Poet of the Month

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)

 

 APRIL POET OF THE MONTH:
ANNA LEWIS (WALES)

Anna Lewis has published two full-length poetry collections and two pamphlets.  Her most recent collection, In Passing, was published by Pindrop Press in 2019.  Her poems, stories, articles and reviews have appeared in magazines including The Rialto, Poetry Wales, New Welsh Review, Planet, Agenda and Magma.  She holds a doctorate in archaeology, and is a Hay Festival Scritture Giovani fellow.  She lives in Cardiff.  Her website is at www.annalewispoetry.co.uk.  

Fill

 

 

That was the night my mother had her fill of me:

when, after Karen’s eighteenth birthday,

I walked four miles with a boy

and dozed, full-clothed, in his room. 

Drunk, but not so very drunk; not like the time

the same boy accidentally punched me in the nose,

and I pitched into his mother’s car unintroduced,

blood down my lip plush as an August rose.

 

To reach his home, we climbed a thin road up the Mendips,

rails of holly at each verge.  In low-cropped fields

the ancient barrows held their ground, and held their own

inherent truth.  Beneath the field’s line,

each space was worked and roughly filled,

the excess heaped above –

all that was dug accounted for.

 

My mother, whose voice later that night

speared from the phone in fury, struck

from fear and disappointment: I had not called,

I had not thought of her enough.  Love

in its peaks and equal troughs.

(c) 2026 Anna Lewis


Hunter’s Lodge


You drank there, did you? 

Right on the ridge, right at the cross:
holiday traffic east to west along the Roman way,
south-bound commuters on the home descent.
I didn’t dare –

no sign; brown stucco walls;                                                 
bullseye windows squinted at the gravel square                   
where cars and vans sprawled half-abandoned,
left to garner frost and starlight.                                           
Potholers and archaeologists                                                

both liked it, and the old, deep locals
whom you befriended easily,
to whom I never spoke.
Dusk: the clay dries on your hands,                     
you straighten from the ancient ground;

then engines rising, roaring,
fading past, mean bolts of light
thrown to the silent yard,
and in your stronghold
voices all at once, beer gleaming in the glass.

From In Passing, Pindrop Press 2019

(c) 2026 Anna Lewis

Early Apples

 

 

Already the green apples strengthen in colour,

as with blood rising under the skin.

The best are the size of a new baby’s head –            

I mean, the head of the baby I know,

 

who stopped where he was

and wouldn’t grow, and wouldn’t be born

and had to be cut, his muffled world

loud in an instant with blades and bright light.

 

I mean the child born blue,

who underneath his glass hatch

grew steadily red, and took his own breaths.   

                                        He hasn’t yet

been outside, has no notion of trees

 

with their feet in the earth,

with their fruit that not only withstands

the long autumn dusk, but gains colour

and glows as winter approaches:

 

grows near incandescent. 

He knows only the hospital’s metred light,

its ambient balance of heat.

He knows nothing of winter, of dusk,

of narrow roads through the fields

 

over which, come November,

starlings turn in black cantos,

the pulse of their wings as they pass overhead

a single low stroke on a drum.

 

Now carnival floats line out of the town,

each decked with hundreds of bulbs. 

They roll on. Always there is one

where the power has failed,

where in darkness the dancers stand cold

 

and are cheered through the streets.

The baby knows, in his own way,

a little of this; fruit and trunk

of his own tree at once, he grows.

From In Passing, Pindrop Press 2019

(c) 2026 Anna Lewis

The length of the night

Early spring in the city.
A midwife said the house was cold,
so the pipes throb all day,
but still the baby cries.

By the window, my mother tussles
with the inconsolable thing at her chest;
while all along the pavements,
around the grey edge of morning

the daffodils shine,
and my mother meets their gaze, saying –
Yes – I too should be somewhere other than here.

Now thirty-six years have gone
and, once more, I’m inconsolable
but silently so.

The lights are again on all night,
and in the midst of her life
my mother lies in her wheeled bed awake,
each day returning the enormous gaze of dawn.

First published in The Rialto issue 103

(c) 2026 Anna Lewis

Between the wars

I spoke to her once     teetering on a chair
in my grandparents’ hall     to reach the phone on its table.
Two wars old        two husbands
two languages           two nations
and a voice like wind and sand down the line.

In her first marriage     she walked out her evenings
under the limes.     One day closed       then the next
while in his cot my grandfather dreamt
or thought with half-formed longing
of his stick       his ball.

No woman got a divorce
in Catholic Poland between the wars      but she did.
My grandfather at seven:
two fathers old         two homes
one family halved.

His mother        still little more than a girl
blows cigarette smoke over their street.
       Autumn in Warsaw:     the first whisper
of winter to come.
She scatters ash to the pavement
                              turns back to the room.

(c) 2026 Anna Lewis

The Engagement Party       

 

Stupsk, Mława, Poland

 

I thought they were cobwebs, but looking back

see that the white veins through the black                        

are only fissures in the ink:

the chandelier hangs clean and dusted,

while the guests beneath lift glasses, smile

across a pristine cloth.                                               

 

The camera is still a novelty:

stunned from conversation,                                       

half-turned faces betray the shutter’s clash,

the blast of light. Cheeks cloud,

lips flush in shades of coal and ash.

 

Behind them, through a slat of glass,

dusk drains the lawn; already, the eastern plains      

have slipped their colour. 

Toasts are made not to a finished thing

but to hope and expectation.             

 

My ancestors, faint at the far end of the table,

will not endure in this white villa                                          

but will linger in the village                                                  

while their table cringes under boots and sacks,

guns propped along the wall                                                  

 

like willow switches lined to dry. 

What I don’t know:

if everything was set in place,

each person at that table bound upon a sure course,

or if the possibilities were infinite and mutable

 

and multiplied with each dividing cell,

each impulse firing back the dark.

I stare at them through the ink,          

                                                                               

through the light their bodies blocked.                                  

They stare at me. 

The bulb ignites.

From In Passing, Pindrop Press 2019

(c) 2026 Anna Lewis

Portions

Both had their mother’s brow,
their father’s jaw and cheekbones,
but Owain’s life had been his own
and Cadwallon spilled it into the ground.

So if he, old man to them all,
had cast himself into four equal parts,
how many parts is he now?
The youngest stuffs his brother’s share
of blood and breath beneath his skin,
swaggers with it.

                              If he could say
it had always been coming, that Cadwallon
as a boy had torn the heads from birds,
set fires among the ferns –
but he had not.  A silver note
to his hair, a voice late to break.
One day he’d turned a corner in the hall
and almost fallen on the boy: curled,
eyes closed, beneath the window
in a wash of sunlight, greyhound pup
draped along his legs.  Clouds cut the sun,
and the light moved on his cheek like water.

What does an old man think about?  These things,
and how his woman’s voice has thinned,
how he no longer has the appetite he did.
Sometimes, at the smell of roasting beef
or boar, he looks up caught by hope and hunger
before his stomach bucks.  Now and again

he doubles, spreads his hands across his gut
as she did six months gone,
squaring her face to each kick.


Caradog ap Iestyn was a member of the ruling dynasty of Glamorgan when the Normans invaded.  Control of these lands was constantly contested.  Gerald of Wales records that Caradog’s son Cadwallon killed his own brother, Owain, although the reason is not given.

Ways back

I have no names for the flowers
nor their colours, which are paths
more than colours,

back to the hedges and dunes of a summer
still vivid, the way the landscapes
of a dream are vivid:

felt in the body, unwritten on any map.
But they were real, those places,
those lanes without discernible destination,

which opened only on to other lanes,
the moors occluded behind their banks.
Past the lanes, past the dunes,

the water gave and shrank,
it spoke in an accent that rose
from the meeting of currents far in the Atlantic;

so the flowers here remind me
of day’s end: flames low on the ocean,
the sun’s submergence.

(c) 2026 Anna Lewis