This free submission window for this anthology closed on 28 February 2026
Authors published so far
Charles Ambrose
, David Ashbee, David Birch, Emeline Winston, Graham Smith, Howard Timms, Tony Bradley
indicates audio
Feature editor: Katherine Parsons Audio editor: Howard Timms
This feature continues our popular Open Submissions series. The feature last summer, Open Submissions 8, included audio and text from 54 writers out of 101 who submitted from 17 countries.
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Charles Ambrose, David Ashbee, David Birch, Emeline Winston, Graham Smith,
indicates audio
David Birch
Sea Glass
Your glamour is filigree-thin
precisely twisted silver thread
beaten strips of gold
a flat shimmer on a bony wrist
side-eyed glances in mirrors.
My glamour has its roots in magic and spells
In the mystery of discarded shards
left to chance and the churning tides
and the abrasion of sand in the longshore drift
to create this pale-frosted fragment
and the remains of an ancient date
proud beneath the gentle brush of my thumb.
glamour: 1720, Scottish, “magic, enchantment” (especially in the phrase “to cast the glamor”)
Mondrian
You dropped an ’a’ from your name to sound less Dutch
shook off the grip of Calvin and the damp canal-side house
moved on from lonely trees in rain-soaked landscapes
to embrace abstraction in yellow, blue and red
trapped by black bars
banned from blending
by unforgiving right-angles and verticals.
Then the colours shifted to the edges
on the run from constriction
and empty space.
You sailed to Manhattan when Paris fell
drawn by the spell of bebop and boogie-woogie
and your canvas surged with syncopated rhythms
as colours scattered
danced to different rules
and a different beat.
Colours of Revolt
They wore sea-green ribbons
and sprigs of rosemary for remembrance
when they fought for the right for all men to vote.
Three hundred locked in Burford Church
and three shot dead on Cromwell’s word.
They wore red caps of liberty
when they gathered in their Sunday best
at St Peter’s Field for liberty and fraternity
and their right to vote. Eighteen slaughtered
when the troops moved in at Peterloo.
They wore purple, white and green
when they chained themselves to railings
and bombed the coronation chair:
purple for loyalty, white for dignity
and green for everlasting hope.
They wore flags of red and white
when they marched on hotels.
Some got their paint mixed up
and daubed a Danish flag on a roundabout
instead of a St George’s cross.
David Birch worked in education and lives in Devon. His poetry frequently explores the relation of people to their landscape, environment and past. Several of his recent poems are published in Wildfire Words and two are included in an anthology celebrating 100 years since the publication of The Great Gatsby, ‘Beautiful Little Fools’. Follow @davidbirch.bsky.social
David Ashbee
My life in ashtrays
Age 10
No one smoked in my childhood home
but I bought with precious coins
on a cubs’ outing.
an ashtray;
on its rim
a white swan in a round slot
like a peg on a cribbage board.
Age 20
House cleared, all swans flown but me,
my life in a satchell
in someone else’s attic,
with 3 acquired pub ashtrays.
Age 50
Another house gone, ashtrays unnoted
in the audit of effects
and I am free
to roam the streets of Lisbon
for exotic cheap cigars.
God knows why
I still keep their empty cartons,
lime green, claret, midnight blue
in a damp drawer in my shed.
Age 80
I lead you through my house
remind you of those heady nights we shared
lost odours
of whisky and cigars.
Not many of us left, you say,
pulling out some baccy
and heading for the door.
Interview
I’m expecting a teenage girl
who lent a hand when a horse
bolted. I shall ask her about it.
Her name is Imogen.
it says so on this form
in looping unjoined writing.
The first box I must tick
is how she greets me,
does she smile ?
I want to tell her
the only Imogen I’ve known
is Shakespeare’s
but that might freeze her.
My role today
is to reassure.
My brown suede jacket
is one I’ve kept for best
and serious occasions,
few and far between
since I retired
from this very place.
I explore an inside pocket
discover a theatre ticket
from 18 years ago
when, it shocks me to realise,
Imogen was not
even a twinkle.
We are a dozen,
spread throughout
the wide bright hall –
The young man at the table on my left
has a can of
… Protein Water ?
Even at my age
there’s something new every day.
It’s as if I’m back at school.
Stilled
Skipping the few steps to the shed,
I gripped the black bucket
with its gleaming Cyclops eye
and swung it skywards above the fence.
A polished chute of water
flung itself headlong to the grass
like a flanker’s diving try.
Resetting the bucket on its two bricks
I straightened up to view the mottling day.
And the world stilled.
I noticed
droplets
poised below the overhang,
a ragged label flaking among stones,
then,
strung between wall and shed
a silver web
quivering
At its core, striped like a snailshell,
perched the weaver,
her knees drawn up, body hunched
like a tiger poised to spring.
It seemed her eyes were shifting, flicking,
as if I were a giant fly
dark against the clouds
as she unrolled her mesh to net me.
I went to nudge her with a fingernail,
set her scuttling round her maze,
watch her leap from wire to wire
in sticky ridge-soled boots
hands reaching out
like a fast-frame rockclimber.
But I stayed my hand,
left her to her day,
turned and strolled away,
hazed in the spell she had spun me.
David Ashbee was raised and lives in Gloucestershire and was one of Enitharmon’s first new poets with Perpetual Waterfalls in 1989. Loss Adjuster followed from Bluechrome in 2008, and a big collection Poems from the Mindshop from Dempsey and Windle in 2021. A founder member since 1990 of The Cherington Poets, and a regular attender at Cheltenham Poetry Society Writing Group, he has often performed his work at festivals and was a judge for the 2024 GWN competition. He walks many miles as a Cotswold Voluntary Warden and edits a magazine for the Cotswold Vale Talking Newspaper.
His poems and photos can be seen at: luckycherryphotosandpoems.wordpress.com
Graham Smith
Void
(Meknes, Morocco)
Walk the labyrinthian alleys of the medina,
past jewellers, tailors and carpet sellers;
open that door; climb stairs – steep, dark and
long – to a flat roof, a world above a world,
where cats patrol and laundry flaps, and now
awash with evening light, as a livid sun
drops like a penny into a cosmic slot machine.
Soon loudspeakers click from minarets
across the city. First one muezzin, then another,
launch their evening call to prayer, erupting
like volcanoes everywhere into the sky,
powerful, awesome, with an air raid siren’s
threat. Then one by one like angry gods
soon bored they disappear, until a last one
drifts eerily away. Empty silence follows.
Nothing seems to have an edge – the everyday
has been swept away. Dark nothingness –
the real maybe – confronts. The city melts
into the night. A stork arrows past a minaret,
a streak of phosphorescent white against
an ink blue sky, like a troubled soul departing.
Plastic Chairs
They look cheap and nasty
outside a cottage
overlooking the sea.
But now as light drains
from distant hills, earth smells
rich and birdsong flickers to a close
they’re transformed from plastic
into solid sculpted shapes –
like earth mothers
courtesy of Henry Moore
or ancient ritual figures from the past
scouring the horizon for truth
and meaning –
though they look smug
as if they believe
they possess it already –
but wind could
soon scatter that illusion
and dawn
will wash it away.
Are You Aligned?
She stands bent over a stick
beside a busy road, dazzling
in flamingo pink, stockinged feet
in wellington boots, cardigan
askew upon her shoulders
then sets off determined toward
a wayside cross the other side.
There she quells irreverent
weeds with her stick, as if hacking
a path back into her past.
But the tide has gone out on
the sea of faith and these
crosses have lost their power
to bless, console, and threaten
others with hell. But hidden
power remains – beautiful,
embedded in time, made of
wood, stone, iron, they ask still
how we relate to the whole –
an, All, that may reject us soon.
So imagine these crosses
shorn of dogma, re-energised,
symbols now of our fragile
home, across France asking:
Are you aligned to the Universe?
Graham Smith lives in Edinburgh and started writing poetry when he retired.
Charles Ambrose
Under Rocks
Under these rocks
The sea has scattered
small lives.
Hunting amongst the
Perpetual grey
was like some deep dream;
Our sky seemed no ceiling.
And crossing them
I was under those same stones
that I had listened to
as a child.
Letting Go
I am watching the leaves fall one by one from the chestnut tree across the road.
They have been turning from green to yellow and from yellow to brown and now they are letting go;
being released, their purpose fulfilled.
For the time being I remain one of the yellow ones, clinging on,
not yet brown, though aware of my destiny and conscious of its inevitability.
The Diamond Maker
(After H G Wells)
When I was young, my dreams seemed too difficult to understand,
now they declare themselves emphatically.
Last night in my sleep, I met an old man who had developed a method for creating diamonds
from the detritus and suffering that surrounded him.
His device sent the precious stones directly into the next world,
the drawback was that he could not cross the threshold to retrieve them.
Just before I surfaced he called out to me in frustration:
“Why is it that my dreams are so much easier to understand now that I am older?”
Charles Ambrose is the pen name of the visual artist, writer, diarist, and art historian Chris Meigh-Andrews. He was born in Essex, England and lived in Montreal, Canada from 1957-1975. He studied photography, film, and fine art and has worked as a photographer, film animator and video editor. Since Meigh-Andrews began working with video in a fine art context in 1977, he has exhibited his single screen and video installations widely both within the UK and internationally. During the 1990’s, he developed a distinctive body of installation work combining video and sound with renewable energy systems.
Emeline Winston
The Parting
Two nights on from the rose moon
I’m hiding in the woods near Bucha
where the tree’s clawed barks,
like sharpened leads, pierce the sky.
Gloved bones pull at the back of my coat,
boots are trampling on my shadow. I turn,
to find a chaos of ancestral ghosts who
found refuge in the woods of Katowice,
hid amongst the pines of Lvov, or were
lined up in clearings of the Wienerwald.
Faceless Magritte-like figures,
made visible only by their clothing,
are pulsed forwards by swathes
of other ancestral voices
who snake back into the distance
disappearing down to feed the soil,
the soil, which holds today’s sign entitled:
Seven Enchanting Ideas for your Day in the Woods
A glove points to direct my eye towards a
streak of light which cuts down through the trees,
suggesting a path out of this wood’s swaddled refuge,
enticing me towards escape,
though offering no security from torment:
is the parting my exposure or are the trees the trap?
I smash open the emergency exit box
of this nightmare, tip out of bed to avoid sleep’s
lure back into their grasp, and draw a parting
in the curtains to seek night’s dark spaces.
This opening invites a fluorescent laser beam
of moonlight into my bedroom. I turn,
to find its illuminated shard branding my bed.
Keeping the curtains open in place to save night’s
spirited beam, I climb back into bed and watch.
I watch the white line cut across my sheet, I watch
the sheet over my body, it’s bewitching rise and fall,
and I decide to grant permission to this sword of light
to stay with me while I sleep, to bless my body,
and trust that it won’t cut me in half.
New Year’s Revolution
What are my hopes and prayers for this year –
only one – is there any way to put a stop to the fear?
This acrid sweat and sting of cortisol fear
lived and mirrored by attacker and defender.
When the clock strikes midnight across the world
could the tanks turn into pumpkins, and drones into birds?
Birds which could squawk off on alternate thermals,
to alter the arch and yawn of those dirty rocket bombs.
Aching hearts blown apart onto the concrete rubble,
the overarching terror of the still-alive. Sole survivors
of whole family huddles, nowhere safe to survive,
no one to hug or cry with, no buildings left to call home.
Aching hearts and trapped screams of the hostage families,
unable to rescue, trying to break free from their stone confines,
stuck, desperate to do, to act, to move, to run towards,
to hug and to whisper to “It’s okay, now you’re home”.
Is it not easy to create change or simply not to do?
Is it not possible to
just stop it, stop it, stop it?
To the hands igniting rockets: lay your hands back down
just stop it, stop it, stop it.
To the fingers which press confirm aerial bomb: lay your hands back down
just stop it stop it stop it
and learn to sit still,
like Buddha.
Revolutions of Intransigence
Do you know the one about the Irish man, the Muslim and the Jew?
Sitting on a bench in Jerusalem’s Old Quarter,
after morning prayers in each of their holiest shrines,
the Irish Man said “For God’s teeth, can’t you lay down your guns?”
the Muslim said “Bismillah, they need to stop the drones and the bombs.”
The Jew said “Baruch Hashem, they need to return our hostages and stop the rockets”.
And the Irish Man said: “For God’s teeth, can’t you lay down your guns?”
Though in their soul, they thought they might have heard a punch line
circling on the desert wind. They look into each other’s eyes when
they realise what they had heard swept up on the wind’s broom,
directed through hairy ears into their hardened hearts. Could it have been
“I forgive you”, “I forgive you”, “I forgive you”.
Emeline Winston is a producer of exhibitions in museums. Poetry came into her life unexpectedly. In 2019, she was invited to what she thought was a poetry reading, but was shocked to discover a poetry-writing group. It brought joy — and consolation through covid online meetings that went on for two years. Emeline continued to write and recently started to share her work.
Howard Timms
Gilded Ozymandias
After Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Ozymandias”
MY name is Donald Trump, twice King of kings
LOOK ON MY WORDS, YOU POWERLESS, and despair
Free speech is MY desire above all else
So I can cancel anyone who disagrees.
When voters said, Apprentice-like, You’re Fired.
I wrote ELECTION STOLEN, had no proof
so sent a “love-in” violent mob who failed
to stop Congress from vote certification.
Seeking now a Peace Prize, I pretend I’ve earned it.
I started world trade wars by taxing my voters
Threatened and used weapons from the sea and air.
I drop cluster bombs of promises and threats
enrich MY friends and family with crypto
covet other lands to grab some oily riches.
Haiku
Trump flies to UK
Robbie Williams’ words seem apt
The ego has landed
Howard Timms is publisher of Wildfire-Words. More
Tony Bradley
Sabbath Days
Early
morning. Senses, alert to scenes
where fen-kissed meadows merge
with woodland ride.
Listen.
Unseen,
eternal sprite,
wisp of misty fenlands.
Bittern. Ethereal booms beckon
the day.
Sun-tinged
reeds and green sedge sound to the mad
Mad-Hatter’s Tea Party #
chatter of one.
Warbler.
She comes.
Tiny, feisty,
torrent of hyperbole,
over-puffed explosion of joy.
The wren.
Hark. There!
The high-pitched, whistly-rich, wispy
song of flame-bonneted
flame-bold goldcrest.
She glimpses
Raven,
surreptitious
hoarder of stolen caches,
observed by furtive ravens’ eyes,
scheming.
Daylight
dims. Evening
blackbird psalms cooler air,
and such days become Sabbath days.
Night falls.
The nightjar stirs.
Tony Bradley hails from Derbyshire, but has lived in Gloucestershire and South Gloucestershire for the last thirty-five years. A retired teacher, Tony has been a poetry enthusiast for well over fifty years. Tony has had several poems published by Wildfire Words, and one poem in the Black Eyes Publishing UK anthology, “The Rise of the Badger and The Great Shrubbery”.