Sweet Mammalian, edited by Rebecca Hawkes and Nikki-Lee Birdsey, is celebrating ten years of publication with an inviting mix of voices both new and and unfamiliar to me. The slender, hand-stitched zine features an embroidered, magnificent, explosive artwork on the cover – ‘I am always waking up from a long sleep’ – by Saskia Bunce-Rath.

The poems, both rich with intimate detail and expanding with breathing space, are a joy to read. You nestle into love, questions, tidal movement, lies, truths, water, ocean, arriving, departing, what might be, what will be, what is. You travel and you drift.

Follow the link below and find your own routes and meanderings. In the meantime I am offering a handful of lines (out of myriad hauntings I’d add) that have clung.

from ‘Reasons’ by Ruben Mita:
‘This is the light in the bulb, / the boil in the kettle, / this is the whole thing / and the thing expansive.’

from ‘Rare Evolutions1.’ by Elliot McKenzie:
‘A person is a cooled / pool of magma.’

from ‘five steps through january’ by Naveena:
‘the right side of my body is static / neon where it brushes your damp arm’

from ‘GLASS’ by Joan Fleming:
‘Sometimes a storm would take hold of her, a storm borne of blindness.’

from ‘Natural causes’ by Zoe Higgins:
‘and the swans only glare and wild their wings / along the walking-speed water and dredge / another snail from the riverweed roots.’

from ‘Only’ by Xiaole Zhan:
‘Hand me a poem round a fragile as an egg in / the small of a warm palm.’

from ‘The mourning pool’ by Sugar Magnolia Wilson:
‘The systematic pattern of / loss and against the ever blackening water / that rises up and around us.’

Sweet Mammalian Issue 10 page where you can read all the poems