January: Rebecca Lowe (Wales).
February: Jim Gronvold (USA). 
March: Carolyn Mary Kleefeld (USA).
April: Tozan Alkan (Turkey).
May: Byron Beynon (Wales).
June: Michelle Chung (USA). 
July: Jim Gwyn (USA).
August: Jonathan Taylor (England).
September: Beata Poźniak (USA).
October: Maria Taylor (England).
November: Stanley H. Barkan (USA).
December: John Dotson (USA).

January: Maria Mastrioti (Greece).

February: Gayl Teller (USA).
March: Mike Jenkins (Wales).
April: Cassian Maria Spiridon (Romania).
May: Simon Fletcher (England)
June: Sultan Catto (USA)
July: Vojislav Deric (Australia)
August: K. S. Moore (Ireland)
September: Kristine Doll (USA)
October: Tammy Nuzzo-Morgan (USA)
November: Christopher Norris (Wales)
December: Maria Mazziotti Gillan (USA)

2023: Poets featured as Poet of the Month 

January: Samuel Ezra (Wales)
February: Tôpher Mills (Wales)
March: Rob Cullen (Wales)
April: Mandira Ghosh (India)
May: John Greening (England)
June: Rosy Wood-Bevan (Wales)
July: David Hughes (Wales)

2025: Poets featured as Poet of the Month 
January: Annest Gwilym (Wales)
February: Sam Smith (Wales)
March: Dave Lewis (Wales)
April: Scott Elder (France)
May: Angela Kosta (Italy)
June: Abeer Ameer (Wales)
July: Jenny Mitchell (England)
August: Sydney Lea (USA)
September: Richard Collins (USA)
October: Mark Lewis (Wales)
November: Robert Nisbet (Wales)
Clare E. Potter (Wales)

2026: Poets featured as Poet of the Month 
Rhoda Thomas (Wales)
Mike Everley (Wales)
Regina Resta (Italy)
Anna Lewis (England)
Carmella de Keyser (England)
 Mujë Buçpapaj (Albania)
Luis Benitez (Argentina)
David Annwn (England)

 

 

                           SEPTEMBER POET OF THE MONTH:
           David Lloyd


David Lloyd (c) 2026 

 

 

Poet and fiction writer David Lloyd is the author of twelve books, including
five poetry collections: The Everyday Apocalypse, The Gospel According to Frank, Warriors, Shared Origins: a collaboration between three poets (2025), and The Last Season (2025). He published three works of fiction: Boys: Stories and a Novella, Over the Line (a novel), and The Moving of the Water (stories). His stories, poems, and translations have appeared in many journals, including Denver Quarterly, The Massachusetts Review, Poetry Wales, and Virginia Quarterly Review. In 2000, he received the Poetry Society of America’s Robert H. Winner Award. He received two Fulbright Scholar awards: at Bangor University, Wales (2001), and at Cardiff University, Wales (2022).

Forgotten

The gods are angry.
I hear it in their pulsing silence.

Angry at the mirrors in bathrooms.
At rivers no longer obeying
the simplest dictates.
At seas coagulating their own continents.
At the multitudinous species sacrificed,
but not to them.
Angry at wine leaked in alleys,

licked from sidewalks.
Angry at screaming birds that won’t bend their wings.
Angry at thousands of buried suns.

I should do something to save us.
But I’ve forgotten which herbs to burn.
Forgotten who to love, and why.

Which well is sacred for which affliction.
How to slash with a sanctified knife
to give pause.
Forgotten how to touch my first born.

Forgotten the words the gods can hear.
Forgotten even their names,
always near our lips, and the names
of their offspring, embalmed
in constellations, no longer out of reach.

(c) 2026 David Lloyd

From Shared Origins, The Seventh Quarry Press 2025

History That Isn’t History

From a sequence titled Dust, which relates Medieval Welsh tales (primarily the Mabinogi) to the life of actor Richard Burton / Richard Jenkins.

 

1

The Mother gives birth
in a terraced house under a bridge

above a coalfield in a village
remote from the epicenters of empire

and the locked vaults of Threadneedle Street,
and turns away

from a quintessence of dust
on the stone floor.

Why would she not love this child?
Why deny a name and armor

against the whips and scorns of time?
Why deny a partner?

Why lead any child to the pit
where yoked ponies trudge their endless nights?

Why ignite a supernova in a tunnel?
Why avalanche a coalface?

Why cage canaries to be poisoned in the dark?
Why conscript? Why scar lungs, 

shackle ankles before unshrouding from mist
the angled valleys, hills laden with blackberries?

A tale not worth the telling
as history tells: any ash heap,

any cold hearth, hovel, haphazard village,
continent, any moment before or since:

one lifted, one swept away, one applauded, one buried,
one a puddler, one a Crawshay,

one a miner, one the Marquess of Bute. 

2

But wait –
this history isn’t history.

A magician, a teller of tales,
chooses to see the unseen,

scoops it to a pocket
where its heart beats,

and keeps beating, warm against skin,
secured from arrows and slings,

and sings within, then sings to be heard –
a winning treble in eisteddfodau –

his fast and rough hands
those of a wing-forward in the national game.

He cries for his mother,
dances on the kitchen table,

walks and runs with new legs,
plays the organ with quick fingers

and the mouth organ
with endless breaths.

He unleashes his voice to roam
with sheep on Mynydd Margam.

Words in air.
A rare story:

a child the Mother refused, is loved
and blossoms between one apocalypse and the next,

between pithead and cloud,
between pew and pulpit.

From nowhere that anyone knows,
through luck, love, magic, ambition:

a name, armor, a wife conjured
from meadowsweet, broom, and oak flowers.

In time, petals of the enchanted life
unwrap along bountiful branches

for the masses to digest or envy
or crave or despise or ignore

in London, Hollywood, Puerto Vallarta, Céligny.
All unfold their exquisite petals –

all but the stone rose
of that dusty floor.

 (c) 2026 David Lloyd

From Shared Origins, The Seventh Quarry Press 2025

Birth in Hoboken

From a sequence titled The Gospel According to Frank, which merges elements of the public persona of Frank Sinatra with Biblical and mythological representations of divinity.

 

Because he was so huge
they pulled him out with forceps
long as pool cues, half-killing
the almost-forgotten mother.

But afterwards, as he lay on the table
by the bloodied tools, he couldn’t open his eyes,
couldn’t leave his dream
of endless and splendid isolation,
always ninety eight point six,
always suspended, always playtime.

It took a waterfall to wake him,
his first note cracking every
window and mirror in Hoboken.

And why not?
Why should he wish to leave
the amniotic slumber for a childhood
of boxing gyms, scrap-heaps, doughboys,
and soon-to-leap stock brokers
so much unlike himself?

Every legend needs a legend
from which the hero rises like a flame
from a greasy stove, like a mushroom
from manure, like a song
from the lips of a kid on a street corner
whose partner strums a ukulele.

(c) 2026 David Lloyd

From The Gospel According to Frank, New American Press 2009

Six Truths About Money

From a sequence titled The Gospel According to Frank, which merges elements of the public persona of Frank Sinatra with Biblical and mythological representations of divinity.

(1)

In truth, he created money before
he created men and women,
setting its core ablaze and placing it
on an altar in the Garden
so it might shine brighter than the sun.

(2)

In truth, money created itself,
moving its spirit over the face of the water,
organizing its forms out of neglected dust,
offering allegiance to no god or human
but finding its inevitable place
wherever two or three are gathered.

(3)

In truth, money was never created
but existed only in the stories
men and women told about it
as they tried to understand themselves,
and the objects their hands made,
and the objects their hands desired.

(4)

In truth, it was the stories about money
that created money, told so often
with such passion by so many
that no one could deny its existence
in their pockets, in their banks,
or in the banks of other people
who said few words,
and kept mostly to themselves.

(5)

In truth, money remade those who owned it
into taller and heavier beings
whose footsteps echoed
from mountain to mountain to mountain.

At the same time it created the machines
that make more money
and the ones that clean money,
the ones that hide it,
and the ones that take it away.

(6)

In truth, money first crawled on its belly
but complained so loudly about not being able to fly
that he gave it wings, talons, a beak.

With its beak, money dug a hole in the ground,
where it crawled, furled its wings,
tucked its talons,
and waited stubbornly for the end of time.

(c) 2026 David Lloyd

From The Gospel According to Frank, New American Press 2009

Homage to Daniel Boone

Like everyone, I’ve wanted
that coonskin cap with bushy tail,
the neck-to-toe buckskins,
and that long-nosed rifle
he lugged everywhere.

Like everyone, I’ve wanted to say,
“I’ve never been lost,
though I was a mite bewildered once,
for three days in Kentucky.”

All around him:  the unmapped
North American forest of aboriginal danger,
sudden snow, the mountain lion’s leap,
beaver traps, porcupine quills,
the skunk’s stink.

Behind every trunk:  teeth and claws.
A bear paw on the back,
an arrow through the eye.
One minute, you stir a squirrel stew
beneath an endless sky;
the next, your uncombed scalp,
in a clutch of scalps,
bobs from a Shawnee’s belt.

But Daniel didn’t care.
He could strip the skin off a back
with three flicks of a knife
or cleave a head with a hatchet
tossed backwards from his left hand.
Every weapon was trusty.

They say that each step he took
he touched a tree,
hacking bark at stomach-level –
that first snaking, trans-continental highway|
signed so all might follow
with shovels and with saws,
with folded pieces of paper,
the democracy of developers.
Here, they shouted, here is where Daniel
paved the way.

So let’s go, I say.
Let’s go deeper.  Let’s lose
our human fear and every hope.
We’ll chew off our own feet at the ankle,
we’ll spit in the lion’s yellow eye,
we’ll laugh as quills drill to the brain
and beyond.
We’ll always aim at the heart.

(c) 2026 David Lloyd

From Warriors, Salt Publishing 2009

Giving It All Away

I am giving away the attic photographs and letters,
shoeboxes of envelopes addressed to someone else.

I am escaping from history, from 1066
and 1282, from the year one and the year
after next year,
from crossbows and phalanxes,
concentration camps, viruses, inoculations,
from Albert Schweitzer and Albert Einstein
and Eddie Albert and Edie Gormet.
I am escaping the news.
I am escaping nameless
women being named.

I am breaking the laws of the universe,
ignoring gravity,
laughing at the jet stream,
dismissing with a wave of the hand
all talk of black holes and the big bang,
the bending of time,
the galaxies collapsing every microsecond.

Eraser in hand, I approach
the blackboard equations – their parentheses,
brackets, superscript numbers,
smug exactitudes, fussy multiplications –
and with grand sweeps I reduce all
to nothing equals nothing equals nothing.

I am filing away my maps, folding sections
in correct sequence along the creases.
I have forgotten the name of the place where I stand,
the place where I stood a moment ago,
and the place where I plan to stand tomorrow.

I am moving out of my house, away from
shoveling and raking, the bodies in the backyard,
the nuclear waste in my neighbor’s basement,
the tanks parked in the side streets.

I unbutton my shirt, unbuckle my belt and unzip
my pants, strip off shoes and socks
and shorts, take off my favorite hat
and let all fly from my fingertips.

Nothing is as new as skin
but I say goodbye also to my body,
to hair and to fingernails,
a farewell to nerve-endings of pleasure and pain,
a final awkward kiss to nipples and to genitals,
a careful touch to all the sore places
that have not healed.

When I step on the scale,
the needle does not quiver.  No fear.
No words to worry the tongue.
As I walk out to the world,
my feet leave no impression on the earth.

(c) 2026 David Lloyd


From Warriors, Salt Publishing 2009


The Last Season

It’s the season for small pleasures, when frost
bleaches grass, when wind screams its night name
and snow slowly reincarnates. It’s a time
for lesser needs, diminished desires. We’ll heal
our sores, splint cracked bones, warm our split hands
by flames stoked night and day. It’s the season

for recollecting the early seasons:
when we slept naked, trimmed fingernails, frosted
our hair, lathered and shaved, our hard-at-it hands
like well-oiled cogs and gears, our nick-names
sloughing off our tongues. We ran, toes and heels
obeying all commands, no thought for how time

ticks a measured second-hand around time’s
round face. But it does. The final season
announces. And guess what? It’s OK. Really.
As when I step out the door to a frosted
morning that doesn’t care, doesn’t speak my name,
that covers greens and browns with pale hands,

vast fingers splayed, those rough, far-flung hands
that refuse to flex. I’m grateful for time
to burrow deep under the duvet, naming
what I excavate: crumbs, socks, loose change, season’s
greetings, mislaid pets, the dustings of frost
in ancient caverns. This is the time to heal

the past, the future, the present, to heal
every instant of neglect, restoring hands
and feet – burnt white then black with deep frost-
bite – these fingers and toes, time and time
again stubbed, stabbed, fractured through all seasons,
my wanderings, my wayfarings, the names

I’ve forgotten, the names I refuse, the names
I speak as I peel back bandages. Heal
me. Forgive me. Forgive my seasons
of discontent. Forgive my frigid hands
grasping what they desire. Forgive the time
devoted to myself. Forgive the frost

its bite. Let me raise these now old hands
into the healing air, up out of time,
into this last season, this deepest frost.

(c) 2026 David Lloyd

From The Last Season, Tiger Bark Press 2025