Dustpoetry
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Cover painting: Sunny Watermelons (2024), by Alai Ganuza. We’ve been celebrating at Dust Towers over the past couple of weeks. Not only are we incredibly proud to showcase an immense wealth of talent across the pages of this new issue, but we are also delighted that Olya K-Mehri has been longlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem (Written) for ‘Forest Fire’, which was published in Issue…
Mişaron On jasmine nights we share a veranda, you’re camouflaged in silence, a presence easy to miss and that suits you. Moon lizard, your life quietly plaited with ours. A milky body pearled with tubercles of sandy brown, an unofficial pet kennelled on an outside wall. Baby cousin of the dragon, no one sane would ever hurt you. High up and out of sight, sticky digits bedded into walls. You do us…
Four After A. A. Milne When you were one, I stared into the shifting waters of your face and encountered myself. When you were two, we were twin breezes, sky and sea meeting, a looping moon and sun. When you were three, we built the universe from first principles, toiling side by side. And everything was possible, or mendable, and we were our own frame of reference. But then you were four, the age…
When I am young, say seventeen or eighteen (after Marilyn Longstaff) When I am young, say seventeen or eighteen, the day will open itself to my face, and the runnels at my mouth will uncrease. Restlessness will not seem out of place - I’ll waft and wander but I’ll know where I am going when I am young. Scars will unpucker under a purple velvet dress which I will buy with savings from a Saturday…
Mealtimes the dining table lies in state ringed with antique chairs but every meal is taken at the white formica breakfast bar even Sunday roast spreading its fatty tendrils on the cooling plates four teak stools in a row facing a blank wall each brushstroke visible the food tastes of resignation my father simmers with the potatoes the knives and forks are just knives and forks the formica is heat…
Strange What Keeps You Afloat A crow’s groan at dawn the creak of two boughs touching an empty breeze this tortoiseshell cat doz- ing in moonlight its wizened body attuned to the tide to some haunt- ing song that spins and drifts and twists a way through leaving you limp and without design tonight is beyond anyone’s reach a barely- there-event then gone give me a God damn map you mutter your…
For Mary I must have been looking for God again, when I saw you, standing there, in your white socks and bobble hat, clicking at the horses. Bless you. It's your laugh I remember most vividly. Always too loud, always at the wrong damn thing. The way it filled the room, like your perfume. Of course, I never met you. But sometimes, when I'm rubbing cream onto old scars, there you are, little one. A…
1 txiki = little ; muxu = kiss ; maite = love (in Basque) Julie Irigaray is a French Basque writer based in Birmingham. Her pamphlet Whalers, Witches and Gauchos was published by Nine Pens (2021) and her debut collection Etxe will be published by The Poetry Lighthouse in 2027. Julie's poetry has been featured on BBC Radio 4, and her poems, articles and translations have appeared in over sixty…
Join me in the den Branches propped against each other, so close the light can only whisper, or a blanket fort with cushions to sit on and a mini-fridge of Smirnoff Ice. In here it is warmer than you would think. In here I’ve collected memories of us on the phone, taking turns to read out chat up lines from a plain-text website, ranking all the boys in our year, claiming again and again to be…
Inherited Soil I used to walk that field after rain, the air dim and streaked with afterlight. Roots pushed up like ribs in the dirt, unbraiding the dark that held them as stones shifted in their sleep. Each season something gave out— the green thinned, copper bled through, and one morning the ground blushed with the last of its colour. I pressed my hand there, felt loss flicker—mineral, unsaid,…
