- About Us
- Archives
- 1963
- 3
- A Clean Cut
- A LIGHT IN MARGATE
- ABC’s of Fiction Writing
- ABC’s of Writing (for Beginners)
- ABCs of Creative Nonfiction
- ABCs of Flash Writing
- ABCs of Poetry
- After the Flood
- After the Rain
- Aubade for Aging
- Bad Translation
- Borderlands
- Cliff Diver
- Clockwork Overture
- Complicity
- Diaphonous
- Does My Slashed Achilles Tendon Make Me More Feminine
- Erasure
- Frida Kahlo and Other Women with Missing Parts
- From Slag to Sanctuary: A Daughter Reflects
- Gathering
- Hallelujahs
- Harold
- Hibiscus Remembered
- Hodges
- Home
- House Centipede
- How to Commit Arson and Not Get Caught
- I began making resolutions*
- I Put On My Mother’s Coat and Her Dreams Fell Out
- Issue 01
- Issue 02
- Issue 03
- Issue 04
- Issue 05
- Issue 06
- Issue 07
- Issue 08
- Issue 09
- Issue 10
- Issue 11
- Issue 12
- All That Glitters
- At Fourth and Union
- Basement II
- Bloom
- City of Robins
- Counting Cars
- I Knew You
- Japanese Garden Dawes Arboretum
- Johnny Worked the Carnival
- Jojo Is Finding His Way
- Last Offices
- Note from the Editors
- Pasture Statues
- Post-Scripts I Delete When I Email You to Tell You I Found Your Novelty Nicolas Cage Sock Behind the Dryer
- Questions for the Orca J35 Tahlequah
- Roads
- Someone I Barely Knew Died
- The Great Listener
- The Sun Birds
- To Cheer You Up
- Twenty Ways to Make Your Marriage Work
- Viola
- When the Fathers Were Gone
- Issue 13
- Lamb Chops
- lamictal love song
- Mano Po
- My Sister Wants To Know
- Noelie and Her Beehives
- Notes from the Editors
- Notes from the Editors
- One Painting
- o—o—o
- Perspectives
- Prime Numbers
- Shame Catcher
- Song for Your Broken Heart
- Spring of Cicadas
- Sunlit
- Telemarketer Loneliness
- Tell Your Doctor
- The ABCs of Writing Series
- The Firewalkers
- The Flight Attendants
- The Ghost Farmer’s Girl
- The Last Leaf at Myrtle Beach
- The Moment After the Moment of the Splash
- The Ship
- The Talk
- The Thing With Feelers
- The Warmth of her Bread
- Theoretical: a bird falls from the nest
- Waves
- You Can See the Prison from the Community College
- Briefs Blog
- Special Issue: Spry Lit x The Poetry of Science
- Submissions Guidelines
Perspectives
The Post-it night fits neatly
in its perfect yellow square.
Yellow not like American cheese
but a decommissioned coal mine
coughing up canaries.
It’s the archaeology of layers
that’s the most surprising:
A rubbing of a self portrait
revealing your great grandfather
smiling at you. The family cat
carrying a perfect copy of van Gogh’s
The Starry Night in its fur.
Your favourite song encoded
onto a blackbird’s feather.
The train sashaying its hips
against the enormity of the horizon
does so because it wants
to test the limits of pressure.
Whatever bounces back
comes through the windows
to pin you in the moment.
Embrace the pressure framing you,
be more than thinning sediment
holding layers together like cheap glue.
Christian Ward is a UK-based poet who can be currently found in Wild Greens, Cold Moon Review, Discretionary Love, Chantarelle’s Notebook and Medusa’s Kitchen. Future poems will be appearing in Dreich, Uppagus and Impspired. He was recently shortlisted for the 2021 Canterbury Poet of the Year Competition and the 2021 Plough Prize.