, placing it heavily
on the chair at the end of the bed.

I lift my breasts, the meat of my chest and back,
over the keys of my ribs. They loll on the floor

beside the rest of this mess. I pull off the sleeves
of my arms and pluck the skin from each finger like a lady

taking her gloves off, hold the pair together draped over
the frame of my hands, lie them on the dresser.

I peel off my face, delicately like
one of those beauty treatments. My scalp comes

away easily, leaving the bright moon of my bare skull.
Then, I garland myself with all the jewellery

I thought I’d lost or never been given and wear it,
bright as planets against my white bones.

Mel Tibbs

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Welcome to issue thirteen of The Fig Tree.

I’m not superstitious so, unlike hotel rooms and aeroplane seat rows, we haven’t skipped from twelve to fourteen.

This issue’s Featured Poet is Bob Beagrie, who appeared three times in the Fig Tree in 2024. When he submitted again I decided it was time to offer a Featured Poet slot. He is a prolific writer, his latest collection Hand of Glory, prose poetry about the bizarre relic in Whitby, being a perfect example. Bob’s poems about the Spanish Civil War, in the collection Romanceros, is a much revisited favourite of mine.

This issue opens with Tracy Dawson’s Towton, and it was in this month that that battle took place, in the driving Yorkshire snow. It contains our first poem submitted from Australia and ends with our first submission by an Indian poet, Nisha Raviprasad.

Last month we published the first of two special issues following our submission call for poetry by women. It has smashed our viewing record, with over 1500 views as I write this. The second part will be out next month with 23 more fabulous poems, including a new Featured Poet, then a printed anthology will follow in the summer with 20 additional poems. Many thanks again to Stephanie Bowgett and Susan Darlington for leading on the selection and editing process.

Also in April we will be launching The Fig Tree 2025 Anthology, a printed edition containing poems published by us last year. The event, on the 11^th in Doncaster, already promises to match last year’s, with over 20 fantastic poets joining us to read their work.

However, this won’t be our first event of the year. This month we will be hosting Coal Anthology readings in Garforth, near Leeds, and Ashington in Northumberland. Other venues are in the pipeline – if you want to host us at a venue or poetry group near you, send us an email.

All information about these readings, and others by Ian Parks and Matthew Paul, are on the Crooked Spire Press website.

Thanks to Paul Brough for his stunning custom image for this issue.

Once again I hope you enjoy reading this issue as much as I did collating it. You are joining over 500 people who are reading the webzine on a regular basis.

Tim Fellows, Editor

Contributors: Bob Beagrie, John Curry, Tracy Dawson, Janet Dean, Marilyn Francis, Victoria Gatehouse, Allan Lake, Marie Papier, Nisha Raviprasad, Seán Street, Allan Wilkinson and Paul Brough.

The Fig Tree Featured Poet – Bob Beagrie

Hen Ogled

We linger, still, in a mythical land
treading the footsteps of saints
where surf-smoothed pebbles
sing a different set of shanties,
where bleak, mist-swaddled moors
replay white-washed pantomimes
for an audience of hares, curlew,
of silent rings of standing stones,

and our high streets are whittled
into charming, hand-crafted souvenirs
held, dissolving like humbugs,
in the hollow of our cheeks.

Bob Beagrie

Untethering

(For Stew)

What he loves is to paddle his kayak away from the shore,
for the land-sounds to fall away, becoming incomprehensible
and of little consequence, for the waters to buoy his weight
and to break and fold and drip with each paddle’s tight dip,
for the shifting light to sparkle in a path of refracted panes
across the window of the lake, for the rhythm of the body’s
muscle memory to plough the vessel forward as an engine:
eyes, arms, shoulders, waist, thighs, feet working in unison,
for the unknown depths beneath him to yawn like a whale.
He loves the smell of water out there, the smell of the air,
the feather floating as if with intent, the circle of the trees
like lashes around an eyeball staring at clouds that broil
and burst to pour stored raindrops, that plummet to pound
the lake into a drum whose vibrations press through skin
into his bones, dissolving thoughts carried from the strand,
there in the iris he can scream and laugh like a madman.

Bob Beagrie

Figueres

The red wall sprouts
small loaves like shingles,

laid by the golden goose
an array of giant eggs
adorn the tower’s roof,

carousel horses stampede
across ornate evening

balconies

hauling thunder and lightning
down from the mountains
to the corpse drying room.

Cows in clown colours
dance flamenco
around and around
the plane trees on The Rambla.

As the hour rings a church bell,
it’s hot enough to drain
a glass of snake venom,

strip down to fig leaves,
go searching the narrow cuts
for El Diablo’s antidote:

the indigo rose black tomato.

Bob Beagrie

Bob Beagrie (PhD) is a poet, writer and performer. He lives in Middlesbrough and has published fifteen collections of poetry, most recently: The Hand of Glory: a biography’(Yaffle 2025), Romanceros (Drunk Muse Press 2024), Kō (Black Light Engine Room Press’ 2023), Eftwyrd (Smokestack Books 2023), The Last Almanac (Yaffle Press 2023). When We Wake We Think We’re Whalers from Eden (Stairwell Books 2021). His poetry has been translated into Finnish, Urdu, Swedish, Dutch, Spanish, Estonian, Tamil, Gaelic and Karelian. He is a founding member of the experimental music and spoken word collective Project Lono and works as a writer, performer, creative producer and workshop facilitator.

The Fig Tree Selection – March 2026

This section features up to ten poems, with a maximum of one per poet per issue.

Towton

Sweetcorn rows shoulder to shoulder,
its stems are bloodied ankles
risen from the Bloody Acres.

Tassels are quivers of arrows,
poleaxes pricked over the press
and leaves are the billhook blades.

Towering above us at six foot four
corn storming our maize view
of the Lancastrian ridge.

At the edge of the field
the short first line has collapsed
under the weight of marching feet.

And here, a trinity of coltsfoot,
a parhelion of petals,
rays of Sun in Splendour.

The hard ground is speared,
arrowed with dusty docks.
Clayed earth always fighting back.

Auburn silks sprout from the heads
of golden kernels still armoured
in their green sheath helmets.

A holly bush guards Dacres Cross,
shields it from the heavy traffic
heading to camp at Leeds Festival.

The lone hawthorn on the hill,
aloof, inaccessible as a king.
A route taken by few.

On the ridge above Cock Beck
crimson splatters the hawthorn
and rose-hipped track.

Today we cross over
the Bridge of Bodies,
Cock Beck flowing clear and free.

Tracy Dawson

Cloughton

I walked to the sea in December,
a long and muddy bridleway

bordered by blackthorns,
each dark cage with its secret of blackbirds,

the fields with their tired winter greens,
suddenly lifted by the curious light

that comes to you sometimes in winter -
slant, like a promise, like the glimmer

that builds in the heart of breakers.
I walked to the sea in December

and realised the grey seals,
bobbing in the lip of the bay

were surfers, slick in their wetsuits -
selkies slipping into newfound skins

to risk the shining edges of waves.
I watched from up on the headland,

felt the sting of their salt-wild joy,
cold slap of it taking my breath.

Victoria Gatehouse

Lunch Break at the Nature Conference

The university caterers have refilled
the feeding stations, and now all plumages
in the hierarchy of academic
pecking orders fluster at the trays, before
hopping each to their own species gathered
at safe-distanced and selected tables, mouths
full of seeds and opinions about
everything, the room loud with raucous
calls from vested nests - Verbosus Scholarium:
provocations, projects awaiting outcomes,
research questions, funding bids competing
for limited air, while the wilting world outside
gets on with extinction, pending a decision.

Seán Street

Love In The Afternoon

The telling will never be done,
how her mother sucked on coal,
how it worked on heartburn.

If you work it back you wonder
about a night in July, the boy asleep,
oblivious. These will be

his last few months ruling the roost.
There’s a threat coming –
sperm carrying the girl genes.

She will bring balance but not for him,
his Mam will stay on his side, but she
will be on Dad’s.

It could have been in the afternoon,
love in the afternoon, Dad on nights
that week, the son at school,

a quarter past two. Mam might have
thought her time at thirty five
was running out. Mam might

have sensed a window in which
one egg might fall in certainty
and there was a chance. Take me,

she said. Take my chance.

Janet Dean

Still Falling

Rain comes hard,
knuckles on slate,
beating the hills into silence,
cutting cold channels
through stone older
than anything I can name.

The land pulls its colours in.
Fields drown to their roots,
hedgerows slump
under their own wet grief.
Sheep huddle —
white rags in the wind.

Home is somewhere back there,
a mark in the mud,
half-swallowed.
A warmth that once rose
like smoke
from a fire someone forgot to tend.

What remains?
The outline of loss,
sharp as flint.
And the rain —
still falling —
grinding itself
into mud and bone.

And me —
another mark on the hillside,
already blurring.

John Curry

Uncool is Cool is Warming

The uncoolest cafe in Melbourne, Australia
(temperature an issue with cool, wet winters)
counter-intuitively, has the finest coffee
so I’m not disappointed that I happened
along, settled, colonised window table
that seats three more people than I have
ever been. Staff : assorted, unintrusive.
Bland personalities like artless walls but
there’s natural light because window and
skylight are positioned perfectly for sun
worship if only indifferent rain would stop.
Bland music is easy to digest bossanova
in Brazilian Portuguese, which I get but
do not comprehend. In this atmosphere,
mind can slither out and again tempt
any naive Eve without drawing petty
deity attention. It’s blank page –
illumined by neon. Benign spy with
no qualms, mission or deadlines
could ask for nothing more.

Allan Lake

Chalk Dream

I looked down at your face today
Your cold lips slightly open
Revealing that once tender smile
The one I first saw as a child
As your eyes peered down upon mine
When you leaned over the pram side

You were always the blue-eyed one
The quiet, sensible one
The one I always looked up to
The one who told me I would die
After eating a stick of chalk
Something you always regretted

I didn’t see your eyes today
They remained closed as you slept
Yet you smiled, or was it a grin?
I wondered just for a moment
What dreams you might be dreaming
Were they of me, swallowing that chalk?

I knew this was our last moment together
And we had to say our goodbyes
One memory after another coming to mind
You took me by the hand to the library
And taught me how to read and write
And I don’t think I ever thanked you

Now your eyes are closed forever
Though they still shine long and bright
Like an evening sky in late summer
As it watches the season change
I placed my mouth close to your ear..

Allan Wilkinson

Matter

He told me
the brain is a box.
A box with an elaborate machinery.
Every element has its use its function.
Nothing is left to chance.
You would or is it could
see no further no deeper.
Facts are facts.

When I tried to bring in another dimension
like the space between the elements,
the shape of the space between the parts
suggesting the void had a meaning,
could be a cause a pause for reflexion,
a groan coming from the matter,

he roared at me
called me
a witch.

Marie Papier

Crem No 162512. Disposal Take Away

Morning high tide
Perranporth beach October 16, 2019
07:09

Sun rise
Perranporth beach, October 16, 2019
07:43

We waited till sunrise. Too late for high tide. The tide already turning.

It rained. Dog walkers ran for shelter. The long flat wet stretch of sand was ours. We walked towards the retreating sea and scattered the greasy greyness that was once a person into the waves, but the waves were busy with their own ebb and flow agenda unfazed by disposal and take away.

It’s almost a cliché, ashes that blow back on a rogue breeze.
Declining to be scattered.

The photograph [dated 16/10/2019] I took [timed 07:46:27] does not show
the cremains, remaining on the tideline.

A seventh wave, out of the blue, saved the day.
Unfixed the feathery ash from the damp foreshore.
Took them gently out to sea.

Sun-up.
Two shadows on a glass beach.
Beams of pink daylight slicing through grey cloud.

It’s too late now
but I wonder whether you would have chosen Perranporth.
You never said.

Marilyn Francis

Loneliness

She lived in a tattered house,
old and frail
she spoke to colors
to the colors of the sky,
of the earth,
of the withering leaves and broken boughs.
And when it rained
it turned gray
like the gentle sigh that left
her cracked lips,
like the cold silence that haunted
cattails basking in the winter sun.
She turned into a vacant house
that had only forlorn memories
the memories ran in the air
vibrated in her breath.
She spoke to the empty swing
that creaked in the wind.
She spoke to the empty colors
that filled her heart
to the vacant house
that had grown ears.
And one day
she lay with a bunch of wilted wild flowers
in her hands.

Nisha Raviprasad

Contributors

Paul Brough is a Yorkshire based illustrator. You can see more of his artwork here

John Curry is a poet from South Yorkshire whose work draws on everyday life, memory, landscape and Northern voices. His poems have appeared in Black Noir Review, 60 Odd Poets and Starbeck Orion. He is currently working toward his first collection.

Tracy Dawson lives in Yorkshire, she is a Read to Write poet and has had poems published in several anthologies.

Janet Dean is a writer from York. Her novel The Peacemaker was published in 2019, and her poetry has been Highly Commended for the Bridport and Manchester Cathedral Prizes, commended in the Poetry Society Stanza Competition and recently published by Acumen, The Alchemy Spoon, Yaffle Press and Obsessed With Pipework.

Marilyn Francis lives and writes poetry in Radstock which, once upon a time, was a mining village in the Somerset Coalfield. She had a collection of poems, Red Silk Slippers, published quite a while ago and, more recently, some other poems published in The North, The Rialto, Poetry Salzburg, Culture Matters, and various other places, both on and offline.

Victoria Gatehouse is a scientist, poet and children’s writer. She lives with her family in West Yorkshire. Victoria’s poems have been broadcast on BBC radio and widely published in magazines and anthologies. Her pamphlet The Mechanics of Love (Smith | Doorstop) was selected as a ‘Laureate’s Choice’ by Carol Ann Duffy. Victoria is a three-times winner of The Poetry News Members’ Competition, and was highly commended for the Gingko Prize, 2023. Her first poetry collection, The Hawthorn Bride, is published by Indigo Dreams.

Allan Lake, originally from Canada, has lived in Saskatchewan, Cape Breton Island, Ibiza, Tasmania, Western Australia and Melbourne. His latest chapbook of poems, My Photos of Sicily, was published by Ginninderra Press. Such journals as The Hong Kong Review, The American Writers Review, Tokyo Poetry Journal, The Antigonish Review, New Philosopher and Fabians Review have published him.

Marie Papier is a French novelist and poet. Her poems have been published in a number of poetry magazines: The North, Stand, Agenda, The Lighthouse, Orbis, Ink Sweat & Tears and others; online; in anthologies: Smith/doorstop’s The Result is what you see today; Indigo Dreams’ Voices for the Silent; Bristol Stanza’s Calyx; Weather Indoors (on Covid); Walking Words, Poetry Walks in Bristol’s Past and Present; Bonds, Lyra Poetry Festival 2024 & Poets’Walk. She was shortlisted for the Cerasus chapbook competition 2024 for After Picasso there’s only God.

Nisha Raviprasad is a poet and avid reader based in Cochin, Kerala. Her work, often centered on memory, nature, and emotion, has appeared in various literary journals. A quiet observer of life and language, she continues to explore the beauty of the everyday through poetry.

Seán Street’s current collection is Running Out of Time (Shoestring Press) Prose includes works on Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Dymock Poets, and most recently Wild Track: Sound, Text and the Idea of Birdsong was published by Bloomsbury, (paperback edition in May, 2025.) He lives in Liverpool.

Allan Wilkinson is a musician and collector of classic rock, folk and Jazz recordings. He has worked alongside a number of poets, adding accompaniment to their words. He broadcasts two weekly radio shows and has published one pamphlet of poetry and songs, Breakfast on Bourbon.

All contributors retain copyright of their work.

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Welcome to this first of two special issues of The Fig Tree, consisting of poems submitted by women. The response was amazing, both in quantity and quality, which made the job of selecting a very difficult and lengthy process. My thanks go to Stephanie Bowgett and Susan Darlington for selecting almost all the poems, after I had selected theirs, and to Charlotte Holm for the beautiful custom-made image. I won’t keep you any longer – enjoy this fabulous and diverse collection of women’s voices.

Tim Fellows

Guest Editors: Stephanie Bowgett and Susan Darlington

Artwork: Charlotte Holm

Poets: Jean Atkin, Claire Booker, Stephanie Bowgett, Donna Faulkner, Marilyn Francis, Moira Garland, Joanna Grant, Ruth Hobson, Celia Jenkins, Dawn Kirby, Kathryn Metcalfe, Jane Pearn, Andrea Small, Judy Smith, Susan Székely, Maria Taylor, Laura Theis, Mel Tibbs, Lynn White, Jackie Wills and Marjory Woodfield.

The Fig Tree Featured Poet – Stephanie Bowgett

Wild child

Child among the tangled weeds
tells the time with dandelion seeds,
blows silver puffs up to the sun
seven o’clock, eight, nine o’clock, done.

Yellow sap stains her skin,
she’ll wet the next bed she sleeps in.

Child among the purple thistles
pulls sharp grass to make a whistle
holds the blade between her thumbs
blows three notes but no one comes.

Grasses whisper, barley hears,
grasses get cut, no one cares.

Child among the meadow flowers
weaves daisy chains to fill the hours,
picks sticky willy, mother-die,
henbane, bedstraw, blue bird’s eye.

Ragged robin, monkshood, vetch,
she fashions a posy to foil a witch.

Child among the curling bracken
sees the sky turn grey then blacken,
hugs herself and rocks and hums,
hums and rocks, but no one comes.

Stephanie Bowgett

*The first line comes from a Lal Waterson song

Summer in Katwijk 1960

I learned to swim in the North Sea that summer
of Kathy’s Clown, poodle skirts, beehives,
hula hoops and quiffs. And I met Jan Haasnoot
on the beach. He tipped his hat, shook my hand.

He needed to practise his English, he said,
could help me build a castle; fetched bucket
after bucket to flood the moat, shells to spell
my name; made a fag packet flag for the turret.

Mum and Dad liked him straight away. He sat
on our plaid rug chatting and smoking,
magicked a pink gingham rabbit from his hat,
twisted a coin from my ear for a pony ride.

In the war, he told us, he’d cycled
all along this coast, messages twisted
in the frame of his bike; distracted soldiers
with jokes in broken German; let them

ruffle his blonde hair. The winter of ‘44,
had been hungry, they’d had to eat
bulbs, he said, and the Gestapo had driven
him to their HQ on his twelfth birthday.

As the sun set, he pulled out a mouth-organ,
Lilli Marlene and We’ll meet again. I trilled along,
chin held high above a sea red as a field of tulips;
managed six full strokes before I put my feet down.

Stephanie Bowgett

This page is intentionally blank

Please note its simplicity
its whiteness. Do not say “snow”
rather explore nuances:
eggshell, cut apple, trainers,
marshmallow, aspirin,
wimple, spittle, pearl.

Observe its shadows. Hold
your hand above the paper
to see the ghosts of your fingers, the play
of different greys, how it loves light.

Do not sully it with a poem. With luck
the smallest of sentient creatures
will choose to crawl across it, leave it
forever changed without making a mark.

Stephanie Bowgett

Stephanie Bowgett spent most of her childhood in Germany, then moved around England and Wales before settling in Huddersfield. She was a teacher and an educational consultant. In retirement she is a school governor.

Her poems appeared in magazines, including Wide Skirt, Rialto and London Magazine and won prizes in the Arvon, Peterloo, Ilkley and Nottingham competitions. Her first pamphlet The Grape-eating Fox was published by Slow Dancer and her second A Poor Kind of Memory by Calder Valley Poetry

A founder member of the Albert Poets more than thirty years ago, she co-ordinated their workshops and readings and with John Duffy, several community writing projects.

The Fig Tree Selection - Women’s Poetry

Bone Dream

I roll my flesh down my legs like a pair of stockings
step away on my clean bone pins,

feel the flex of my toes knock against the wooden floor.
I unlace the corset of my stomach and unwrap it

from around my middle, placing it heavily
on the chair at the end of the bed.

I lift my breasts, the meat of my chest and back,
over the keys of my ribs. They loll on the floor

beside the rest of this mess. I pull off the sleeves
of my arms and pluck the skin from each finger like a lady

taking her gloves off, hold the pair together draped over
the frame of my hands, lie them on the dresser.

I peel off my face, delicately like
one of those beauty treatments. My scalp comes

away easily, leaving the bright moon of my bare skull.
Then, I garland myself with all the jewellery

I thought I’d lost or never been given and wear it,
bright as planets against my white bones.

Mel Tibbs

Talla

Talla spends her days marooned on the veranda
of her grandson’s house. Sometimes she talks to God.
Sometimes she asks the TV to speak in whispers.

She introduces me to three dead sisters, young girls
with dowry coins tumbling from their necks
and homemade dresses cinched at starved waists.

I hear them kneading prayers into their daily bread
to ward away locusts. Talla looks up, so sad
I’m not one of them, only a visiting guest. I’m ten.

Talla’s close to a hundred. Without leaving her chair
she goes for a walk. It’s dark. She’s a shoeless girl,
under the clouds of old empires. We’re tar-eyed.

I’m lost. She lights up the sky before electricity.
She introduces me to the moon. I read history books,
but they never describe the colour of falling stars.

Maria Taylor

Calling the lay roster through the canonical hours
after David Hart

At Matins, by candlelight, listen for your tasks:
Nesta Ashdown – to sweep the nave
Alard Mercer and Giles Brickenden – to walk the maze
Agnes Cooper – to churn the goats and clarify the sheep

At Prime, Day’s Eye, this St Winifrede’s Day:
Thurstan Fletcher – to stook the shadows in the cloister
Joan Bigge – to scale the bishop’s trout into kettles
Goda Nash – to dust the shrine

At Sext, sixth and tallest hour:
Alice and Sybile Tallow – to name the kitchen mouse
Wolf Parva – to carve a misericord devil
Jenkin Walter – to mend his ways

At Nones, ninth and little hour:
Osbert Payne and Ranulf Baker – to sing to the geese
Matilda Rolfe – to slip the firedogs from their leash
Odo Smith – to gripe through Lent

At Vespers, the violet hour:
Hugo Teller – to wind the pendulum in the transept
Gabriel Godefrey – to hallelujah in the quire
Eva Cheeseman – to hold the cold hands of the saint

At Compline, in the foothills of rest:
Cicely Fox – to shutter the moon
Godwin Taylor – to cage the bestiary
and Robin Bywater – to eat our sins

Jean Atkin

handmade

she shows her love in lengths of yarn
and sore wrists from busy crochet hooks,
some days she’s forgotten who she is
but catches glimpses, sewn into seams

Celia Jenkins

Noir

Your hat   slid along
      slant coping   black bricks
running rain.   Here comes 
       the storm   speaking storm language
sheeting     perpetually                                                                                     
                                          
                                 held up   one end each
                                      as if   perpetually,
                                 making   an iron bed.
                                    All eyes are sleepless   in noir
                              pacing rough boards    up and down
                                             
up and down  smoking,
    only the thunder   speaking,
brief flares   on half-faces.
    Your hat guarded   the loot so well
I, the dame   never even knew

                                      what was   in the bag.
                                           The night   it burst open       
                                       your hat closed   its mouth 
                                           on mine   perpetually,   light on the spilling 
                                                        rain   the rain stops
        
Ruth Hobson

birth mother

we tore
apart

eyes
star-blinded

in birth’s dark geology
the brute

tectonic rift
that’s left its mark

I float

in rose-scented
bath water

watching
your thumb print

rise and fall on the tide
of each breath

at my dead centre
a knot

Claire Booker

Shame

I knew a girl     a girl (with no name)
it was her     the girl     the girl
by then she was a woman     and
she had never told anyone before
because                          because

they said     molest    strangers     don’t go
with strangers     she did             that’s what she did
he said can you do a job
for me     she did     she did

she ran all the way home crying

she sat under the table
the policeman ate swiss roll
she liked sitting in the front seat of the police car
she had never been in a car

after-dreams of falling
falling
          falling
                    falling
waking
arteries stashing shame

those were the days
like crushed daisy chains

Moira Garland

Breakfast Tray

after Carol Ann Duffy

My belly growls at the scent of it,
the crisp toast, the fragrance
of China tea in its delicate pot.

I am small but my hands are steady,
I’m trusted. I balance the tray
on one palm while I tap three times,
wait for permission to enter.

He is sitting up, plump and shiny
against the satin pillows.
I place the tray level on his lap.
He does that thing,
and I ignore it, don’t meet his eye,
look out of the window
where they’re saddling the horses.
In my mind I’m galloping
down the drive curtained with trees, away.

I move towards the door. This time
he doesn’t call me back.

Jane Pearn

Brief Encounter

His name was Marcus Falcon. He hovers in my head
The blossom was pink
The day we met, he was laying supine on the ground

I kissed his purple lips, I filled him with my air—
I beat him with my adrenaline, again and again and again!
He was unresponsive, impotent in my arms

And the blossom was pink
Stay with me. One two three. Stay with me. One two three
Stay with me! He… beyond sentiment. I was spent

I heard the tethers slip. I watched the bird break free
The blossom was pink
Fly two three. Fly two three. Fly for me…

Dawn Kirby

Pantoum after a Visit to Boulder Bay

The cliff pathway leads down. A clatter of children
beside a red dinghy
baches, boulders, tidal causeway
a squabble of seagulls.

Beside a red dingy
they peer into rock pools
a squabble of seagulls.
What do you see? Sneer of crabs. Netful of limpets.

They peer into rock pools
jump from boulder to boulder. You can’t catch me…
What do you see? Sneer of crabs. Netful of limpets.
Tonight they’ll be jumping in their dreams. Headlock of boulders.

Jump from boulder to boulder. You can’t catch me…
Rosy Morn is the oldest bach here. It’s built from rock and clay.
Tonight they’ll be jumping in their dreams. Headlock of boulders.
There’s a bath in the front garden. Flamboyance of ice plant. Slither of kelp.

Marjory Woodfield

Footnote
A bach is the New Zealand term for a holiday home, usually small and unpretentious.

Quadrantids, East Yorkshire

Air so tight it hurts to gasp.

Velvet sky of magnetic light.
Promised aurora absent.

Two male tawnies compete
unseen in shadowed trees.
Black beck slips by, shushing.

Above rooftops, a silent meteor
arcs millennia dust across the earth.

With no resistance in the windless night,
I breathe it in, taste contentment.

Judy Smith

Trying To Pet A Blackbird

I’m trying to pet
a blackbird. Failing that,

I’m trying to steal
her song and turn it

into something I can hand out
when asked to account

for myself. Birds are generous
by nature like all

feathered things. But I don’t want to push
my luck with this one, risk her

flying off. I’ve so little to offer in return
apart from my time and lousy patience.

I inch closer by the minute, stretch
my hand out slowly, a finger at a time.

I stroke the air quite near her feet.
She does a little dance. I pause. She sings

a bit more forcefully in my direction. I retreat,
eager to show I got the message.

We stay like this, her crooning, me never
quite approaching all the way.

If anyone asks what I did today, I’ll say:
I almost, almost wrote a poem.

Laura Theis

Raven

Under the hill, Raven stores trinkets
from his travels. Golden buttercups don’t tempt
him — he’s after the real stuff. He dreams
of Brink’s-Mat, ingots beyond his carrying,
but makes do with window-sill wedding rings,
thin bracelets plucked from sleeping wrists,
necklaces undone from the recently dead.

Dragonish, he sits with his hoard, sorts sovereigns
from doubloons, stacks arms-engraved signet rings.
He has long been at this caper, plans bright-eyed
heists days in advance. Once he pinched
a watch-chain from a sailor who himself
had lifted it from a cabin hired by a traveller
desperately seeking a sea-distance.
Raven remembers them all.

He tracks pickpockets, hangs around at fairs,
clocks the lost-attention states
of the carelessly wealthy. He spots
a Rolex, whets his beak, calculates
the nipping points. He fancies an earring,
is not above flattery, spends weeks
calling endearments to gold-hooped girls
who chatter in the woods. He sets his spells,
oils his feathers for flight.

Andrea Small

To a Dead Moth in the Great Chamber

East Riddlesden Hall, Keighley

Lying on your back on the sisal matting,
abdomen exposed, dry but not yet a husk.
Why here? Why didn’t you couch softly

on the tester bed, fade into its crewelwork?
Or settle on that casket, silk-stitched
with hares, boars, dogs, and hawks?

But here you are, under the ticking
of a brass lantern clock, its round
uncased pendulum your last bright moon.

Susan Székely

Fenland

It stands alone there in the fen,
an old building, derelict now
but still stately as a church,
a cathedral like church,
one of the many built
by those profiting from the wool
of the sheep grown on those flat-lands
and of the labour of poor men and women.
Built to secure the rich man’s place in Heaven,
and standing there still like this building,
just one more elderly relic
of the same trade
with stories to tell
of Heaven and Hell
under those big skies
with storm clouds rolling.

Lynn White

a warrior at Paddington Station

the transit lounge
on platform one was hectic

the girl behind the enquiry desk
was busy busy busy busy

sitting in his wheelchair
like a beached turtle

in his baggy scarlet jacket
and roomy black cap

he could wait
until someone noticed him

he had all time and no time
a piece of travelling debris

he dozed
hands resting on his walking stick

as a riptide of passengers
swept by

and he slept on undisturbed
knowing all about killing time

Marilyn Francis

Celandine in dark wood

Celandine, the first flower
I knew the name of,
grew with white anemones
which died when you picked them.

When Victorian colonists
were afraid of appearing improper -
except when committing genocide,
arranging children at looms -

they spoke a language of flowers.
Joys to come, the lesser celandine
mutters in floriography
on the edge of a dark wood

where a girl was murdered.
Messenger, others call it,
a sign of poor, neglected earth
and see, it’s plentiful as stars.

Jackie Wills

To That Girl in My Class Last Semester

Sometimes, your skin is brown,
sometimes, it’s white. Sometimes,
your hair is short—next time, a mass
of corkscrew curls. No matter, really.
I can pick you out from all the other girls.

You’re the one who looks away then
stares me down, defiant, insolent.
The one who finds her way unerringly
to my last nerve. And tries it. I sniff
you out the way an animal scents pain.
Or seizure. What can I say to you, girl?
That I used to be your kind. You know how
to find your own. And I know that, before too
long, I’ll get it—the paper all about the things
she did, your mother, stepmother, father’s latest
girlfriend, aunt, grandmother, whoever it was
who was supposed to have your back. Who just
kept turning hers. Who cut you down. Forgot
to pick you up from school. Left town. Loved
the boy much more than you. And showed it.

You see me now, your teacher—just another
parlor aunt to carp, nitpick, point out that you
look fat in that. Any chink in my armor? You’re in.
Scoring a point. Getting some of your own back,
Right? But I want to tell you I’m not like them.

That I’m your friend. That not all other
women are your mortal enemy. I just wish
that you could see me. See how I used to
be you. See how I made it through. And maybe,
maybe, just maybe, girl, you can, too.

Joanna Grant

The Late Night Stalker

The full moon
               creeps
around  every   house.

She peeks   in
     through
every        window.

Spotlighting
pockets
of       darkness.

Exposing        the places
where     devils
may       hide.

Donna Faulkner

A Woman’s Guide to Carrying a Coffin

Always wear flat shoes, not heels,
your back will thank you later.

Watch as the undertakers,
white gloved like stage magicians,
ease the coffin from the hearse.

Face your partner, remember
the first time you sat across
from him in a restaurant.

Take the weight, don’t cry out.

Your arms are not being ripped
from their sockets.

Match your steps with three men
bearing their mother.
How she once carried them
within her.

Kathryn Metcalfe

Contributors

Jean Atkin’s third collection High Nowhere is published by IDP. Coast to Coast to Coast published her winning Individual Poet Journal in 2025. Her collaboration with Richard Skinner, Crossing Paths, is due from Black Cat Press in 2026. Since 2010 Jean has worked as a poet in education and community. www.jeanatkin.com

Claire Booker’s poetry has appeared in Agenda, Dark Horse, Magma and Stand, among others. She won The Poetry Society’s 2023 Stanza Competition, and was longlisted in the 2023 National Poetry Competition. Her collection, A Pocketful of Chalk is out with Arachne Press. Her pamphlet, The Bone That Sang, is with Indigo Dreams. More info at www.bookerplays.co.uk.

Donna Faulkner grew up in Chesterfield and lives in New Zealand. Free spirited and unconventional, she came to the business of writing later in life. She’s been published in The Bayou Review, 300 Days of Sun, Windward Review, Havik, and others. Her debut poetry collection In Silver Majesty was published by erbacce press, Liverpool (UK 2024). Instagram: @lady_lilith_poet | Twitter: @nee_miller /linktr.ee/donnafaulkner

Marilyn Francis lives and writes poetry in Radstock which, once upon a time, was a mining village in the Somerset Coalfield. She had a collection of poems, Red Silk Slippers, published quite a while ago and, more recently, some other poems published in The North, The Rialto, Poetry Salzburg, Culture Matters, and various other places, both on and offline.

Moira Garland is a poet and short fiction writer. Publications include The North,
Dreamcatcher, Stand, and Magma, and many anthologies. Her recent poem in The Fig Tree was nominated for the Forward Prize. Wins include the 2016 Leeds Peace Poetry prize. Poems have been placed or commended in other competitions. Instagram/Threads/Bluesky: @moiragauthor

Joanna Grant has spent almost twenty years living outside of her native United States, studying and working and complicating her notions of origin, of belonging, and of home. For fifteen of those years, she has taught college classes in writing, public speaking, and mythology to American soldiers stationed overseas. Her poems have appeared widely.

Ruth Hobson was born in 1951 in Nottingham, where she still lives. Her full-length collection Arthur Talks was published by Palewell Press in 2019 and a pamphlet of Christmas poems Starwise was published by Palewell Press in 2023. She won first prize in the Manchester Cathedral Poetry Prize in 2024.

Charlotte Holm lives in East Yorkshire and is a textile artist, mother and carer. She has had poems published in Black Nore Review, Ink Sweat and Tears, The Fig Tree, and Sixty-Odd Poets, and was also included in the 2024 Ripon and High Wolds Poetry anthologies.

Celia Jenkins is a freelance writer and tutor living in Wiltshire. She has lived in China and Japan, and is particularly interested in short form poetry. In 2025 she was published in Presence, Hedgehog Press, Time Haiku, Poetry Pea, Wild Whispers, and Contemporary Haibun Online.

Dawn Kirby has only recently dipped her toes into the world of submitting poems after writing for years on and off. After raising a family and retiring from her job as a Tutor within Adult Education, she now dedicates more time to her love of Poetry, both reading and writing, and has been published in 60 Odd Poets, Urban Scrawl and The Rotherham Anthology- Ourselves Reflected Back.

Kathryn Metcalfe is a poet from Renfrewshire previously published both online and in print. She founded and runs Nights At the Round Table, a local open mic for poets and writers. Her pamphlet Like Nesting Dolls We Are is available from Seahorse Publications.

Jane Pearn’s poetry has appeared in several magazines including Brittle Star, Spelt, Obsessed with Pipework, and Ink, Sweat & Tears. She has been longlisted twice in the National Poetry Competition, and in The Rialto Nature and Place competition. Her third collection, Picking Up Signals, was published in January 2025.

Andrea Small is a multi-disciplinary artist working across painting, poetry, voice, and video. She has an MA in Creative Writing (Poetry) from MMU; her poetry has been published in journals including Strix, Dreich and Obsessed With Pipework, and several anthologies. Andrea lives in Sheffield, believes that we can all sing, and is learning to be a clown. www.andreasmall.co.uk

Judy Smith lives in East Yorkshire. She had a career in health and education. She has a passion for nature, gardening and community tree planting. Judy has had poems in anthologies including Spelt, 14 Magazine, Artemis, Black Bough, Dreich, High Wolds, York Literary Review, The Starbeck Orion.

Susan Székely lives near Bradford and is a university course administrator. Her poems have appeared in magazines, anthologies and have been placed in competitions, including the Walter Swan (Ilkley Literature Festival), Welsh International Poetry Competition, Borderlines Festival and Cheltenham Poetry competitions. Her first pamphlet, The Hungarian Pottery Flask was published by Grey Hen Press in 2025.

Maria Taylor is a British Cypriot poet who has been highly commended in the Forward Prizes. She has been widely published including poems and reviews in The Guardian, Magma and The Times Literary Supplement. Her most recent collection is Dressing for the Afterlife (Nine Arches Press).

Laura Theis’s work appears in Poetry, Oxford Poetry, The Irish Times, etc. She’s been awarded the Caterpillar Prize, Alpine Fellowship Writing Prize, Oxford Brookes Poetry Prize, AM-Heath-Prize, Live-Canon-Collection-Prize, Arthur-Welton-Award from the Society of Authors. Nominations and shortlists include the Forward Prize, Bridport Prize, Elgin Award and Best-of-the-Net. Her most recent collections are Introduction To Cloud Care (Broken Sleep Books) and Poems from a Witch’s Pocket (Emma Press).

Mel Tibbs lives in South Devon. Her poetry has recently appeared in Bad Lilies, IS&T, 14 Magazine and Clarion, and has been longlisted by Mslexia and both the Fish and The Plough Poetry Prizes. She is working on her debut pamphlet about the experience of living in 17 different houses before the age of 21.

Lynn White lives in north Wales. Her work is influenced by issues of social justice and events, places and people she has known or imagined. She is especially interested in exploring the boundaries of dream, fantasy and reality. She has been nominated for Pushcarts, Best of the Net and a Rhysling Award. lynnwhitepoetry.blogspot.com and www.facebook.com/Lynn-White-Poetry-1603675983213077/

Jackie Wills has published six collections of poetry. Shortlisted for the 1995 TS Eliot prize, she received a Cholmondely Award in 2023. Wills’ surreal, witty, compassionate poems take stock of motherhood, menopause, ageing, extinction. Her seventh collection, Making the Wedding Dress, will be published by Salt in 2026.

Marjory Woodfield’s home city is Christchurch, New Zealand, but she’s also lived in Asia and the Middle East. Her writing’s appeared in a range of places, from Saudi Arabia and Singapore, to England, America and New Zealand; in literary journals such as Ōrongohau | Best New Zealand Poems, The Pomegranate London, Acumen, Orbis; and anthologies such as Pale Fire (Frogmore Press) Best Small Fictions (Sonder Press) and Fuego (World Congress of Poets Literary Journal).

All contributors retain copyright of their work.

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Welcome to issue twelve of The Fig Tree.

That brings us to two years of publications, twelve regular issues and two specials which resulted in the Coal Mining Anthology published by Crooked Spire Press last month. The 2024 printed anthology launched last April has almost sold out, with preparations for the 2025 edition beginning in the New Year.

This issue’s Featured Poet is Stewart Carswell, who appeared in the Fig Tree in 2025 and impressed us enough to ask him to submit for this slot.

This issue contains the first sestina we have published, and Bob Chiswick has used the complex form very effectively to create a beautifully constructed elegy.

2026 promises to be a bumper year for The Fig Tree and Crooked Spire Press – keep an eye out on Substack (if you subscribe – it’s free - you will get information on publications and events in advance). We hope to be taking events to different parts of the UK next year, particularly linked to the Coal Mining Anthology.

Once again I hope you enjoy reading this issue as much as I did collating it. You are joining over 500 people who are reading the webzine on a regular basis.

Thank you all and have a happy and healthy New Year.

Tim Fellows, Editor

Contributors: Stewart Carswell, Bob Chiswick, Susan Darlington, Alan Davies, Greg Freeman, David Harmer, Graham Lock, David Lukens, Mike O’Brien, Hannah Stone, Tim Taylor and Paul Brough.

The Fig Tree Featured Poet – Stewart Carswell

Kind of night

It glitters, it fosters frost
while constellations I don’t recognise
twinkle the sky,

all those coincidences of giants and geometry
Greeks gave names to
and believed they held the future.

Tomorrow the single eastern star
will dawn unasked, blind us
with bland light. How

am I supposed to know anything now?
I’m tired. I think
we’re both tired of this now.

Stewart Carswell

Relationship break-up modelled as Must Farm bronze age settlement

What did you carry with you
when you escaped your burning home,
the walls aflame, the roof about to collapse
upon the life you could’ve lived?

Those artefacts are not preserved
here. All there is is what’s left behind:
broken pottery, burnt chopping boards,
the beads of jewellery you wore

to the restaurant in Cannaregio, three courses
and how much wine? The sunset that made them
think we were Italian. If I left you forever
I’d never forget the nerve of your lips.

And what would I carry?
Well that’s another story.
But what I’d leave is a bed frame,
broken pottery, bookcases (but not the books).

Let them get buried with all the rest of it,
lost and forgotten
like floorboards under bog oak,
excavated perhaps one day out of the blue,

the pieces put back together
incorrectly and interpreted all wrong:
that doesn’t fit there,
this didn’t happen like you’d think.

Stewart Carswell

Swan song

The swans in their thousands gift their own snowfall every winter
to the peat-blank fields that lie beyond the back fences
of the furthest houses. On days when mist clears
from the only road that regrets the dare to cross the fen
you see the blown snow drift into clumps, gathering
around the sugar beet or any other leftovers lost in the frost.

In the kitchen you boil the kettle, this cold won’t last forever
because the turning of the Earth is told in the stars,
nights with the plough spun sideways reveals true north,
tilled soil, fields kindled for tiny green flames
and the swans, knowing how long the days are now, shift their gaze
skyward and with new resolution head for home.

Stewart Carswell

Stewart Carswell lives in the Forest of Dean. He studied Physics at Southampton University, and has a PhD from the University of Bristol, and he approaches writing poetry with the mindset of a scientist. His poems have recently been published in Under the Radar, Finished Creatures, Atrium, Ink Sweat & Tears, and The Storms Journal; and he has performed poetry at the Cheltenham Poetry Festival, Poetry in Aldeburgh Festival, and around Cambridge and East Anglia. His pamphlet Knots and Branches (Eyewear Publishing, 2016) was followed by his full-length debut Earthworks (Indigo Dreams Publishing, 2021). Find out more at https://stewartcarswell.co.uk

The Fig Tree Selection – January 2026

This section features up to ten poems, with a maximum of one per poet per issue.

Hidden

I discovered the man who was never my father
in a letter she’d kept for sixty years.

Our violent separation has torn us to shreds
I lie awake at night longing for you.

Inside a diary written in Welsh, his photo. A shy
lover’s smile, his striped tie tucked into flannels.

I swear my words are true. Remember our walks?
The quarrels? Their passionate aftermath?

Was a promise made? Did moonlight guide her
as she dodged doodlebugs in her London life?

An unbreakable bond draws me towards you.
Will you write to me Joyce? Can I see you again?

He was called Howard, he was never my father;
a year later she met the man who would be.

David Harmer

The Gael

For nine hard months she carried me
and probably complained for most of them
in that rich brogue, the tongue of gael;
she endured a labour of hours, not
days as she claimed in my early years,
ensuring she would always remain

locked inside me. What remains
is an incomplete jigsaw for me
to complete as the encore years
accelerate coldly, where recalling them
is impossible but I do not
dwell on it. I searched for the gael

and the spirited girl-of-the-gael
standing firm, choosing to remain
staunchly true to Erin green and not
given to compromise. That offered me
no comfort against Irish jibes, most of them
attacking her identity over the years

but I’m half English and my years
taught me that the girl and the gael
were one and nothing would ever part them -
she was always damned to remain
woven into green, challenging me.
Rather than compromise she would not

question her doctrine and still I cannot
blame her. Aloof to neighbours for years
she created walls and barriers for me,
only one was her friend, a fellow Gael.
Her eye was lightning and still there remains
no shade of blue yet to classify them.

God’s clutches were firm so ignoring them
was a sin and something she could not
consider, leaving her content to remain
true to herself for all of her years.
I was once inside the girl of Gael,
now the mirror shows she’s inside me.

The Gael has grown stronger within me
over the years but still I remain torn
between the differences, I can not separate them.

Bob Chiswick

Sailors

Mornings, they would flip the table upside down,
stream sheets between its legs and play
at being sailors. Two sisters and a boy adrift
in seas of shadows, sharks and flying fish.
They haul on ropes, drum up winds,
peer into the carpet’s violet depths.

Cabin boy or able seaman, he is always willing:
keeping watch, dropping anchor
taking orders with a brisk aye aye sir!
One sister is kneeling at the stern
her broom-rudder trailing; the other
catches rain water in an old school hat.

Afternoons and righted, the ship
wears its mainsail as a tablecloth.
Meat curls on plates. Peas settle
in butter, the brown gravy thickens.
And when the usual row (about food of course)
becomes first storm then sullen silence,
they stare at laps, tie knots in napkins.
The afternoon drifts on towards a dusk.

In time the mother will experiment
with polenta and foreign holidays.
One sister will prowl the underground
writing on billboards, this degrades women.
And the other sister will be dead; but
for now, she is the centre of the world
and nothing can change without her say so.
Her obstinacy is beautiful,
like a swan welded to the river,
nothing can make her alter course:
she has said she will not eat and that is that.

And that is all some years ago, though
nothing happens suddenly. At sea
the future extends below the horizon
and no amount of able-seaman willingness
can make it go away. In real life,
sailors thirst for port. Once docked
they dissipate through darkened alleyways,
search out whatever beds they can,
and drown themselves in acts of love.

David Lukens

Climmer Apologises to Guillemot

I don’t feel guilty. But when the guillemot
stares at me, I feel impelled to explain why
I’m half-way down the cliff with her egg
in my hand. It’s for breakfast, I apologise.
Farming doesn’t bring in much money
and I can barely afford to feed my family.

She continues to look, unblinking, the eggs
in my sack suddenly heavy on my back.
These? I falter. They’ll be sold to the Sugar House.
You wouldn’t believe how many it needs each day
to purify sugar. When she still regards me
I shift in my halter. Wonder if I can tug the rope

without her noticing. Signal that I want raising.
I try again a final time. If there’s any left, I plead,
they’re sent to the tanneries. They need the whites
to soften hides. And the shells? They refine wine.
She gazes, considering, and then moves so fast
that rocks dislodge. Crash down around me.

When I lose my footing, she doesn’t apologise.

Susan Darlington

The Amber Frog

When it could move in space,
leaping from branch to branch of ancient trees
it was confined in time: imprisoned
in a narrow cell four months by five -
scant room in which to grow,
to eat, to mate, to die.
Master of three dimensions
slave of the fourth.

That changed when one athletic leap
landed in tree sap, thick and sticky.
More sap covered it and robbed
those long elastic legs of motion,
lungs of air, ending all flickerings of life.
But sap, set hard, preserves.
Confined in space, the frog
was now released in time
to surge past the dying
of the tree that killed it,
outlive the forest, witness
from its yellow stone the death
of dinosaurs, birth of seas.

Making its way to our time, it found
a new celebrity. Traded, treasured,
stared at by a thousand curious eyes
the frog remains inscrutable.
People may own it, for a while
but they are trapped within
their cage of decades.
The frog will travel on.

Tim Taylor

Come on, The Colliers!

A lone bugler occasionally
blasts out the right note,
where once brass bands

played, loud and proud,
to accompany striking
miners back to work.

Home of the Charlton brothers,
Wor Jackie Milburn.
Inside the little stadium

Ashington’s few hundred
passionate in their support.
A first-half breakaway

by the men from Yorkshire
is enough. No one alive
to remember the Third Division (North).

I get talking to a former keeper.
He once won the FA Vase
but now needs hips replacing.

Will a new train line push the town
back up the league? Too early to say,
they reckon in the Pigeon and Whippet.

Greg Freeman

Ikea

Vacant eyed,
Like sheep they flock
Through the modern museum
From one brand new exhibit to the next
Dressed in leisurewear
T-shirts bearing the names of American cities or universities
Or fictitious clothing companies along with the year of their inception

They congregate at the mid-point cafe
To numb the beginnings of a feeling of hunger
With the vague exoticism of Swedish cuisine
They push their food to the table
On strange, upright, tray laden trollies
Like hospital patients
With catheter bags on wheels

Sufficiently fed, they move along
Anaesthetised by dreams of altered domestic landscapes
Pondering the play off between style, practicality and comfort
They shuffle past furnishings, accessories and ornamentation
Determining dimensions with paper measuring tapes
Jotting down notes with plain wooden pencils

Outside, light rainfall is illuminated by orange streetlights
As cars roll out of the free parking
Stuffed with flat packs and tomorrow’s bric a brac.

Mike O’Brien

The Gift

When I interview the
great Leonard Cohen,
he remarks on my stammer.

Yeah, I sigh, it’s a pain,
though I think it’s why
I became a writer.

Then, he says, perhaps
you should think of it
as a gift from God.

I glare at him in irritation.
How dare he try to
sanctify my affliction!

I’d’ve preferred a
typewriter, I mutter.

Graham Lock

Old friends visit the Yorkshire Sculpture Park

Nothing is quite what it seems.
Sophie Ryder’s gargantuan hare
spreads human fingers on the ground;
in her bronze lap, a pubic frizz of autumn leaves.
Frost casts white ruts on the muddy path;
winter sun throws long shadows
of a couple, linking elbows.
They wonder if, thirty years ago,
there was a moment when
they might have touched each other.
But this intimacy speaks only
of middle-aged knees,
and a forgotten walking stick.
There are no promises to break.
They talk of other matters.

Hannah Stone

A Simple Twist

Replication error,
so simple, so savage.
The Chinese whisper,
a message is altered.
I see the beauty,
in this ugly truth.
I am it,
it is me.
Together forever,
bound by nuance,
to our final breath.

Alan Davies

Contributors

Paul Brough is a Yorkshire based illustrator. You can see more of his artwork here

Bob Chiswick is a retired musician, manager and lecturer and has written, performed and recorded songs for over 55 years. Many songs were originally poems and over the last 25 years he has sporadically let some of them loose in the poetic world where a smattering have had the ‘published’ tag attached. He writes about a wide range of issues, but has avoided underwater basket weaving as he knows nothing about it. He also has a published novel to his name.

Susan Darlington‘s poetry regularly explores the female experience through nature-based symbolism. It has been published in Mslexia, Northern Gravy, Pennine Platform, One Hand Clapping, and Ink Sweat & Tears among others. Her pamphlets include Never Wear White (Alien Buddha Press, 2022) and The Oracle of Snails (Hedgehog Press, upcoming). Follow her on Bluesky at ‪@susandarlington.bsky.social

Alan Davies grew up in South Wales and now lives in Bath where he contributes to the Stanza 25 Poetry Group. He explores ideas fuelled by imagination and experience with key inspirations being the influence of industrial landscape and culture as well as living with chronic leukaemia.

Greg Freeman is news and reviews editor for the poetry website Write Out Loud. At the age of 70 his life changed with a move to Northumberland from Surrey. He now believes he was always a northerner at heart, and is proud of the landscape and history of his adopted land.

David Harmer was born in 1952. He lives in Doncaster and is best known as a children’s writer with publications from Macmillans Children’s Books and Small Donkey Press. His work for the Grown Ups is sometimes published in magazines. He also performs with Ray Globe as The Glummer Twins, often at the Edinburgh Fringe.

Graham Lock began writing poems in the late ’60s, had a handful published in little magazines, and edited a small anthology, In Dark Mill Shadows. Then he spent the next 40+ years writing about music. Now he’s writing poems again—and has had a handful published in little magazines!

David Lukens lives in Wiltshire. He started writing late, initially novels for young adults, then poetry. His work has been published in magazines such as Acumen, Butcher’s Dog and Under the Radar. His pamphlet One Brief Wave won the Cheltenham Poetry Festival’s first pamphlet competition and was published in 2021.

Mike O’Brien enjoys writing and performing poetry, some of his work can be found at zoomburst.substack.com. He has also dabbled in publishing other poets, who can be found at sixtyoddpoets@substack.com. His favourite poets include David Bowie and that funny looking chap with the moustache out of Sparks.

Hannah Stone is a poet, editor and convenor of literary activities including the Leeds Song festival poets-composers forum. She is currently editor of Dream Catcher journal and collaborates with composers. She has had nearly 450 poems published, including as poem of the week in the Guardian in 2023.

Tim Taylor has published two poetry collections, Sea Without a Shore, and LifeTimes, both with Maytree Press, and two novels. His poems have appeared in magazines such as Acumen, Orbis and Pennine Platform and various anthologies. Tim lives in Meltham near Huddersfield and teaches Ethics part-time at Leeds University. - https://wordpress.com/view/timwordsblog.wordpress.com

All contributors retain copyright of their work.

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Poems are still being reviewed but we are hoping to get final selections, and communications, out by the end of the year. Thank you for your patience.

There will be a regular issue of The Fig Tree at the start of the New Year, our 12th one, marking two years of getting your poetry out there.

In other news, the date for the 2025 Anthology launch has been booked in for Saturday, April 11th, with an online reading on Sunday 19th April. I will be emailing all the contributors in the next week or so concerning the publication and launches. I’m typesetting it now and it looks really good.

Finally, a reminder that the Crooked Spire Press sale is on until December 31st, with savings on collections and bundles.

Have a great Christmas and New Year!

Tim

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Welcome to the eleventh issue of The Fig Tree.

This issue’s Featured Poet is Victoria Gatehouse, who I have heard read her poetry a couple of times recently, and whose fine nature-inspired collection The Hawthorn Bride was published last year by Indigo Dreams. I was delighted when she agreed to provide some new poems for this issue.

At The Fig Tree we try to be as inclusive as we can in the poets we publish, but of course we are only able to publish what is submitted, and the majority of the submitted poems have so far been by men. I have seen this noted by other publications, despite the fact that I see as many women as men at poetry events, workshops and so on. In an effort to equalise the ratio of men / women poets published, we will be producing a special issue next spring featuring all women contributors, including editing, artwork and writing the forward. See The Fig Tree webpage for more information on how to submit poems for that issue.

The week I write this has seen the death of two outstanding and influential poets. Firstly Tony Harrison, the Leeds poet whose infamous poem V outraged the conservative right when it was broadcast in the 1980s, but whose poetry went far beyond that. He never compromised his principles in his work, and this has left a fine legacy. Equally influential but very different in style was the Liverpool poet Brian Patten, who also died this week aged 79. Along with fellow Liverpudlians Roger McGough and Adrian Henri, like Harrison they were all working class but grew their reputations alongside the Mersey Beat music scene, which was obviously spearheaded by the Beatles. Music and poetry merged (McGough was in the pop group The Scaffold along with Paul McCartney’s brother Mike) but Patten was able to create accessible and beautifully written poems that influenced so many of his and subsequent generations. The world of English poetry has lost two under-acknowledged giants.

Ian Parks’ The Sons of Darkness and the Sons of Light, from our imprint Crooked Spire Press, was launched in October, and a Fig Tree Coal Mining Anthology will be out this month with a launch in Doncaster and another online. Ian will be reading at a few places over the next few months, so if you missed the launch events you can catch up with him as he tours Yorkshire, and maybe beyond, over the next few months. You can check all relevant dates and venues, and keep track of Matthew Paul’s readings too, at crookedspirepress.com/events.

Once again I hope you enjoy reading this issue as much as I did collating it. You are joining over 500 people who are reading the webzine on a regular basis.

Thank you all.

Tim Fellows, Editor

Contributors: Nick Allen, Tim Buescher, Oliver Comins, Susan Darlington, Victoria Gatehouse, David Lukens, Alison Stark, Clare Starling, Tim Taylor, Rod Whitworth, Rodney Wood and Paul Brough.

The Fig Tree Featured Poet – Victoria Gatehouse

Buck Moon

That was the summer my son grew antlers,
a creature of testosterone and light,
suddenly powerful.

There was so much he had to outrun -
the echoing length
of school corridors,
the nowhere streets of this town,
the soft ground of home.

I stood back
as he pounded and pounded
the earth
as velvet branched wild
from his head

a scaffold
for stars to latch on to,
rich and thrumming with blood,
hardening to the forest-call of autumn.

Victoria Gatehouse

The Dam and the Goats

Remember that October day
we took the path to the reservoir,
how the dam stopped us dead
in our tracks,
the looming vastness of the thing,
the colossal weight of water
it was holding back.

A surface with so little to give.
I couldn’t get past
the blank and unscalable grey.

You said,
if we were ibex goats,
we would find a slow
slant way of moving,
a sheer strength to lean against,
the slimmest of fissures
a foothold
for our rubbery soles.

And yes, stones might go skittering
from the near-vertical
faces of dams,
but we would keep on
hoof by shining hoof,
we would twist our bones sideways
to lick
the life-giving salt from the stone.

Victoria Gatehouse

Thunder Moon

quick summer storm     this charge that builds
all afternoon     strange violet glimmers
beneath the trees     the air curiously alive
each cloud     with its bellyful of waiting

the potential between ground     and sky
has grown too large     travelling from ground up
or maybe cloud down     I could never remember
and when it comes     shock wave of rain

my son strides in     luminous as nitrogen
he is speaking the language of electrons
soon he’ll leave home     study physics with those
who understand     the ions behind the strike

travelling from ground up     or maybe cloud down
I could never remember     but I’ll remember
his moment of explaining     this breath of petrichor
and stone-gleam     this white-hot forking of light

Victoria Gatehouse

Victoria Gatehouse is a scientist, poet and children’s writer. She lives with her family in West Yorkshire. Victoria’s poems have been broadcast on BBC radio and widely published in magazines and anthologies. Her pamphlet The Mechanics of Love (Smith | Doorstop) was selected as a ‘Laureate’s Choice’ by Carol Ann Duffy. Victoria is a three-times winner of The Poetry News Members’ Competition, and was highly commended for the Gingko Prize, 2023. Her first poetry collection, The Hawthorn Bride, is published by Indigo Dreams and her debut collection for children Aardvark Day is forthcoming in 2026 with The Emma Press.

The Fig Tree Selection – November 2025

This section features up to ten poems, with a maximum of one per poet per issue.

when ordinary people visit stately homes

with their high ceilings and ornate furnishings
we may gasp or exclaim but don’t kid yourself
it is not awe or jealousy    no    we are astonished
at the entitled wastefulness of it    all the damn
space you take up     all that air     the extravagant
unnecessariness of how you and your ancestors
have lived     of the smug self-satisfied belief that
you somehow deserve it     we are aghast at the ego
and embarrassed for you     uncomprehending
at how uncomprehending you are about how
the rest of us cannot abide your greed     your
flagrant bad taste in so many things     all those
bloody stuffed animals everywhere     your
unwillingness to be part of the common endeavour

Nick Allen

Bolton Abbey

I have been otherwise: glorifying Our Lord.
I have seen the ascetic times.
I have seen the times when monks grew fat
on sheep and land and power.
Now I am romantic, picturesque.
I make the view (pretty).

Rod Whitworth

The Wink

Frances stays behind wearing her sunhat
while I climb toward the Big White Buddha,
its smile already slowing my breath. Halfway up,
my legs call it quits. Gravity gets personal,
the warranty doesn’t cover knees.

I drop onto a stone bench,
shaped like it’s been waiting for me.

A scrap of paper cartwheels past. I catch it:
no pond, no frog, no leap
just the echo of someone trying.
Days of travel for a riddle
I don’t even understand.

Back home, understanding comes with
Alpha Courses, yoga mats, and a TED Talk titled
‘How to Be Still in Seven Steps.’
But here, it is the Buddha’s silence,
a hush that waits while I sweat and burn.
The pilgrims came empty.
I showed up with a camera.

A monk plucks the paper from my hand,
like it means something. A guide nearby yells,
Enlightenment or selfies, choose fast!
My fingers go for my phone before I even think.

Then the Buddha’s gaze fractures
a wink? A trick of light?
For a second, I’m not a tourist,
but just a question
the mountain holds in its breath.

On the way down, the steps
grow wings, each one a feather
plucked from the Buddha’s smile.
At the bottom, Frances is right where I left her:
arms folded, sunhat slightly askew,
holding two bottles of water like she won them.
She grins: Nice view? I nod.
She takes my hand. Let’s go home.

The coach door sighs open
to take us back to the ship,
back to our small, floating world.
We’re just passing through,
like everyone else—quietly,
with receipts.

Rodney Wood

Previously a fishpond

At this time of day,
most birds gather
at the eastern end
of the old fishpond.
They’re here to catch
humans. We bring
bags of food—a mix
of nuts and seeds,
or just breadcrumbs.
Ducks in particular
are appreciative,
the raucous greeting
of their wet laughter
echoing around us.

Oliver Comins

Paradise Lost

One book a week, all twelve from October
to St Lucy’s day and the ways of God
justified to man — or at least to us —
a long-owed filial duty discharged
to a sightless mother, who saw too well
how man’s first disobedience spoiled the show.

Each Thursday in her muggy sitting room
I read, she listened, blind eyes travelling
back and forth the ranks of fallen angels,
her heart as ever with the underdogs.

And then we’d talk about free-will and sin
and I would make the tea and remonstrate
with her belief that all will be redeemed.

We talked of Milton’s daughter, woken up
at dawn to write the lines remembered
from the night and wondered: was it freely given,
this duty to her father, God or both?

A few months later when the doctor said:
Look, your mother is perfectly able
to decide and we must all respect that,
I sat beside her in a sweltering ward
surrounded by machines that beeped and flashed
and marvelled at her quiet resolve as she
through Eden took her solitary way.

David Lukens

Taxidermied Fox and Farm Equipment, Elsecar Antiques Centre

Even now – hedged in by thresher,
snare, plough – you’re tensed for escape.
One foot raised as you survey the terrain,
girders an echo of your russet fur.

Ready to flee the pop of engine.
The snap of metal jaws. A cruel joke
to trap you where soil begets dust,
a tamed memory baked on steel.

Decades must have passed since
you last stalked the fields. But tell me:
can you still feel barley stubble
under your paws in the split second

before you wake to stale air,
a sky that blazes with electric stars?

Susan Darlington

Feria

The lorry shook,
a dreadful clatter,
a roving, frantic eye momentarily rose
above the open corner of the truck.
Confused, I thought I saw a hoof,
then realised it was horns
that crested, sank, again, again,

then stuck
and for a frightful minute hung,
jammed between the metal struts,
head wedged,
strained side to side,
till horns were grasped,
twisted rough.

And the bull fell.

Still, it tried to vault its fate,
the horns, the head, the eye,
thrust down,
each time undone,
to pounding brass on civic stage,
hoards in red and white kerchiefs
perched on every ledge and plinth

to watch the waiting posse strut,
one poised cow girl, long plait
swung mid-back,
among the leathered men
sporting jaunty trilbies,
shirts of floral, paisley patch,
some wore spurs on heels,

dug in salt and peppered flanks
of stocky, restless mounts
who’d herd the wild, crazed beasts,
wound up by hours
confined in steel
to arena and corrida
through barricaded, festive streets.

They waited,
as we waited,
craned to see
the exit of the six
and as the moment neared,
small children wove through legs
to get a better view,

no matter barriers could be charged.
rammed with unleashed power,
no matter gaps were wide,
slight bodies pressed part through,
they seemed to take the fatal risk
simply,
as fair due.

As the bolt was raised
the lorry door swung free,
the compact six burst out,
an instant bolt past cheering throng
along their route
and gone,
valiant in their doom.

Alison Stark

Stainless

Once, my sister found her dancing round the living room to Bronski Beat
and despite this being the time of her decline, it was entirely beautiful to me.

Uprooted, sent to work for her Grandmother aged 12,
shoots and branches trimmed, trapped in white Sunday gloves.

A blemish polished out by a _______ stepmother,
all these cuts and buffs left the twinkling truth.

She was small, hard and shiny; functional, fragrant -
like an oiled ball bearing in a bag of marbles.

School reports reveal a child at the top of their class in all subjects.
She never expressed bitterness at the loss of this curriculum -

turned her short arms and bright eyes to domestic perfection,
easing the emancipation of wealthier women.

Her own perpetual movement bore the wear
of backstage business in the houses of entrepreneurs.

At home, her stairs were immaculate. Everything clean, clean,
clean. She did not cook.

There was no dust on her Coulport ladies, Hummel cherubs, Bang and Olufsen
television. Her Mordaunt Short speakers were impeccable.

The coronation of Elizabeth the second
took place in her living room, as did the landing on the moon.

Tim Buescher

Undercurrents

His face was like the surface of a placid sea.
It moved, but with the languid sway of wavelets.
No breakers hurled themselves upon the sand,
no crests of white tainted the smoothness of that water,
nor was his voice more that the ghost of a sea breeze.
The storms we saw him weather made no impact on it.
We marvelled at the strength that could absorb such blows,
preserving calm, presenting still
the same unruffled visage as before.
We did not see the currents churning in the deep,
the forces that made war inside him
and yet never broke the skin. We thought we saw
right through the limpid upper layer to the man within.
We were deceived, and so we learned too late
that he was drowning.

Tim Taylor

A Day at the Crazy Golf

We’re on a never-ending walk
from the source of the Thames
all the way to the barrier.

When we set out you were a child;
now you’re tall and hunched,
kicking your way along the towpath.

At this dingy waterside caff
I turn and find you’ve grown again,
wolfing burgers and Sprite.

Late winter. They have Crazy Golf –
mildewed cement and peeling windmills,
half-submerged in rainwater.

It’s the cusp of fun –
a hint of primary-coloured years
sparks the dulled urge to play.

Out of the shabby shed we drag
a crate of faded balls,
a bin rammed with clubs.

At the seventh hole
you set the ball down in the wet,
raise the club for a strapping whack –

smash up a plume of spray –
hit the target for a hole in one –
laugh captured on a camera-phone.

Three of us in this crazy game,
swans on the grey water,
and no one else for miles.

Clare Starling

Contributors

Nick Allen is a poet and trade union activist living in West Yorkshire. His poems have appeared in many anthologies - most recently No Net Ensnares Me edited by Ian Humphreys and Apocalyptic Landscape edited by Steve Ely. His four pamphlets and one collection of poetry are available here: linktr.ee/nickallenpoet

Paul Brough is a Yorkshire based illustrator. You can see more of his artwork here

Tim Buescher is a recovering academic (with at least one toe still in the water) from Beverley, East Yorkshire. He is in the process of establishing his own independent writing and research practice. You can find him at cartographink.uk

Oliver Comins returned to The Midlands recently after living in the Thames Valley then West London for many years. His poetry is published quite widely and collected by The Mandeville Press, Anvil Press and Templar Poetry. A second full-collection is currently seeking publication.

Susan Darlington‘s poetry regularly explores the female experience through nature-based symbolism. It has been published in Mslexia, Northern Gravy, Pennine Platform, One Hand Clapping, and Ink Sweat & Tears among others. Her pamphlets include Never Wear White (Alien Buddha Press, 2022) and The Oracle of Snails (Hedgehog Press, upcoming). Follow her on Bluesky at ‪@susandarlington.bsky.social

David Lukens lives in Wiltshire. He started writing late, initially novels for young adults, then poetry. His work has been published in magazines such as Acumen, Butcher’s Dog and Under the Radar. His pamphlet One Brief Wave won the Cheltenham Poetry Festival’s first pamphlet competition and was published in 2021.

Alison Stark started writing poetry in 2022. She was a winner in Guernsey Literary Festival’s International Poetry Competition 2024, judged by Paul Muldoon. She was shortlisted for the Yeovil Literary Prize in Poetry 2025. Her poems have been published in The Fig Tree Anthology 2024 and in The High Wolds Poetry Collections of recent years. Alison lives in East Yorkshire and works as a doctor in the NHS.

Clare Starling started writing poetry when her son was diagnosed with autism in 2020. Her pamphlet Magpie’s Nest won the Frosted Fire First Pamphlet Award 2023. She particularly loves writing about nature, and how neurodiversity can give different perspectives on the world. www.clarestarling.com

Tim Taylor has published two poetry collections, Sea Without a Shore, and LifeTimes, both with Maytree Press, and two novels. His poems have appeared in magazines such as Acumen, Orbis and Pennine Platform and various anthologies. Tim lives in Meltham near Huddersfield and teaches Ethics part-time at Leeds University. https://wordpress.com/view/timwordsblog.wordpress.com

Rod Whitworth was born in Ashton-under-Lyne in 1943 and has done a number of jobs including teaching maths (for 33 years) and conducting traffic censuses (the job that kept him on the streets). He now lives in the Garden City (aka Oldham) and is still tyrannised by commas.

Rodney Wood worked in London and Guildford. His poems have appeared
recently in The High Window, The Pomegranate (London), Black Nore Review and Seventh Quarry. His debut pamphlet, Dante Called You Beatrice, appeared in 2017. He is MC of a monthly open mic night and blogs at https://rodneywood.co.uk/

All contributors retain copyright of their work.

You can find more information on the launch, and the workshops that accompany it, at their facebook page. There will soon be an opportunity for all poets to get involved in the next round of this project.

Following on from two stunning performances by Ian Parks and his guests at the launches of his collection The Sons of Darkness and the Sons of Light, Ian will be at York on 21st November together with Matthew Paul, and in Hull on 29th November. For more details go to crookedspirepress.com/events

Before then, we have the launch of The Fig Tree Coal Mining Anthology - in-person in Doncaster on Saturday, November 15th and online on Tuesday, November 18th. In addition to the contributors there are open mic slots available in Doncaster - get in touch if you want to read a mining or mining community poem at that event. The book is available to pre-order now and will be shipped before the launch. More details at crookedspirepress.com/events

Finally I would like to strongly recommend that you read Ian Harker’s new pamphlet Gain Access, deserved winner of the Poetry Business International Book and Pamphlet competition. Ian’s previous pamphlet was published by Yaffle Press and he has appeared in The Fig Tree too. I will review Gain Access on my personal poetry site soon but in the meantime pop over to Ian's shop and grab a copy at the absolute bargain price of £6.

Anyway, less waffle and more Yaffle. Here are the promised poems from Linger, with thanks to Mark Connors and Yaffle for providing them.

We wait for cleaning in my father’s house

They say that ninety percent of dust is human cells.
We flick it away with microbial cloths,
feather dusters bought in discount stores.

My father carries his sacks of dust lightly, ready
to give all of it away for a good night’s sleep.
My mother grinds it into her pain, lays it out for all to see.

There’s a clock turning in the corner where no clock stands.
The hands of it are thick with a thousand days.

How close to dust we live our lives.
How it buries us.

Liz McPherson

Seeding

The wild garlic came early this year, its stars spreading their allium scent under the trees. Some call it wolf-garlic but it is named for the bear, Ursinum. I wear the flowers, make soups daily, rub its juices on my withering skin. Waiting has become my penance. In spring the bear comes, sleep-heavy with her cubs, feasts on the leaves, digs bulbs, lazily throating them as she un-dies in a freshening sun. I weave a wreath into my hair but my lover’s bed is a place where a child with no face screams. My erratic feet skip steps. I no longer hope for spring.

Liz McPherson

Liz McPherson’s debut pamphlet, Shivering in the Wind, was published by Yaffle’s Nest in October 2024. She is a co-organiser at Rhubarb, who run an open mic, a Stanza and a poetry book club in Shipley, Bradford. Her work has been published in online and print journals as well as being placed or long/shortlisted in competitions including the Poetry Society Stanza Competition.

Grass

Linger over a hand-sized patch of green,
contemplate each blade
in the root of the matter.

Hold a finger on a spikelet,
feel it fold under stress,
make a slow return to the dance.

Tufts in the west are similar
to tufts in the east,
growing like there will always be green.

Sandra Noel

Tugging on the hard-wires of tradition

We’ve moved our Christmas Eve floor-picnic to Winter solstice, and I can’t decide if the windows are welcoming this darking night or pushing it away. The first of your twelve logs is finally taking hold and we pass an array of brightening veg between our crossed legs. Family voted best crisps of the year, pears and pickles, that Wensleydale we saw being made in Hawes. We’ll share stockings on Christmas Eve instead this year, nosh on posh chocolates. I’d like an Icelandic Jólabókaflóð in front of the fire, a pile of books as big as the Christmas Day queue for KFC in Japan. Oh, and while we’re at it, I want to run around the block with our suitcases on New Year’s Eve. I’ll wear red underwear for love like the Peruvians, eat twelve grapes at midnight, wish for a year of together travels.

Sandra Noel

Sandra Noel is a poet from the island of Jersey. Her passion for nature and the ocean weaves its way through her work. She has poems placed and commended in various magazines and anthologies such as Ink Sweat and Tears, Black Nore Review, Prole, Strix, Skylight 47, Yaffle publications and on Guernsey buses. Sandra’s debut collection ‘Into The Under’ was published in July 2024 by Yaffle’s Nest, Yaffle Press.

Google: Sandra Noel Poet, Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/sandra.noel.526

I drift from one anxiety to another

and my blood pressure is trending again
after good news from my Hba1c test
and I‘m back to worrying about salt
not glucose spikes. Look, a spider’s web
is taut between branches, laced like spun sugar
and two swans I named Brenda and Eddie
after a couple in a Billy Joel song
are drifting under the swing bridge, in sync,
like how we both walk occasionally
when I’m not unravelling in front of you.
It’s shaping up to be a good day.
The sun is seeping up above the hills
and a kingfisher skirrs into view.

Mark Connors

Orange ball on white canvas

You visit your old house again, back to Low Lane and your formative years, your gut in a fizz as you walk down the back street. It’s been snowing, and it’s laying. You watch yourself play kerby with John and Paul, boys with good Catholic names like yours, aiming your throw for the sweet spot of the kerb edge so the light orange ball, your dad bought from Mace, will arc itself back to you on the very same trajectory, the ball so light you could swerve a free kick into the net like Tony Currie with your eight-year-old right foot. Every time you see footage of an old winter fixture, an orange ball on snow before the days of under-pitch-heating, you remember your ball, its literal and unbearable lightness of being, in all that fetid trauma of your youth. You enter your old back yard, see the tiny talon prints a blue tit once left circa 1979, its impossibly light weight making its mark on your white-out-world. You look through a rotting frame to your father at the sink, his mouth open in silent song as he sings along to Radio Eireann while he peels the spuds on pages of the newspaper he read that morning before preparing Sunday dinner. You watch him morph into a stranger who wonders why there’s a 55-year-old man standing in her yard in thick snow, staring through her new kitchen window.

Mark Connors

Mark Connors is a widely published poet and novelist from Leeds. His debut pamphlet, Life is a Long Song was published by OWF Press in 2015. His first poetry collection, Nothing is Meant to be Broken was published by Stairwell Books (2017). His second, Optics (2019), third, After (2021) and joint collection with his wife, Gill, The Where We Were (2024) were all published by Yaffle. www.markconnors.co.uk.

The Fig Tree will be running a Special Issue (or maybe issues) in Spring 2026 featuring poems by women. The ratio of submissions we get is a bit weighted towards men (and I’ve seen that mentioned for other poetry magazines), and hopefully this will balance the output up a little, and maybe encourage the long term submissions to be more even. For more details on how to submit, go here . The issue will also be illustrated, curated and edited by women. If we are oversubscribed we will consider two issues, and/or use the best poems that don’t make the selection in the regular issues next year.

The launch of Ian Parks’ The Sons of Darkness and the Sons of Light, published by our imprint Crooked Spire Press, is finally here this Saturday, 11th October, at 2pm in Doncaster, at the Unitarian Church. For all information go to the Crooked Spire Events Page - the event is free to attend with refreshments available for a small donation to the Unitarian Church. There’s also an online reading on Tuesday, 21st October. Both events also feature high quality guest poets.

The online reading will be via Zoom and is also a free event, but you need to book your place in advance to access the Zoom link.

The next Crooked Spire Press publication and launch events are also imminent. The Anthology based on the Fig Tree Coal Mining Specials will be launched in Doncaster on Saturday 15th November at 2pm, followed by an online reading a few days afterwards. Full details will be available next week on the Crooked Spire web site. The book will be available to order before the event.

I hope to see you at an event, in-person or virtually!

Welcome to the tenth issue of The Fig Tree.

Our Featured Poet this month is Adam Strickson, who has had poems in both the regular Fig Tree and the Coal Mining special issue.

I met Adam at The Fig Tree Anthology launch in Doncaster. It was a fabulous event and I'm looking forward to repeating it for future anthologies.

If you are interested, I produced a short guide on how I select for the Fig Tree (with tips that might be useful when you submit anywhere) and a brief review of each of the poems. I won't be doing that every time! You can find this on my personal poetry blog, Tim Fellows Poetry, also on Substack.

If you've read the guidelines for submission, you will notice that I've included a “no AI” policy. This may seem obvious, but AI is increasingly becoming a shortcut to content creation that not only bypasses true creativity and humanity, but has also utilised the work of thousands of writers who have received no credit or payment. I do understand that basically we build on what we read in our heads when we create, but we have usually paid for the books and are unlikely to have read, and be able to instantly access, everything that we could ever find online. In The Fig Tree, I don't use anti-AI or anti-plagiarism software because,I hope, at least for now, that I could recognise so-called AI slop if I read it. Also, I'd simply be feeding it to another algorithm... Anyway, one of the sites I sometimes submit work too has added another policy. On that site, you review four other poems as part of the deal that lets you post yours. They discovered that contributors were feeding other people's poems into “AI Review” software to generate reviews so they didn't have to. I can't stop people putting poems from The Fig Tree into AI, but please don't. I also noticed when creating the PDF files for the Crooked Spire books that Adobe's AI wants to read your document and “summarise it”. Too lazy to read this? Let AI steal the document and give you a garbage summary of it!

Substack allows AI scraping by default – I've turned it off but it's not 100% effective. If I found a way of publishing that guaranteed to block AI, I might switch.

If you have any thoughts on this, please comment below the article. I'm interested in any valid counter-arguments.

Our imprint Crooked Spire Press continues to grow, having published Matthew Paul's The Last Corinthians we will be following up with Ian Parks' The Sons of Darkness and the Sons of Light in October and a Fig Tree Coal Anthology in November, which will include poems from the special issues but also others that have not appeared online.

Once again I hope you enjoy reading this issue as much as I did collating it. You are joining over 500 people who are reading the webzine on a regular basis.

Tim Fellows, Editor

Contributors: Fiona Cahill, Oliver Comins, William Coniston, Mike Everley, Lisa Falshaw, Emma Lee, Sarah Raybould, Chris Sewart, Clare Starling, Adam Strickson, Anna Whitehouse and Paul Brough.

The Fig Tree Featured Poet – Adam Strickson

Early February, window view

The sludgy path,
the wizened elder.

Out of the air, light as mizzle,
small birds flit onto its twigs.

They rise and fall all morning,
bounce off the nubs and stubs,
beak for insects, pick
at browning wheels of apple –

a male coal tit, with a streetwise
white stripe that divides its topknot

two rival robins, a dunnock
that dibs in the seedfall

a male chaffinch that seems
more colourful than a chaffinch
should be, the green-backed
beauty of the female, engineer
of nests bound with spiders’ webs.

A goldfinch, weeks too early,
swings his pants, his sway and bob
from one side to the other
a comic pivot of display,
ready whenever she is.

The window glass separates me
from this calming busyness of birds
and I am slow to want to go outdoors,
to let the side-by-side language
of living things come into me.

Adam Strickson

The poor man's overcoat

In the end, sooner or later, and usually later,
he goes under the railway into the woods
that he means to visit more regularly.

What does he find away from the stamped path
beyond the steel fence and the quad bike ruts?
Always moss, and a slight widening of his eyes.

Sometimes shelves of Turkey Tail fungus
and once a tawny owl perched in daylight.
Always the enticement of ground sounds,
each step a polka of possibility.

He may be surprised by a scrap of carpet
or a stackable chair, because this is the secret place
of the last gasp of childhood
before everywhere is enclosed.

Adam Strickson

Being and Breath

I hoick you up to the moor
and leave you in the Nab's hoot and whistle,
stranded among boulders, fretting the mist,
until the wind knifes through to lay the day open.
You dive down, reckless for the free-fall
that blends body and earth, immerses you in a blur
of waist-high reeds and rush. Your headlong feet
flush a mountain hare. It flies across the eyes' sweep
before it fades into upland shift and sway.

This is the bar-bend and fetter-break that takes you
from office chair and constant screen
to the high and deep, making you a peat-astronaut
whose heavy boots defy gravity in the listening glory
where, without bearings, you claim those first steps.

Adam Strickson

Adam Strickson is a community artist, poet and PhD tutor at the University of Leeds. He lives in the hamlet of Wellhouse, near Huddersfield, where he enjoys walking, wildflowers, local history and gardening. Adam’s three books are published by Wrecking Ball, Graft and Valley Press. He has contributed articles to journals on subjects ranging from Japanese cinema to Greek tragedy. Lead artist with 6 million+ Charitable Trust, Adam is currently working with Balbir Singh Dance Company and on projects with refugees from 11 countries. He is something of a specialist in Chinese and Japanese theatre, lanterns and giant puppets.

The Fig Tree Selection – September 2025

This section features up to ten poems, with a maximum of one per poet per issue.

Extra Time

The frantic goalie gestures with his gloves,
hurting from his last heroic dive.

The team sweat, some substituted off.
Close ups show them looking

over their shoulders – the pitch
seems to have grown bigger,

there’s gaps the size of graveyards
in the goal-face grapple. The crowd howl.

Here, on the edge of the sofa, under
the fairy lights I put up to make things

more cheerful, I recall that
if it wasn’t for the clinical execution

of my surgeon, the whistle would have blown
for me, but we are still playing –

there are still seven minutes to go
and anything could happen.

Clare Starling

Lines To My Father

Nailless fingers, the penance of the poor.
Childhood Ricketts and lack of nutrition.
It was a miracle that you survived.

Teenage probation. Stealing a turnip
from the owner's garden. God's allotment.
Devilment must run in the family.

Then the fall.
Earth's movement.
Deep underground.

Gravity's dark sound. Butties dug you out.
Remember, you penned lines about the squeeze.

The war and radar were your ticket out.
Sleek Catalinas searching for tin fish
across the swell. One later found Bismarck.

Then India, with Box Brownie in hand.
History and tradition. Black and white.
Faded pictures. Sepia memories.

Yet, years later, when you were old and frail,
the x-ray still revealed a darkened spot
on your lung. Coal has a long memory.

Then came the small strokes, with each one taking
a part away. Only the shell remained.
Death came as a relief
and as a friend.

Mike Everley

Winding Wheels

At every entrance to a village,
at every site of a former colliery
carnival-coloured wheels rise up
from coal seams. Half sunk,
segmented, frilled by grass,
lit with colour-changing LED lights,
like some fairground ride,
this monument to a destroyed industry,
way of life, community.

Next to busy roads, on roundabouts,
they crouch, where traffic divides,
splinters, winding back to the past,
miners lifted and dropped in a cage,
faces blackened, whites of eyes gleaming
in lamplight, clothes made of coal dust,
the underground in every crease and fold.

23,000 tons a week at Frickley,
job for life, grandfathers, fathers, sons,
“Unity is strength”, “Coal not dole”,
“Support the miners”, out for 8 weeks
at most. No-one predicted a year,
back-to-backs huddled under
pit-heads, shadowed by slag heaps.

Lisa Falshaw

Perseids

We lie on our backs, the grass still warm.
Darkness slides down into the valley,
muffles its sound, yielding to owls.
Air forgets today’s heat, previews
tomorrow’s early freshness and we are
exposed to the southern horizon with light

shouting from the sky, and no competing moon.
The galaxy’s luminous edge pierces our world,
bright pinpoints, billions of unvisited suns.
A silent flash arcs across, as a grain of grit,
remnant of a rock the size of a skyscraper,
burns to nothing in seconds, the universe unconcerned.

William Coniston

Dazzle

We plan our departure to catch the sunrise,
leaving the others to sleep while we go east
to stand on the cliff at Bay in lumbering air.

Driving across moorland in the small hours
a trace of moonlight seeps between clouds
before leery darkness shutters the outside in.

By the time we’ve parked at the top of a hill
there’s enough grey dawn to show the path
we’ll take, bushes below and waves beyond.

Out in the open, we lean on a fence and wait.
Even as we wonder if we should have come
the Sun is actually there, unfastening the sky.

The moment when bleak gives way to bright
is as good as we’d hoped and better, perhaps,
than we deserve—day beginning with dazzle.

Later, we eat warm bread from a Whitby baker,
share a bag of fresh strawberries and that flask
of filtered water you bring on every journey.

We linger beside the East Pier Light to watch
two laden trawlers return to port, welcomed
by gulls and the whiff of kipper woodsmoke.

Heading back, we choose the high road again.
Sunshine pursues us, makes the heather glow
and releases scent of purple, musk and peat.

In a crowded street, you decline my suggestion
of coffee and drop me not far from the station.
At this stage, it seems our chance has passed.

But when you say you need to get the morning
done and rest before lunch, I hear the warmth
in your voice and feel your eyes examine me.

Oliver Comins

They Built a Studio Where Once Were Orange Groves

‘It’s all right. It's a mining town in lotus land.’
(Wylie White’s opinion of Hollywood in 'The Last Tycoon' by F. Scott Fitzgerald)

In my trailer I give my agent hell,
then let him paw me on the purple chaise.
Aware of the spittle on his moustache,
aware of my rosary above the basin
set swinging by our motion.

On the set the crew sweat a vast diorama
of Chicago into position; electricians toss dice
against a prop valise; a deft continuity girl
checks her clipboard for green or red
apples in the fruit bowl.

All this gaudy mash of light and frenzy,
shadow and purpose, so that my image
can burn and flicker in thousands of cinemas.
And, like rising floodwaters, nickels and dimes
will seep under doors, spill into profit
and percentage – endure in two sets of meticulous ledgers.

Then one crystal morning,
on a dim and troubled set,
Wardrobe-Larry shares a white line
that floats my disenchantment. And as I drive
to the Brown Derby, I thrill at the starry stop-lights
on Mulholland, let my synapses flare and bones soften.

Now through a crack in my trailer door
I watch myself frantic with laughter, and detect the
soft scent of bruised orange blossom
fearful in the air.

Chris Sewart

Mowing his Lung

TV subtitle: “He was my neighbour. I used to wave to him when he was mowing his lung.”

Suburbia, an overcast day,
rain showers a threat not
yet realised. A neighbour
you only notice when he
washes his car or drags
the lawnmower out
because the noise irritates.
This is where nothing
extraordinary happens.
Where a police car’s
appearance is noticeable.

You are perplexed.
It’s not yet real that you
won’t see the neighbour
again. There’s a tug of guilt,
should you have made
an effort to talk to him,
invite him for a beer
to watch the game?
You meant to, one day.
But he’s run out of days.

The policemen nod, leave.
It’s just a routine enquiry.
The death is unexplained
but not yet suspicious.
It will only be when the site
of death is revealed as the garage
where the lawnmower was kept
and the cause carbon monoxide
poisoning, that they will question
your use of the word “lung”.

Emma Lee

Cloisters

With each slow step
layers of my life drift
onto sacred flagstones
and silence sifts my thoughts,
until only the ones that matter remain.
I find myself in a shadowed sanctuary,
where memories peal like ancient bells
and my heart opens wide—
a prayerbook that longs to be read.

Anna Whitehouse

Rough weather of the cuckoo

Rhythmic creatrix with her shoreline mistress
Thirst salt shattered cliffs and cracked skies
Bog myrtle spiced earth with a hint of citrus
Fuchsia hedges spiked with loosestrife
I fling myself out to dance in the sting
Whirling dervish Queen of the Scairbhín

Fiona Cahill

scairbhín or scaraveen is a particular chaotic spring weather pattern in the west coast of Ireland said to be the rough weather of the cuckoo.

Bone Collector

Fascinated, he poked at the raven’s skull;
goggle-eyes, half-skinned cap, beak intact,
feathers adrift like a tribal headdress.

Carcass raised on a stake, inspected it,
stirred up a squall of flightless ghosts.
How they lunged and bickered, he

danced to catch
those bone-swimmers.
One, two, three, four, five, six.

The beak made a snap, prised open,
still on its hinge, cracked back into place
with a lopsided grin.

I smelt rot, shivers of dead-things,
spectators shrivelling at the sight
of the bone-handler as he

wielded his trophy like a pallbearer,
triumphant,
butterfly stroke bold.

Sarah Raybould

Contributors

Paul Brough is a Yorkshire based illustrator. You can see more of his artwork here

Fiona Cahill is an artist, poet, activist and carer living in South Yorkshire. From a line of Irish single mothers her work explores institutional abuse, politics, grief and the power of the natural world to overcome separation and containment. Fiona was invited to contribute to an ambitious exhibition by The National Museum of Ireland entitled ‘Changing Ireland’ that will open in October 2025.

Oliver Comins returned to The Midlands recently after living in the Thames Valley then West London for many years. His poetry is published quite widely and collected by The Mandeville Press, Anvil Press and Templar Poetry. A second full-collection is currently seeking publication.

William Coniston turned to writing in retirement and shortly before COVID became infected with poetry, from which he has never recovered. He has been published in periodicals and anthologies and recently graduated MA (Creative Writing). His debut collection Bee lines comes out on 20th September with Yaffle.

Mike Everley has had fiction and poetry published in numerous publications including: New Welsh Review, Poetry Wales, Outposts, Cardiff Poet, Undiscovered Poet, Entheoscope, Poetry News (Poetry Society), Lothlorien Online Poetry Journal, 5-7-5 Haiku Online Journal, The Bamboo Hut, Dark Poets Club, Green Ink Poetry, These Pages Sing, The Seventh Quarry and Acumen. He was a member of both the NUJ and the Society of Authors before retirement. Now he focusses on creative writing as a silver scribbler.

Emma Lee’s publications include The Significance of a Dress (Arachne, 2020) and Ghosts in the Desert (IDP, 2015). She co-edited Over Land, Over Sea (Five Leaves, 2015), reviews for magazines and blogs at https://emmalee1.wordpress.com

Lisa Falshaw lives and works in West Yorkshire but dreams constantly of Kefalonia. She has had poems published by Black Bough, Atrium, Dreamcatcher, Dawn Treader, Strix, Fig Tree, Fevers of the Mind, Orbis, Yaffle and Ink Sweat and Tears. Find her on X: @LisaFal Facebook: Lisa Falshaw Instagram: lisafalshawpoet

Sarah Raybould is a poet and GP in the Derbyshire Peak District. She enjoys imagistic and nature writing and uses poetry as a form of reflection within medicine. She has poems published by Public Sector Poetry and wrote and performed a commissioned work for English Touring Opera in 2023.

Chris Sewart lives in Beverley, East Yorkshire. Recent poems have appeared in Fig Tree, Obsessed With Pipework and the Bournemouth Writing Prize 2025 Anthology. He has a short story in Broken Sleep's forthcoming Laurel & Hardy Anthology, Pardon Me, My Ear is Full of Milk. In 2026 he will be Festival Poet at the Stage 4 Beverley Festival - Stage 4 Beverley

Clare Starling started writing poetry when her son was diagnosed with autism in 2020. Her pamphlet Magpie’s Nest won the Frosted Fire First Pamphlet Award 2023. She particularly loves writing about nature, and how neurodiversity can give different perspectives on the world. www.clarestarling.com

Anna Whitehouse is a Birmingham-based writer and university mentor, whose poetry has been published in Black Nore Review and Wildfire Words. In her spare time, she loves exploring the local countryside with her dog and getting stuck in bookshops.

All contributors retain copyright of their work.

This will be Ian's first full collection of poems since the acclaimed Citizens in 2017.

The book will be launched at the Unitarian Church in Doncaster on Saturday October 11th at 2pm, with special guests Susan Darlington, Steve Ely and Laura Strickland, with music by Liam Wilkinson. There will also be an online reading on Tuesday, October 21st with guests including Bob Beagrie and Gaia Holmes.

Go to the Events page on the Crooked Spire Press website for full details.

These are guaranteed to be memorable readings and we are honoured that Ian has agreed to work with us to publish this fabulous collection.

Welcome to the ninth issue of The Fig Tree as we return to our regular issues following the final part of the coal mining special last month.

Our Featured Poet this month is Hull-based poet, writer and performer Matt Nicholson who is about to have his fifth collection, Side-eye, published in August. The poems below are taken from this collection. Matt is also a member of the poetry group The 4 Johns - none of whom are called John.

The first poem after Matt’s, by William Coniston, was chosen around the time when we remember again the events of June 6th, 1944 on the beaches of Normandy. Importantly, it touches on the impact on the soldiers who came back, not just from that battle and that war, but is applicable to all armed conflicts. I was lucky enough to visit Vietnam and see some of the places, artifacts and photographs of that brutal war. As brilliantly told by Bruce Springsteen in Born in the USA, the post-conflict treatment of American soldiers who fought because their country asked them was shameful. We in the UK haven’t covered ourselves in glory either. Sadly, there are people right now who will be candidates for PTSD fighting wars across the world.

On a less depressing topic, the 2024 Fig Tree Anthology, which contains a couple of terrific war poems, is now available to buy at the Crooked Spire Press website. It’s Paypal for now, but please contact us if you want to use bank transfer or cheque. You can also buy Matthew Paul’s new collection The Last Corinthians, which was launched in June. Matthew was the Featured Poet in The Fig Tree back in Issue 4.

Once again I hope you enjoy reading this issue as much as I did collating it. You are joining over 500 people who are reading the webzine on a regular basis.

Thank you all.

Tim Fellows, Editor

Contributors: Angela Arnold, Lorraine Caputo, William Coniston, Lorraine Kipling, Matt Nicholson, David Harmer, Emma Lee, Chris Sewart, John Short, Jeff Skinner, Richard Wilcocks and Paul Brough.

The Fig Tree Featured Poet – Matt Nicholson

Afternoons – I walk beside you

We meet at the limit of the copse,
in this unforgiving land where stress
dumps softened men and makes
them choose new and slow distractions
to insulate their shrunken days.

You have brought your tall black dog
who carries your love in harness,
and I wear boots that still creak,
making us talk of unoiled machines.

The afternoon is ruptured by Airforce jets
while they bank and trespass overhead,
leaving the sky to heal in gentle thunders.

We cross over into the influence of trees.
We judder as the sun’s breath is lost,

as we become comfortably darker.

Matt Nicholson

Visitor (how religions start)

He arrived at peak summer
in a fur-lined wet-suit
and candy-pink bikini briefs.
He had in his possession
an empty suitcase on wheels
and breath that stank like
organic deli rolls, two weeks
too long in the bread-bin.
He sat on the knitted rug
in the outhouse looking in
and every time the ads broke
our favourite show, we’d wave
asking questions behind hands
like, how long is he staying?
Do you think we should feed him?
Is it wrong to hose him down
in the yard in front of neighbours?
But it took the youngest of us
with pink peaches for cheeks
not burdened by the thoughts
of a watching world, to ask
the question no-one else dared.

Matt Nicholson

Didactic

What kind of clouds are those?
they asked, together, from the back,

a finger appearing between the seats,
pointing out of the driver’s window.

They look like Cumulonimbus, he said,
you see the way they climb into the sky?

In the car park, long minutes after,
he had taught them to count the seconds

between the lightning and the thunder,
flash and catastrophe, love and argument.

By the time the rain had eased to a pour,
it was too late for their swimming lesson.

Matt Nicholson

Matt Nicholson is a passionate poet from East Yorkshire. He publishes his fifth collection, Side-eye, on Yaffle Press, this summer. He has been widely published in magazines/journals, and now, as featured poet, in The Fig Tree. Matt’s work is dark and visceral, but also sensitive and heart-wrenchingly honest, leading Helen Mort to describe it “capable of breaking your heart and mending it again”. For information, books, bookings, mentoring, visit www.mattpoet.com

The Fig Tree Selection – July 2025

This section features up to ten poems, with a maximum of one per poet per issue.

More Tea?

I’m alright, thank you, he says,
from his straight-back armchair,
looks down at the half-full cup
he holds in his lap with bony hands,
the pale and brown-spotted skin
so loose it’s like the wrong size
was issued when he joined up.

He remembers the QM Stores
at Catterick, the smell
of serge battledress and canvas,
how the Sergeant Major recited
a clipped description of each item
handed over to be signed for,
a complete outfit from boots up.

How they all grinned and joked
and swapped to get the right size.
How, after six months, with rations,
a bolt-action Lee-Enfield rifle
and seventy-five rounds,
they jumped into thigh-deep sea,
heading for a cratered beach
in wind and a rain of bullets.

How that night he wept for his mates,
because he was alright.

William Coniston

Allium cepa

When I was young I grew an onion—
I was so proud, I peeled it where I stood,
let the paper-white skin drop to the earth,
and bit, full-mouthed, through the fleshy scales
as if it were an apple, and still sweet—
though not as sweet as an apple, yet
it was so fresh, and the sharp tang felt like
life.

Lorraine Kipling

Passions

In faraway times when sex and student politics ruled
you stood apart in our bedsit world with a partner
promised life-long love instead of passing passion
while sounding off at us as a radical republican.

She shared the love and domestic democracy but other
ardours were personal – philately and anything Anglo-Saxon.
Your album was a fish spangled with thousands of scales
and your Masters had a unit on Æthelflæd Lady of Mercia.

Useless when you tried to teach in a school you thought
was a nest of wasps which caused despair though I recall
you believed pragmatism was “a form of bourgeois cowardice”.
Shame you both fled without telling. Lost touch for decades.

After you phoned still grieving her death from cancer we met
at your home barn with a view of Shropshire and Mercian
hillsides to share stories and view stamp collections
showing butterflies flowers and countless national leaders.

You said dealing could go on when a heart got weak
and that sculptors were as good as doctors to keep a man
healthy so concrete was poured into moulds to create
a full-size statue of Æthelflæd for enthroning on a mound.

In faraway times she stood apart as ruler amongst wrangling
royal men her ruthless heart hailed as brave and strong
when blood flowed in rivers and now you are at peace
she remains a warrior receiving the homage of meadow grass.

Richard Wilcocks

family

like the roar of a train now stuck
on passing passing passing

one big hand under the sky with its
two dozen stiff fingers whisking
whisking the air so expertly
these close-clustered wooden musicians
caught hard at work together
moaning fortissimo
tromboning into everyone's sleep

such a groaning of multiple warnings
amid swallop and strumble
and none able to grip
fend off
protect

but father shouts louder than that
and mother wrings yet another cloth
to mop up nothing
but angry air
and the scratchy feel
of everyone's
thoroughly chafed bark

Angela Arnold

What We Did On Our Holidays

Onstage, faces in shadow,
Sandy ghost-lit. I wonder which song

she’s singing? The group’s loose,
a boho focus, lost in playing. Hanging out

at the Caroline Record and Music Bar
this sleeve’s my door to another world:

I imagine them on the road,
between gigs, travelling through the night

in the van. It’s spring, ‘69.
I’m sixteen, anything can happen.

Jeff Skinner

Now the Morn is Several Hours Old

As damp fog lifts
the cathedral bells toll
in a hurried flurry

      People rush on, rush off trolleys
      rush into, out of cafés

            A man walks backwards
            past a church

Jugglers await the change of light
to toss their clubs
before the gnarled traffic

Lorraine Caputo

Arrival of Concrete

The old woman pottered
in a coal-dark house
with an inscrutable history
from before our time;
she’d shout at kids
who messed in the meadow.

Buttercups and poppies
scattered colour
across that wild expanse
where dock leaves
apparently cured nettle stings
and the travellers said
the field contained
cures for most ailments.

Trespassing, we played games
in the cornfield opposite
all mad with summer
but in time, the woman died
and her crumbling house
became a car park
while in the cornfield
five hundred new houses.

John Short

Facing the future

It’s an August morning and I’m nearly nine
with Grandad Ben in his dusty Vauxhall
leaving Upper Welland for Marlbank Road.

Just over there, a new petrol-station,
bright concrete blocks, shiny asphalt
the pumps standing in line like soldiers.

White globes declare a blue logo
we slow for a moment, Ben examines
the unreadable sign, F-I-N-A.

Feener or Finer? Than what I wonder?
He twists his neck, an old scar shines
above the collar of yesterday’s shirt

and a gardening jacket still scented
with summer bonfires. It’s only petrol he laughs,
revving the engine, we continue

past the churchyard where only last year
I found him lying next to Bess His Wife.
He arrived in 1963; four years later

she joined him. They’re not easily found.
It’s a place of rest, of birdsong and quiet,
the road pushed some distance away.

David Harmer

Marking Time in an Insurance Broker’s Post Room – March, 1978

Under a vibrating desk
boxes of accident claim forms
fight my clunky shoes for space.
I kick at the boxes and feel
a satisfactory movement.

On top is an ancient franking machine,
its visceral click, snap and stamp
is a metronome. My hands synchronised to it,
feeding enveloped insurance policies
through its inky mechanics.

Upon the noticeboard is a
Health and Safety poster, drawing-pinned
within an inch of its life. Its dense text
draws me in: Duties, Employee,
Crown, Corporate. Words that I whisper
to the rhythm of the apparatus.

A white window DL gets jammed,
and at that moment the transistor radio
asserts itself in the corner.
The cellos in Mr. Blue Sky thrum a new beat,
accompanying me as I fix the machinery,
keeping time with my work.

In 1981, I will have a
ticket to see E.L.O. The clique all go
but I don’t, lost in a different rhythm:
of opening hours and last orders
of pints and shorts and lock-ins.

I still have that ticket, pinioned
to the wall in front of me:
Wembley Arena, Saturday 12th December,
its fading block text:
Block D, Row 21, Seat 3,
scarcely legible.

Chris Sewart

When light is reluctant to leave

“You see how light and its residents have lied.” Anne Stevenson

You check your papers. The house is tidy.
You notice the lack of toys and excess of books.
The mother is well-dressed and on trend,
keeps her back ram-rod straight. Watches
as if daring you to catch her out.
The daughter is in clothes you recognise
as fashionable two summers ago.
Her posture is perfect. No make-up, clean.
The large window lets in ample light.
Surfaces are dust-free. “She loves cleaning,”
you noted the mother said. The daughter
did not react. No hint of enthusiasm.
That came later when she was allowed
to talk about books. You see
there is no television. The smear-free
speakers are silent. The radio untuned.
What concerned you was the similarity
of statements from mother and daughter.
Not the same story exactly, but a high
coincidence of details. You remember
how the mother spoke first. You can’t
remember what the daughter’s voice
sounds like. Reading, you guess,
is a solo, quiet activity that doesn’t
demand a mother’s attention.
There’s a bruise on the daughter’s knee
you didn’t see before. It’s fading,
leeching a yellow colour into skin
belonging to a child who’s rarely outdoors.
Her other knee is the pale surface
of the moon, of a child used to shadows.
Now you wonder what will happen
when you and the light leave.

Emma Lee

Contributors

Angela Arnold is a writer, poet, artist, a creative gardener and an environmental campaigner. Her poems have appeared widely in print magazines, anthologies and online, both in the UK and elsewhere. First collection In Between: ‘inner landscapes’ and relationships (Stairwell Books, 2023). She lives in Wales.

Paul Brough is a Yorkshire based illustrator. You can see more of his artwork here

William Coniston turned to writing in retirement and shortly before COVID became infected with poetry, from which he has never recovered. He has been published in periodicals and anthologies and even had a mention in The Guardian. He recently graduated MA (Creative Writing).

David Harmer was born in 1952. He lives in Doncaster and is best known as a children’s writer with publications from Macmillans Children’s Books and Small Donkey Press. His work for the Grown Ups is sometimes published in magazines. He also performs with Ray Globe as The Glummer Twins, often at the Edinburgh Fringe.

Lorraine Caputo is a poet-translator whose works appear internationally in over 500 journals and 24 collections of poetry – including In the Jaguar Valley (dancing girl press, 2023). She is a Best of the Net and Pushcart Prize nominee. She journeys through Latin America, listening to the voices of the pueblos and Earth.

Lorraine Kipling is now living again in her hometown of Manchester, where she writes poetry about petrichor and gutter puddles. She is currently working on her first collection. ‘Favourite’ is one of her least-favourite words. She spends a lot of time looking at Very Respectable Verse, and would put the kettle on for Wendy, Pam, and Carol.

Emma Lee’s publications include “The Significance of a Dress” (Arachne, 2020) and "Ghosts in the Desert" (IDP, 2015). She co-edited “Over Land, Over Sea,” (Five Leaves, 2015), reviews for magazines and blogs at https://emmalee1.wordpress.com

Chris Sewart lives in Beverley, East Yorkshire. His poetry and short stories have been published in many small press journals and competition anthologies. In 2019, he was the recipient of the Larkin Society Poetry Prize. His solo show, ‘Yarn Bombing and Other Poems’, debuted at the 2025 Stage 4 Beverley Festival. Society of Authors Member profile: Chris Sewart - The Society of Authors

John Short lives in Lydiate, Lancashire after a previous life in southern Europe. Recently published in Black Nore and Littoral Magazine he has produced a book of travel stories and four collections of poetry. The most recent is In Search of a Subject (Cerasus 2023).

Jeff Skinner’s poems have been published in anthologies and in many journals, most recently in Black Nore Review, Paperboats, and Ink, Sweat and Tears. He was commended in the last Sonnet or Not competition. He volunteers at his local food bank and in an Oxfam bookshop, listens to music, watches football, reads, writes.

Richard Wilcocks lives in Leeds and is Secretary of Leeds Peace Poetry. Recent poems have appeared in Dreich magazine, And The Stones Fell Open and Whirlagust IV.

All contributors retain copyright of their work.

The deadline for submissions to the print anthology has now passed. Thank you for all your fantastic poems. I’m sorry I can’t include them all. The Anthology will be launched on November 15th in Doncaster and, shortly afterwards, in an online launch so that contributors from all over the UK can take part.

My ancestors’ bones
spark like flints in the dark.

- Ian Harker, “Clear Out”

When I created The Fig Tree, I always had the idea that in addition to the regular issues, I would produce one extra issue per year on a theme. The Fig Tree itself is unthemed, any patterns that you might detect within an issue are coincidental, even though related poems may be placed together.

For 2025, the theme for the Special Issue is Coal, encompassing mining, miners, mining communities and, because we are currently in its 40th Anniversary, the Strike of 1984-1985.

I was brought up in a mining community in Derbyshire in the 1960s and 1970s. I could see the (by then closed) Morton Colliery from my bedroom window. It continued being active for years, pumping ochre water into the local stream to allow other mines to continue operating. I knew one of the miners who died in the disaster at Markham in 1973 and my family was full of miners and men connected to the industry. The women were connected too, of course - maintaining the household while never knowing if their husbands or sons would become another of the casualties of an industry that, although much safer at the end, had harvested so many lives and injured many more. Mining was the inspiration for my poetry when I began writing in 2017, my first poem being a narrative ballad poem about the death of my Mum’s uncle Jim in a mining accident in 1935. I have written twice about this - the second of these is below. I had left home and was working in Birmingham in 1984, the first in my family to go to University. I was never going down the mine - they were a special breed and I wasn’t one of them. I had to rely on second hand reports about the strike, including from my Dad, who was an engineer who had been redeployed to keep the mines open while the men were out. It was grim and nobody won in the end. So, the subject is very close to my heart and I’ve been reading and writing mining poems on and off for the last seven years so I felt it was appropriate to put a collection together for The Fig Tree, with your help of course.

The submission guidelines are a bit different to the standard issues (check the special Submissions page for full details) with the main difference is that I will be allowing previously published poems, but please let me know where they have been published before and please send in new ones if you have them. I will also accept a larger number of submissions per person.

In the meantime, here is my second poem about Uncle Jim. Based on a newspaper article about the accident and its aftermath.

An Inquest Into a Mining Death, 1935

The jury donated their fees to the mother
of the dead miner.
The words of the witnesses had hung
in the stale air, crushing and suffocating.
How he was in the wrong place
at the wrong time.
How the company was not at fault.
It was sad of course, but part of life.
Before they filed out into the soot-soaked streets
she made sure she thanked them all
for their sympathy and generosity.

Welcome to this special issue of The Fig Tree, the second part of an anthology of poems about coal mining.

Part one can be found here - I won’t repeat the full introduction but I will repeat the key points. I come from several generations of miners and mining families on both my mother’s and father’s sides and grew up in a mining community. This history was a key part in my choice (or maybe compulsion) to start writing and publishing poetry in later life.

The format is a little different to usual, with no Featured Poet and a few extra poems too. Our new publishing venture, Crooked Spire Press, will be publishing all 40 poems from the two online issues in a paperback anthology that will be put together and launched in the autumn.

Once again I hope you enjoy reading this issue as much as I did collating it. You are joining around 500 others who are reading the webzine on a regular basis.

Thank you all

Tim Fellows, Editor

Contributors: Glenn Barker, Paul Brookes, Sandra Burnett, Janet Dean, Peter Devonald, Anne Marie Duquette, Lisa Falshaw, Jack Faricy, Donna Faulkner, Tim Fellows, David Harmer, Petra Hilgers, L.B. Jørgensen, Catrin Mari, Ian Parks, Ali Rowland, Finola Scott, Andrew Spacey, Joe Williams, Sarah Wimbush, Phil Wood, Gareth Writer-Davies and Paul Brough.

Henry Moore Notebook

Coal Miner Carrying Lamp

I’ll be telling this to someone else
years after the event -
how sheer the black that fell on us,

the black and then the heat
running between our shoulder blades
and streaming down our backs.

No falling roof, no accident,
no scrambling for the lamps
but something pressing heavy on our lids,

the props about to split
and heaving his own body from the face
a man of coal and candlewax.

Ian Parks

Our House on Hady Hill

A lion knocker      waits
on the      front door,
      its brass face
poised to      rat-a-tat-tat.
      The world outside is a       Legion.

Uniform houses.
Hawthorn  hedges. Slate  roofs.
      Across the      forbidden    road
    the     hospital.
                A  children’s   home.

Knee high     socks
race      up      the      stairs
                            slide
                    down
the banister.

Everything's     made
   a    game.
My rag doll      clasped tight,
   and I     swing     like Tarzan
from the     toilet chain.

I peek     at the     world
and     wait.     Sigh     at the window.
Watch      for the blue car,
listen     for a     rat-a-tat-tat.
   Scribble     on window breath,     and look

again.   Childhood
        is     short
          waiting
for       things
         to happen.

Through  the       peeled   paint
   of      the      back door.
Past      the grasses      overgrown,
    a  chrysalis      clings
    to the     coal bunker.

Donna Faulkner

Pit Ponies

Seeing them cut-side among tough tussocks
freshly released, their light-induced madness
a contagion of disbelief as they ran and bit

and frolicked, their annual holiday hedged
between thick bullrush and fenced hawthorn.
We would see them from the road, a family

heading for five lane ends roundabout,
Brackenbury’s farm, brick barn and hay bales
stacked, the sweet stinky secret parcel

of an embedded hedgehog one summer,
story of sun and rye gone wrong,
leaving Ebenezer’s sabbath interiors,

watching them wild-eyed with freedom,
discovered colour, rampant hoof and the smell
of kicked turf under an open sky.

Andrew Spacey

Grandpa’s Canaries

He kept ten caged in the attic. Treated them as pets
when he was too poorly to work the seams.

On the day he passed
Gran summoned the Rag & Bone Man.

I heard the deal – take care of cages and birds.
I watched her sneak a florin into her pinny pocket.

She told me - they’ll sing sweeter in a wild wooded place.
Birds in houses bring bad luck.

Such an opera filled the air that smoggy morning
Bailey’s horse and trap carted them away

and I conjured an image; a golden flock rising
from our terrace of sooty chimneys.

I told my friend – one day we’ll fly from here.
He shrugged, led me to the scrapyard water-butt.

Together we pulled up weighted hessian. A shroud
for ten tiny rags of yellow.

We gave them a proper burial and promised Our Father
we’d forgive those that trespass against us.

Sandra Burnett

Silverwood Colliery II: Surface Dressing

One million tonnes
of earth-body slag
shrouds the pit voids
and human scars below.

A skin-graft make-up
of surface soil dresses
this swollen and wounded
landscape of seam offal.

A graceless scattering
of scrub sapling and spinny
grips the unsteady contours
of grey belch spoil.

And ten thousand suns
nurture a renaissance
in a new earth motion
of windsong and wilding.

Glenn Barker

The Mine During the Strike

Suddenly quiet I stand, mouth open as a vase,
listen to the creak of empty pulleys,
see grass grow, green through black dust.

Hunger creeps through still shafts and galleries,
no light glints off my faceted surfaces,
gas seeps in like a cramp, no canaries sing
deep in me where coal dreams
of heat, the speed of engines racing in the sun,
a bonfire in every colour of driftwood bone.

Water sleeks hewn stone, tears and loneliness,
and every open seam is a toothache like flint
working through soil towards the light.
The tunnels are a void, something was taken,
replaced with voices and men wearing my colour
as a badge of honour, penance,
now their voices get lost in open air, have no echo.
Only their footsteps remain dark,
shadows creep towards me.

Wind sighs over my pursed lips,
a standing tone in the echo chamber of my throat
rattles empty fire grates though town.

L.B. Jørgensen

Advice for peacemakers

‘Think of the middle of the strike...’
from an early draft of ‘Orgreave’ by Ian Parks

Always think middle
Your middle is ground gained
not compromise    gravity 
not weakness    weighted and sharp 
as the steel point of a drawing compass    
Now draw it out from here   your radius
precise contour lines that ripple    slow 
as the peregrine circles on thermals
All you need now     ears 
sharper than bat’s    for every 
flutter    fear   fury   every forsakenness
Closer to the middle there’s a bruise 
of spit  sweat   spark  solidity
further out shapes are sparser
unexact   unstill   unsteady
unheard   mere memories 
Draw lines to match each
to its rightful open mouthed
scrunched face   tears behind slits 
fist shaking owner in the centre
ley lines crisscrossing contours
so everyone can see
there’s no middle

Petra Hilgers

Women against Pit Closures

She blooms,
badged and blue-jeaned
in the sunshine.

In the shadows -
her husband
her father
her sons,

the gate
the hearth
the alarm clock, ringing.

This hybrid rose -
her eyes, anthracite on fire,
her lips, the curve of a pickaxe.

New Aphrodite.
One of the first
to clamber up, up, up
and over
the pit-yard wall.

Sarah Wimbush

Manvers Main; 1988

The pit gates open, the last shift leaves,
washed clean in a final shower
he slowly walks towards Moor Bank,
shoulders striped with coal tattoos.

His breath is heavy, years of bad air
stacked in his lungs and always the ache
from Orgreave-cracked ribs, the coppers
fell on them like Peterloo dragoons.

Up the road, the scabs
sat behind wired up windows
in a gob-spattered bus, taking the plunge
on a full belly, names never forgotten.

Face set forwards, he joins the track
where they’d marched back to work
their banners flared like sails,
galleons adrift on treacherous waters.

Nearly at the end of the street, he takes
one look behind, sees the pit slam shut.
No going back, he’s on his own.

David Harmer

Above and Below the Surface

I had heard the miners’ wives laughing
at us, soft city-types, behind our backs,
saying we knew ‘nowt’ of pit village life.
It was true, we’d none of us ever had
to scratch for food, or bandaged battered heads
when mounted police had charged into
unarmed crowds. Their talk was tough as leather,
all surface, but we were solid behind them
all, we knew right from wrong.

At sixteen I was afraid of the women;
the miners’ wives, and the activists
who I helped with printing leaflets amidst
the smell of ink and hand-rolled cigarettes.
I felt frail around them, I was too thin-skinned,
I’d been told. I put my pocket money
in the rattling buckets mosaiced with yellow
‘Cole not Dole’ stickers, proud to be part of
‘the enemy within.’ It all seemed clear.

A list of mining tragedies from the 1890s
is full of fallen props and trucks rolling
backwards, all ‘accidental deaths’ involving
compacted bones, or flesh, or vital organs.
Then, there’s George, whose dad told the inquest
his eighteen year old son had ‘sober habits’
but had said, ‘Father, I have got the worst job
in the pit,’ and next day was found drowned,
face down in the colliery pond.

Now, nobody here is lowered down to work
like an animal burrowing underground,
or trundled by what looked like funfair trains
to stoop or lie all day in shallow caves.
Those women were surely just as caged by
the rhythms of cooking, cleaning and child bearing,
traditions most must have dreamed of quitting.

After the strike, it was a lack of hope
that set in, slowly crushing those villages,
undermining the truths we had believed in.

Ali Rowland

Industrial Disease

in a remote cemetery
I eat my packed lunch by the derelict chapel

and read a recent gravestone
"the price of coal"

on the scratchy-arse mountain
fresh six foot excavations

workers who lived out their usefulness
take the cage one final time

to vast interlocking levels
the endless dark vein

strong men
who dug their own graves in hot dust

broken glass lungs
breathing in tightfisted capitalism

never enough money to make good
right all the wrongs

rest in the afterlife the only sure thing
my way forward

is over slagheaps
footings of the old stables and winding house

all that remains above ground
and a furious acrid fire that never burns out

Gareth Writer-Davies

In 1984

Orwell had his own idea
of what events might come to pass,
but never lived to see the year
of 1984.

I was eight, then nine years old,
a schoolkid in a north east town,
recall much less than I’ve been told
from 1984.

There’s some things I remember well,
like Davis beating Jimmy White,
the famine, and the Grand Hotel
in 1984.

But that all happened on TV,
a hundred thousand miles away.
The strike was right in front of me
in 1984.

I saw the eyes of desperate men,
and even then, I think I knew,
our town would never rise again
from 1984.

A war was waged, a war was won,
a war against community.
We’ll never undo what was done
in 1984.

Joe Williams

I Am The Eighties

I am ‘Allo ‘Allo! raised from the dead,
I am crackly pictures and wonky sound,
I am analogue watches and landline phones,
I am cassette tapes that unwound
and have to be spun back in with pencils.

I am video players and Betamax, black and white TV’s,
grainy and fuzzy, coat hangers for bad receptions,
I am blackouts and candles, strikes and power for the people,
I am ZX spectrum and time for tea,
one more game will make me happy.

I am clunky photo cameras and sending off for prints,
I am the Falklands War, privatisation and denigration,
I am the battleground of free market economics,
eighties politics and the war for the heart of the nation,
with all the despair, hurt and heart-break that entails.

We never understood the cost back then,
‘progress’ is a double-edged sword,
always move forward so fast, leaves us left in the past,
a celebration of so many impossible freedoms,
we understand too late the consequences of desire.

Peter Devonald

Concerning the bing and some truths around it

Here skies glow angry with flare-ups,
children are warned away from the bing
that smoulders like a spurned lover.

Forests compressed by time, spring-green
trees become fossil fuel. Heaped overground,
the detritus shadows homes, souls, lungs.

Some murmur geology, talk of jack-in-
the-box continents shifting, of upheaval,
of underground seams rich with black gold.

Others murmer the hill is the rounded haunch
of a fire beast that dreams and spits terror.
The locals know the bings, know the truth.

They paid for this heap with their breath.
Orange flickers self-sparking night and
day, health risked to scavenge for dross.

The mound is man made, a casual cast-off.
All the profits and miners are long gone,
though the spoils and spite of greed still flame.

Finola Scott

Head Count: The 1939 Register

He is pictured as an upright man, white shirt sleeves
turned over elbows, cupped by his hands. A belt
pulls the slack of trousers from an undefined waist,
the space under ribs and just above thighs.

That word is in the back of her mind when she refers to him.
She takes the egg off his plate, leaves a splat of mash,
adding protein and fat to her own, piling it high.
He studies the flesh on her arms, the rolls of boned-out pork.

I uncover his demob papers from twenty years before,
and see he was a buried man, a man under fire.
The flaming rind of bacon spits, it stinks of death,
his appetite is gone, it’s more than he can stand.

Gran, whose Domestic Duties go Unpaid, lives off the wages of her sons:
a Haulage Hand, a Ripper, both Heavy Workers Below Ground,
a younger brother just fifteen, a Motty Lad. Grandad, once Haulage Hand, is now Incapacitated.

Janet Dean

Memorial

We asked that they be kept together.
As we searched the rows of names and dates
we sometimes had to stop; to contemplate
another life, etched on a shining disc.

The clouds were low and they had left
umbrellas just in case it rained. Groups gathered,
linked by the inky dark below. The choir sang
and the rain began to fall, insisting

on being part of this. It made us new
as one by one she slowly read the names.
I felt the wet drips fall from the edge
of a shared umbrella as she reached

the brothers, Jim, George, and Bill.
All gone now; Sixty years apart.
My tears are merging with the pouring rain.

Tim Fellows

116

Nine-year-old girl still chases a ball
spinning across the schoolyard bedlam;
a ribbon of terraces, snug with slate roofs,
gutters tip tap; a ruckus of boys
fool about in the drizzle. Their play's
wetted coal-black; their eyes flicker
rain-happy fun; they banter chase
the girl pursuing her flutter world
of summer frocks. I hear the chapel.
Granddad humming his wisdom hymns
and out of tune. The shift is over --
slag heaps shimmer a grave of ponds.
The blurry boys are spitting out
coal dust from watery lungs: they have
no breath; the flighty girl is weighted
in mourning black. I've sat too close
to my Grandmother's clock. A kettle
whistles the summons back from cousins.
Gran makes a pot of tea and unwraps
the valley gossip. There's a new school.

Phil Wood

116 children were killed in the Aberfan disaster of 1966

Coël not Doël

Merry Christmas, children. Everything is fine. You see the shine of twinkling tinsel, not the glint of unmined coal or hunger that haunts tired eyes.

Look, here's a present. Everything is wonderful: unwrap it. This kind lady spent hours stitching patches into dolls’ clothes shimmering like new. You don't know they're all second-hand.

Help yourself to food, there's plenty, as if one wealthy person has popped to the shops just for you. You can't tell how many people scraped their pennies together.

In this hall, it's warm as pudding,

shimmering with disco songs, no one's chopping up furniture for firewood. No-one is shivering, all thanks to this strong paperchain of women.

Nadolig Llawen i chi gyd, i deulu mawr y byd.*

We want to wrap you gift-like in our shield.

Catrin Mari

* ‘Merry Christmas to you all, to the world’s big family’ ( from a Welsh children's song).

Hartshead-cum-Clifton

In Clifton Woods a treecreeper snips
at the motorway’s nylon swish. Light
gleams on glass and lacquer, flickering
through the trees. Rush hour smothers
the ringing labour of the open coal pit,
the clink clink clink of heavy picks,
the rasp of spades, the clank and rumble
of loaded tubs, the crashes of rockfall,
and the chatter of the pit brow lasses.
Somewhere, buried in a mine shaft, lie
the trumpets, flugels, tubas, drums,
the horns, trombones and euphoniums
of the colliery band, whose strains
children, laiking up the Common,
still claim to hear between their games.

Jack Faricy

Coal Haiku

Diamonds shine so bright
Past refuge wanting sunlight
Former lumps of coal

Coal sitting so dark
Lumps of black waiting to shine
We’re all lumps of coal

Dark coal and bright gems
A time and place for each one
We’re both coal and gems

One or the other
Taking turns in earth’s crust
Of darkness and light.

Anne Marie Duquette

Harsh Light

Gentle light should enter these open eyes,
slow. Sat on slagheap blue sky midday see
flit white clouds pass shadows over pit, ply
and flow girded redbrick coal washery

over bright puddles, empty slurry tanks
cross concrete bunkers of unused sand, lime,
gravel. Recall days ago nightshift rank
veins freeze blood heat, ice encrusted hands rimed,

ground concrete hurt all when I fell one snowed
winter day heavy weight hauls postal bag
down, I slip on an iced drift to unload
post bottom of door number eight. I rag,

open sprung letterbox, sharp fringed brush put
letter pull out quick metal lid slams shut.

Paul Brookes

5th March 1985

Early morning, quiet grey of the pit yard
split by crimson of a banner, fringed with gold.
“Unity is strength” held aloft by men who wore
coal dust streaked in folds and creases, who knew
marches, pickets, hardship, brutality
of walls of police and noise
as batons beat shields.

They emerged from back-to-backs,
snap wrapped roughly in paper,
stuffed into pockets of donkey jackets
by wives who had fought just as hard,
keeping families together and stomachs full.

Even as Thatcher took a pick to communities,
shovelled away their jobs for life,
cast their livelihoods onto slag heaps,
smashed through seams of generations and identity,
they marched, secure in their commitment and pride
under the banner which defined them all,
and the winding wheel began to turn.

Lisa Falshaw

Contributors

Glenn Barker writes on the human condition, the intangible and ephemeral, natural and supernatural, and the fractured moral vacuum of contemporary life. Published in Broken Spine, Black Bough and other anthologies, he enjoys supporting the life of the writing community as a reviewer, and performing at local open mic events.

Paul Brookes is a shop assistant, writer and reviewer. His chapbooks include Wolf Eye Territory (ImpSpired, 2024), Ever Striding Edge (Dark Winter Press, 2024), and The Dude Work (Sherwood Handcrafted Press, 2025). He edits The Wombwell Rainbow (interviews and challenges) and The Starbeck Orion.

Sandra Burnett’s poems have been published in magazines including Magma and Strix and in many anthologies, most recently in two Chapel FM/Yaffle Press collections, Missing and Recovery. Half Moon Books published her pamphlet New Lease and collection Between Sea and Sky. Her late Grandad and uncles were miners at Middleton Colliery, Leeds.

Paul Brough is a Yorkshire based illustrator. You can see more of his artwork here

Janet Dean was brought up in a mining village in Barnsley, South Yorkshire and is now living in York, having worked for forty years in the public and charity sectors. Her poetry is widely published in magazines and anthologies in print and online, and she has won prizes and commendations in several national and international poetry competitions.

Peter Devonald is a multi-award-winning writer based in Stockport. Winner Broken Spine's Reader’s Award 2025, Loft Books Best Poem 2024, Waltham Forest, FofHCS, two HoH’s, runner-up Shelley Memorial and N2tS 2024, Finalist Tickled Pink 2024, highly commended Hippocrates, Passionfruit Review, Saveas and Allingham. Nominations for Forward Prize and two BoN, widely-published/anthologised. Children’s Bafta nominated. Facebook: @pdevonald BSky: @pdevonald.bsky.social

Anne Marie Duquette is a published author of 25 fiction books, and was raised with love for her land. Both of her grandfathers were coal miners; one in Pennsylvania, and the other in Colorado. Both suffered from “black lung,” and risked their lives in primitive conditions. This poem is for them.

Lisa Falshaw lives and works in West Yorkshire. She writes poetry about loss and transitional states. She has had several micro poems published by Black Bough and poems published by Fevers of the Mind, Atrium, Dreamcatcher and forthcoming in Dawn Treader.

Jack Faricy is a teacher and poet from Slaithwaite. His poems feature in various anthologies and magazines. His debut, Traces, is available from Calder Valley Poetry. His PhD project - a poetic exploration of landscapes connected by the M62 - is ongoing.

Donna Faulkner spent her childhood between countries. One foot bare and carefree in New Zealand the other tiptoeing the coal dust and camaraderie of working class England. She lives in Rangiora, New Zealand and has been published in The Bayou Review, 300 Days of Sun, Havik, Fieldstone Review, New Myths, Bacopa Literary Review and others. Her debut poetry collection In Silver Majesty was published by erbacce press in 2024. See more here or on Instagram @lady_lilith_poet or Twitter @nee_miller

Tim Fellows is a writer and editor from Chesterfield, Derbyshire. His pamphlet, Heritage (2019) was inspired by his background in a mining community. His poems have been published in Black Bough, Black Nore Review, The Lake and The Morning Star, among others.

David Harmer was born in 1952. He lives in Doncaster. Publishing as a children’s writer with MacMillans Children’s Books and Small Donkey Press, he also has work for the Grown Ups in many magazines. He performs with Ray Globe as The Glummer Twins, often at the Edinburgh Fringe. For many years he taught in primary schools serving NCB communities.

Petra Hilgers is originally from Germany, has lived in South Africa, Northern Uganda, London/UK and now lives in West Yorkshire/UK. Her writing has been published in magazines and commended in national and international competitions. Petra’s debut collection The heart neither red nor sweet won the 2021 erbacce poetry prize.

L.B. Jørgensen is a Danish poet writing in English. She does translation and subtitling and has had poems published in several magazines. Her debut pamphlet A Woman Travelling was published by Paekakariki Press in 2024.

Catrin Mari is a Welsh-speaking poet and social researcher based in Cardiff. Her poetry deals with themes of under-represented historic figures including activists, sense of place; and shifting identities. Her work has been published widely in anthologies, journals and online, and she is working on a first pamphlet.

Ian Parks is the editor of Versions of the North: Contemporary Yorkshire Poetry. His versions of the modern Greek poet Constantine Cavafy were a Poetry Book Society Choice. His Selected Poems 1983-2023 is published by Calder Valley Poetry. His work appears in the Folio Book of Love Poems.

Ali Rowland is a writer from Northumberland. She has been nominated for Best of the Net 2025, won the Hexham Poetry Competition in 2023, and has two published collections: Rooted (Maplestreet Press, 2024) and Dragged Up: A Northern Childhood (Sixty Odd Poets, 2024). You can follow her work at Musings of a Mad Woman on Substack.

Finola Scott writes to make sense of the world. Her poetry is widely published including in New Writing Scotland, The Irish Pages Press, and Lighthouse. She has won & been placed in competitions, writing in Scots and in English. She invites you to visit FB Finola Scott Poems and on https://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/poet/finola-scott.

Andrew Spacey worked for four years at Steetley Colliery near Worksop, his birthtown. He has lived in Spain, Australia and the Netherlands and has published various articles and poems over the years. Currently he lives in Sheffield.

Joe Williams was born in Ashington, the hub of the mining industry in Northumberland, and now lives in Leeds. His latest book is The Taking Part, published by Maytree Press. He is currently working on a new collection of poems about Ashington. joewilliams.co.uk

Sarah Wimbush is a Yorkshire writer and the recipient of a Northern Writers Award. Her collections are Bloodlines (2020), The Last Dinosaur in Doncaster (2021), Shelling Peas with my Grandmother in the Gorgiolands (2022) and STRIKE (2024). STRIKE was nominated for The 2024 Forward Prize Best Collection.

Phil Wood was born in Wales. He has worked in statistics, education, shipping, and a biscuit factory. He lives in the Sirhowy Valley where many mines have now been greened with ponds and country walks. His wife's father and uncle were miners.. His writing can be found in various places, most recently in : Byways (Arachne Press Anthology), The Lake, Shot Glass Journal, and the Borderless Journal.

Gareth Writer-Davies has won and been shortlisted in multiple poetry competitions and is the author of collections Bodies (2015), Cry Baby (2017), The Lover's Pinch (2018), The End (2019) and Wysg (2022). His mining connection is from his mother's family who were involved in mining as coal miners in the Rhondda, South Wales, specifically Treherbert, the last village before you go over the head of the valley.

Acknowledgements

Sarah Wimbush’s Women Against Pit Closures appeared in STRIKE (Stairwell Books, 2024)

Donna Faulkner’s Our House on Hady Hill was published in Starbeck Orion,1984 Miners Strike Special, May 2024

Phil Wood’s 116 was first published in London Grip.

All contributors retain copyright of their work.

As promised (threatened?) last time I will be bombarding you a little bit more than usual over the next couple of months with news and updates - I promise I’ll slow down a bit over the summer!

The second part of the Coal Mining special will be available on Monday June 2nd, with an anthology planned for the autumn. If you enjoyed the first one, you’ll love this one too.

The next regular issue, issue nine, will be published in July, with further issues planned for September and November. If you want to be in the 2025 Anthology, get your submissions in - details on The Fig Tree submissions page. Submissions are open year-round.

You can get more information on Fig Tree and Crooked Spire events on our website crookedspirepress.com, with options to buy our books.

The Last Corinthians by Matthew Paul

The Last Corinthians, Matthew Paul’s fine latest collection, is now being printed and is available for pre-order over at the Crooked Spire Press website, either directly (paying by Paypal) or by registering for the free online launch on Tuesday, 10th June (7pm) where there is an option to by a ticket that includes a pre-order of the book, posted to you as soon as it is available. You can use credit or debit card via this method. If you prefer to pay by bank transfer, email us at crookedspirepress@mail.com

In-person events are also planned - full details over at the Crooked Spire Press website, but here’s a full list in picture format. In addition to Matthew, there are some terrific guest poets reading too, so even if you are attending an in-person event, you may also want to attend the online reading to listen to Cliff and Shash too.

Online Launch of the Anthology

The online launch of the Anthology last Sunday had readings from poets whose work was included in the anthology reading from it, and reading other poems. Thanks to the people who showed up just to listen, and to our readers Lisa Falshaw, Mike O’Brien, Emma Lee, Ian Badcoe, Penny Blackburn, Angela Arnold, Alison Stark, Matthew Paul, David Hutchinson, Deborah Harvey, Sarah James and a guest slot for Paul Dyson. I read poems by Simon Beech, Mark Mansfield and Beth Brooke.

Welcome to the eighth issue of The Fig Tree, sandwiched between parts one and two of the Coal Mining Special, which completely exceeded my expectations and which will also be produced as an Anthology in the autumn by our imprint Crooked Spire Press. You may observe that a few poems that didn’t make the Coal Mining issues due to lack of space have sneaked into the regular issues - they were too good to not publish.

This issue’s Featured Poet, Joe Williams, is someone I first met when I had only just started writing, about eight years ago. His headline set at Spire Writes (an open mic in Chesterfield that is sadly no longer running) caught my attention with its dry wit and tight writing. His debut pamphlet Killing The Piano was followed by a verse novella An Otley Run that chronicles the (in)famous pub crawl on Otley Road in Leeds. He has had numerous poems published, and is also very capable of writing serious poems - his powerful poem about stadium disasters in football sits easily alongside his haiku, clerihews, nostalgic and outright funny work. He is also an editor, competition judge, and legendary open mic host.

The 2024 Fig Tree Anthology is now available to buy at the Crooked Spire Press website. It’s Paypal for now, but please contact us if you want to use bank transfer or cheque.

Once again I hope you enjoy reading this issue as much as I did collating it. You are joining over 500 people who are reading the webzine on a regular basis.

Thank you all

Tim Fellows, Editor

Contributors: Joe Williams, Stewart Carswell, Janet Dean, Craig Dobson, David Harmer, Oz Hardwick, L.B. Jørgensen, Fokkina McDonnell, Matthew Paul, Mat Riches, Jeff Skinner and Paul Brough.

The Fig Tree Featured Poet – Joe Williams

The Lowest Form

When I heard that sarcasm was the lowest form of wit,
I realised it might be an art I could excel at, so
from an early age I devoted myself
to perfecting it.

I like your new coat, I said to my mother, as a first attempt.
Being naive, she took it as a face value compliment.
I was uncertain whether to count this as
success or failure.

At school I worked hard at honing my craft,
was happy to accept the detentions I received,
never regretted the essays that earned me an E
in GCSE History.

Nor the jobs I might have had, if I hadn’t insisted
on showing off my talents in the interview room.
Having read my CV, they should have known what
to expect.

To become a great artist demands great sacrifice,
though I accept I may have gone a step too far
when the registrar invited me to say,
I do.

Joe Williams

Scheherazade

We met on the town hall steps,
dressed as agreed,
in evening wear
and the certainty of youth.

We sailed Sinbad’s ship
through the Gulf of Oman,
out into the ocean,
and over its edge.

We rode on the wind,
the young prince and princess,
held up by strings
and brass section breath.

I’d have stayed with you
for a thousand nights.

Joe Williams

Relativity

Einstein said,
and I’ll get this wrong,
because I don’t have a PhD
in theoretical physics,
that the closer you get
to the speed of light,
the slower time goes.

It isn’t time itself that changes,
but the way that you experience it.

So when they said
there was nothing they could do,
it was only a matter of time,
I knew all I had to do
was find a way for you and me
to beat the speed of light,
and we could live forever.

It isn’t love itself that changes,
just the way that we experience it.

Joe Williams

Joe Williams is a writer and performing poet from Leeds. His latest book is 'The Taking Part', a short collection of poems on the theme of sport and games, published by Maytree Press. His other work includes the pamphlet ‘This is Virus’, a sequence of erasure poems made from Boris Johnson’s letter to the UK during the Covid-19 pandemic, and the verse novella 'An Otley Run', which was shortlisted in the Best Novella category at the 2019 Saboteur Awards. Despite all of that, he is probably most widely read thanks to his contributions to Viz.

Find out more on joewilliams.co.uk

Relativity was originally published in the anthology Lighting Out (Beautiful Dragons, 2021)

The Fig Tree Selection – May 2025

This section features up to ten poems, with a maximum of one per poet per issue.

Poetry arrived

one day in the early sixties,
when I’d found a quiet corner of the yard
at Bromley Boys’ Grammar School
where I wouldn’t be punched in the face
during break, I was reading
Beatles’ Monthly and was uprooted
by Rowley the maths teacher.

Dark winged in his academic gown
a knobbly forehead gleaming,
he asked if my mother knew my blazer
pocket was ripped, furthermore
had I looked at the homework
due in tomorrow? And just how
would I tackle the problem?

As I knew none of these answers,
he asked me where I wanted
to be in ten years time?
I replied asleep on the hill
above Little Malvern Priory, where many
hundreds of years ago, a man had dreamt
a marvellous dream and once there,
I would have a marvellous dream myself.

He looked at me in disbelief,
remarked I was a clown
who would add up to nothing.
I was eleven, so I agreed.

David Harmer

Cul-de-Sac

On New Year’s Day, I’m round my mum’s again:
from her rocker, the Neighbourhood Watch spies
a man shouting and a woman gesticulating defensively.
Turns out he (Howard) is related to all at number six:
his Auntie Janine and cousins, Malcolm and Maxine.
She (Rosalyn) arranged the visit with ‘Max’, but none
of the trio is answering the doorbell or their mobile.

‘I’m sure they won’t be long,’ I venture, inviting them
into the bungalow’s warm. Howard and Rosalyn cringe
into the lounge, fresh meat for Mum, who itemises
her latest ailments, and only pauses her peroration
to peel dressings off her shins, revealing crusty sores.

Our not-quite guests grin and bear this for almost an hour
until Malcolm finally phones: they’re parked outside
Howard and Rosalyn’s house, in Effingham,
miles beyond the M25. I can’t stifle my amusement.
‘It’s like an episode of One Foot in the Grave,’ I say.
Rosalyn half-smiles. Howard’s face flushes beetroot.

Matthew Paul

A Fire in My Room

Outside, washing flaps,
catches grains of soot.
Mother tuts, brings black-
flecked sheets to wash again.

That morning’s anxious scrape,
a squeak of fear; Father came,
a bird on his shovel. Bird
in the grate, a death-omen.

Tonight I’m tucked and warm,
embers of the fire are mine.
I collapse into darkness,
the last flames lick my sleep.

Janet Dean

Designated Drivers

Motorbikes don’t care either way,
—they lack the self-control for choices,
but our fuel-based cousins continue
with their guzzling grumbled departures
from kerbs like old folks getting up
from chairs. The way they overtake
each other, those things may as well
be chariots for all the licence
they possess, forced to roam city street
rat-runs pulling rubber-strewn doughnuts
in provincial carparks. We don’t do that.

Any slamming of our boots at night
is down to humans. We pull away
sotto voce, moving in soft-soled
silence. Our engines and ignitions
have been turned down, the sound switched off
on purpose, although we’ve left our doors
clicking shut to keep you in the loop.
The skeuomorphism pleases people.

Unless asked, we won’t mention, discuss
or bring up our programmed requirements
to be at the barest minimum
one hundred and ninety percent safer
than your so-called Highway Code guidelines.

There won’t be an alarm going off
when you abandon those well-fobbed keys
to help us become the Johnny Cabs
you claim to think you really desire.

Are blind bends truly blind in an age
of mirrors and computed angles?
Thanks though for clicking on the bridges,
bikes, fire hydrants and cars in captchas;
this keeps us going more than fuel cells.

It may be marking our own homework,
so we’re staying neutral just in case
we kill someone. And perhaps, in time,
we’ll learn the meaning of sorry.

Perhaps, in time, we’ll mean it. For now,
remember to look both ways. Left, right,
and left again. You won’t hear us coming.

Mat Riches

The cab company in the film Total Recall is called Johnny Cabs. They are all standard in look, feel, and user interface. In this case, it’s a voice recognition controlled robot driver that always refers to itself as “Johnny Cab.” Said robot driver is smarmy, chatty, and every inch a creepy puppet-like thing with wheeling mannerisms and snide eye rolls.

Travel Writing

This cottage overlooking the Dart,
a daughter in her room playing FC 24.
What if we lived here all the time

stepping out each morning into
city streets from an apartment
on Via Sistina searching for that first

espresso, La Gazetta. The afternoons!
The afternoons we spend in gardens
or looking at a famous painting

in the Louvre. The moon is different
now, above the Pacific; we watch it
from a favourite restaurant terrace

before a last night, our motel bed.
Tomorrow we hit LA. Scorsese
has an option on the screenplay.

Jeff Skinner

Embroidery of the Picket Line

The street is your embroidery hoop.
Choose a fine needle and the thinnest silks for faces.
Satin stitch two-ply cotton thread in broad sweeps
for straining shirts over backs and shoulders
where the lines meet, place the couching thread
of a baton held high, arrowhead stitch the sweep
of its shadow as it falls. See the linen pull under the weight
of twine as you cross stich the blur of fists in air.
Lay fly stitches on noses, collarbones, twisted arms
where bruises will form. Place a bead of mother-of-pearl
where a tooth flies from the silk bed of a mouth.

Outline each letter of the slogans in run stitches,
the way the French bullion of broken cobbles darken,
back stitch the shine of police horses in the sun
above placards held in hands whose callouses are fading.
Pick them out in knotted, undyed wool.
With grandma’s needle, the one that worked on
the trade union banner, loop hardanger stitches
around the frayed edges where blood spatter seared
through the cloth. Be sparing with the black
as no one has been down the mine for months.
Only their eyes are dark pits.

L.B. Jørgensen

Thrift

I’m  shedding  my   summer  and  learning to  dress in  November  all year  round.  It’s surprisingly  awkward,  recalling a  childhood of  misaligned buttons and of shoelaces which  tended  towards  the  functional  rather  than  the  precise.  Little black days go with   everything  and  nothing,  depending  how  you  wear  them,   and  I  wear  them like old records that have seen too many parties that plunged off the rails. All thumbs, I  fumble  after  my   fashion,   zipping  skeletal   leaves   over  skin  that’s  sagged  into  winter.  Next season’s look will be this season’s look, with more holes and creases, and layer upon layer of frost and webs. I’m shedding my expectations and learning to dress my age by  cutting clothes  from free magazines and  hanging them with  tabs from my shoulders.   Shimmer?   Shiver?   I’m  shutting  my  wardrobe.   I’m   leaning  into  little blackouts. It’s awkward.

Oz Hardwick

Acronyms

If someone is confused between
a minaret and a minotaur,
is that an early sign of dementia?

When I learned my brother’s diagnosis
was MCI, I remembered the MJQ,
how I sold all my LPs to the man
in Chorlton-cum-Hardy, opposite
the café where I used to meet friends.
One of them, HN, has grade 8 in flute.

My brother couldn’t recall all the details
in the GP’s story, the purple shoes. I doubt
he was ever interested in purple shoes -
they wouldn’t have gone with his metal brace.
Mild Cognitive Impairment,
not the Modern Jazz Quartet.

Fokkina McDonnell

Olive grove

I got your postcard, the one
with the picture from a small hill somewhere inland
looking out across a neat olive grove.

You said you were in Naples. I’d assumed
you could’ve found something more recognisibly Neapolitan
to WISH YOU WERE HERE by
than what you sent, the non-descript olive grove
from any arid Mediterranean postcode.

Show me the piazzas! the turquoise coast!
even the ice cream, for fuck’s sake!
Show me the Naples you still love,
send me something more appropriate,
the seafront hotels with their honeymoon suites
and Vesuvius ever-present in the background.

Stewart Carswell

Daddy Longlegs

Coming after the wolf spiders
start to appear inside
and before the autumn’s first frost,
you’re better news than both.

Sign of summer’s going, though,
your significance is lightened by yourself –
stingless, biteless, clumsy stumbler –
a tickle in the hand, no more,
you’re soft as September weather.

Sad as it, too, to watch you suffer
predation, frustration, unlimbing accident.
Guileless, unprepared one, how you cling,
every year; how you even reappear from
last year’s disasters is a miracle of winning spirit.
Without beauty, power, weapon or wisdom,
your barely functioned flight hurls
Icarus after Icarus of you tumbling
to where foot or wheel or mower
or infant’s grasp or cat’s paw or hoover
or any number of other ordinary things
condemns each unlikely attempt.

Is this, my inept, what I admire –
your hopeless, dauntless trying, your soaring ambition on such limited wings;
the thought that if you can make it through, you daft, ungainly bungler,
then maybe I can, too?

Craig Dobson

Contributors

Paul Brough is a Yorkshire based illustrator. You can see more of his artwork here

Janet Dean was brought up in a mining village in Barnsley, South Yorkshire and now lives in York, having worked for forty years in the public and charity sectors. Her poetry is widely published in magazines and anthologies in print and online, and she has won prizes and commendations in several national and international poetry competitions.

Stewart Carswell grew up in the Forest of Dean and currently lives in Cambridgeshire, where he co-hosts the Fen Speak open mic night. His poems have recently been published in Under the Radar, Finished Creatures, Ink Sweat & Tears, and The Storms Journal. His debut collection is Earthworks (Indigo Dreams, 2021). Find out more at https://www.stewartcarswell.co.uk

Craig Dobson has had poems and short fiction published in various UK, US and European magazines. He’s working towards his first book of poetry.

David Harmer was born in 1952. He lives in Doncaster and is best known as a children’s writer with publications from Macmillans Children’s Books and Small Donkey Press. His work for the Grown Ups is sometimes published in magazines. He also performs with Ray Globe as The Glummer Twins, often at the Edinburgh Fringe.

Oz Hardwick is an international award-winning prose poet, who has published “a dozen or so” full collections and chapbooks, most recently Retrofuturism for the Dispossessed (Hedgehog, 2024). He has also edited several anthologies, most recently Dancing About Architecture and Other Ekphrastic Maneuvers (MadHat, 2024) with Cassandra Atherton.

L.B. Jørgensen is a Danish poet writing in English. She does translation and subtitling and have had poems published in several magazines. Her debut pamphlet A Woman Travelling was published by Paekakariki Press in 2024.

Fokkina McDonnell now lives in the Netherlands. She has three poetry collections (Oversteps Books, 2016; Indigo Dreams Publishing, 2019; Broken Sleep Books, 2022) and a pamphlet (Grey Hen Press, 2020). Poems have been widely published and anthologised. She received a Northern Writers’ Award from New Writing North in 2020.

Matthew Paul was born and grew up in South London and now lives in South Yorkshire. His second collection, The Last Corinthians, will be published by Crooked Spire Press in June and is available for pre-order at this link, here. His first collection, The Evening Entertainment, was published by Eyewear in 2017. He is also the author of two haiku collections, published by Snapshot Press. He writes reviews and essays, and blogs about poetry, here.

Mat Riches is ITV’s unofficial poet-in-residence . Recent work has been in Wild Court, The New Statesman, The Friday Poem, Bad Lilies, Frogmore Papers and Finished Creatures. He co-runs Rogue Strands poetry evenings. A pamphlet, Collecting the Data, is out via Red Squirrel Press. Twitter @matriches Blog: Wear The Fox Hat

Jeff Skinner’s poems have been published in anthologies and in many journals, most recently in Allegro, Ink, Sweat and Tears, and Paperboats. He was commended in the last Sonnet or Not competition. He volunteers at his local food bank and in an Oxfam bookshop, listens to music, watches football, reads, writes.

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