Vincent van Gogh – The garden of Saint Paul’s Hospital (`Leaf Fall’) 1889
The submission period for issue 19, Autumn 2026, is now open. The window will close on Sunday, 13th September at midnight.
The theme for this issue is ‘Autumn’ and you are invited to immerse yourself in your senses. Do you notice the colour and the beauty in the fall of the leaves like Vincent? Are you one to go out blackberry picking? If you went to the sea, would you see, like Sylvia, “nothing but a great space/Of white and pewter lights, and a din like silversmiths/Beating and beating at an intractable metal.”?
As the days darken do you listen to the rustling leaves, the whispering winds, for voices from the otherworld? Do you believe in magic, become jolted into memory by the fragrance of the first fires, see shadows playing in the night, or is it the light? Can you delve deep into yourself and pull out the creature of a poem? “Tyger Tyger, burning bright,/In the forests of the night;/What immortal hand or eye,/Could frame thy fearful symmetry?”
Send up to 3 poems of 40 lines or less. Submissions of art and photography are also sought.
Send all submissions to orla.a.fay@gmail.com
Please do send work in Times New Roman, font 12. Include your work in the body of the email and as a Word document attachment.
Send a short bio of 50 words or less, written in the third person.
Work should be previously unpublished.
Those submitting work should be over 18.
Blackberry Eating
I love to go out in late September
among the fat, overripe, icy, black blackberries
to eat blackberries for breakfast,
the stalks very prickly, a penalty
they earn for knowing the black art
of blackberry-making; and as I stand among them
lifting the stalks to my mouth, the ripest berries
fall almost unbidden to my tongue,
as words sometimes do, certain peculiar words
like strengths or squinched,
many-lettered, one-syllabled lumps,
which I squeeze, squinch open, and splurge well
in the silent, startled, icy, black language
of blackberry-eating in late September.
Galway Kinnell 1927–2014
The Listeners
‘Is there anybody there?’ said the Traveller,
Knocking on the moonlit door;
And his horse in the silence champed the grasses
Of the forest’s ferny floor:
And a bird flew up out of the turret,
Above the Traveller’s head:
And he smote upon the door again a second time;
‘Is there anybody there?’ he said.
But no one descended to the Traveller;
No head from the leaf-fringed sill
Leaned over and looked into his grey eyes,
Where he stood perplexed and still.
But only a host of phantom listeners
That dwelt in the lone house then
Stood listening in the quiet of the moonlight
To that voice from the world of men:
Stood thronging the faint moonbeams on the dark stair,
That goes down to the empty hall,
Hearkening in an air stirred and shaken
By the lonely Traveller’s call.
And he felt in his heart their strangeness,
Their stillness answering his cry,
While his horse moved, cropping the dark turf,
’Neath the starred and leafy sky;
For he suddenly smote on the door, even
Louder, and lifted his head:—
‘Tell them I came, and no one answered,
That I kept my word,’ he said.
Never the least stir made the listeners,
Though every word he spake
Fell echoing through the shadowiness of the still house
From the one man left awake:
Ay, they heard his foot upon the stirrup,
And the sound of iron on stone,
And how the silence surged softly backward,
When the plunging hoofs were gone.
Walter de La Mare
Drawn to the Light Press 