The Broken Spine is proud to announce the shortlist for the second annual Readers’ Choice Award, a unique opportunity for our community to celebrate the best poetry published in our print collections over the past year. Unlike other awards decided by editorial panels, this is one voted for by you—our readers and peers—to honour the poems that have left the deepest impact.
In 2024, Rachel Deering won the inaugural Readers’ Choice Award for her stunning poem Birch Tree. Now, a new selection of powerful, thought-provoking, and emotionally resonant works is up for consideration. Handpicked by Alan Parry, these poems represent some of the finest writing featured in The Broken Spine’s print collections over the past year.
Here are your Readers’ Choice Award 2025 nominees:
The voting period runs from 1st March to 7th March 2025. During this week, you have the chance to read these nominated works and cast your vote for the poem that resonates most deeply with you.
This is your opportunity to acknowledge the writers who have moved you, challenged you, or changed your perspective. Share the link widely—among fellow poets, readers, and literature lovers—so we can make this a true celebration of reader-driven literary recognition.
Let’s be clear: the Readers’ Choice Award carries no monetary prize—what it does carry is prestige, respect, and the backing of The Broken Spine’s dedicated readership. If you want to change that, we invite you to support our fundraising campaign.
We are actively raising £5,000 for The Broken Spine Poetry Award, a separate prize that will include a cash award for poets. The Readers’ Choice Award is about community recognition, while The Broken Spine Poetry Award aims to provide direct financial support for outstanding poets.
If you believe in what we do and want to help us take this to the next level, you can donate to our fundraising campaign here:
Every contribution helps us move closer to a future where independent poetry receives the financial backing it deserves.
This isn’t just an award—it’s a celebration of the poets and words that have made an impact on you. Whether you’re a writer, a reader, or both, your participation ensures that the voices shaping The Broken Spine’s literary landscape receive the recognition they deserve.
So, read, reflect, and vote between 1st–7th March. Let’s make this year’s Readers’ Choice Award a true testament to the power of poetry and the people who love it.
Vote now and be part of something bigger.
little chimp blood lust Matthew M. C. Smith wrong? glorification of man spikes of heroism brutality unreal conditioning complete? it starts with He-Man – Aryan facsimile on a rotoscope road under Grayskull towers HE is primal energy source hot conduction of power HE will smite skeleton foe wrong? to thrill-seek, jump brown-patterned couches with fake army knife little chimp blood-lust ignited father is watching World at War (staccato marching, Belsen, Dachau, Treblinbka, Auschwitz) little gappy-tooth kid’s eyes blink with Battle Cat in his small imp hand – teeny little O mouth at… bodies in ovens, bodies in the field ragdoll piles slow bulldozing of pit rows) child with white-blond hair, legs bruised like nursery stormclouds, sprinkle of freckles, glassblue eyes and chinblood that runs with fresh raspberry vampire lines, wrestler-grapples his dog, not knowing that good has darkness and mothers of foes weep and even a white page with black ink looks down like it could actually cry at these words at the godawful state of things army grenades, army figures, army trucks, army guns, war war war until there is no escape
American Girls
Lucy Heuschen
In love with love and low-cal frozen yoghurt,
Java coffee, smuggled beer and Lucky Strikes,
we gorge ourselves on the American century.
Care packages arrive from home: each chock full
of Marathons, a name we haven’t yet unlearned;
Dairy Milk, Curly Wurly, Tunnocks Tea-Cakes.
We send proof of life: Breakfast At Tiffany’s poses,
peanut brittle candy, Hershey’s Chocolate Kisses.
Year-end, our mothers wait with Tupperware.
They long to reach us, touch us, hold us.
That done, they’ll stuff our prodigal mouths full.
You Can’t Have Special Goggles in the Wrong Hands
Justin Karcher
After Ezra Jack Keats, Theatre of Youth, & Marina Car, Irish Classical Theatre Company January-February 2023
Yesterday I saw two plays & my day begins walking to Theatre of Youth to check out The Snowy Day & on the way there, in front of Savoy, this guy asks me for a cigarette & when I give him one, he asks, “Are you Mafia?” He means Bills Mafia & when I tell him of course, he fist bumps me then proceeds to tell me how there are too many Bengals fans in Buffalo right now, that he’s unsettled, that he got kicked out of a store because he was talking about the Mafia. “I just love Josh Allen,” he tells me… but the way his eyes look, it feels more like a confession & I’m the priest. Something soulful is happening here, but I’m running a little late. “There’s nothing wrong with love,” I assure him, but as we part, I start thinking how that was probably the wrong thing to say. Too much of anything & you won’t be able to move. Anyway, I meet up with Donna, Tony & Javier at Theatre of Youth. At one point during the show, the kids find a pair of funky-looking goggles & pretend they’re deep-sea divers or astronauts. It’s cute. Some bullies chase them through the city trying to get the goggles. The puppet dog saves the day, which is awesome, because you can’t have special goggles in the wrong hands. I feel like I still live my life this way, riding the wave of my imagination in a city that is either small or big depending on how you look at it. Afterward, we go to The Old Pink, but it’s a little out of context, because there’s still daylight & the young are still in their coffins. A Bengals couple heads into the men’s bathroom together & I hope they both get a release, whatever that might mean for them. Me & Donna eventually split up from the gang to eat dinner at Don Tequila where I enjoy a California Burrito & we chat about playwriting & what it means to get your voice out there. Good food, good chat, & then on our way to Irish Classical for The Mai, we notice a strobe light party happening in some third-floor apartment on Allen & I can’t help but applaud the ambition because it’s a little too early for strobe lights but maybe I’m just getting older. We swing by Matinee because there’s time to kill before the show & this dude I know from poetry open mics gives me his opinions on the silent movie that’s playing. I don’t know the movie, but at one point there’s this well-dressed woman wearing fur piloting an old-timey airplane through a snowstorm. It’s quite beautiful. At Irish, I pretend I’m wearing those funky-looking goggles from earlier because I really wanna meet this nine-fingered fisherman that everyone’s talking about. I think about love, how it’s never well-executed, that it drags us into a mulberry wasteland where all you hear is the sound of a cello off in the distance. Afterward, me & Donna part & I swing my Matinee again & wish Mike a happy birthday. I talk about wearing a diaper & singing Lady Gaga, how my stage name would be Lady Goo Goo Gaga. Anyway, on the way back to my car all the way on Bidwell, I stop at 7-Eleven for a coffee but at this point in the night, you kinda have to mix all the different flavors together to fill up a cup & I imagine our hearts work the same way – lots of flavors from all eras of our lives coming together to make the whole thing beat. When I finally get to my car, it is covered in the thinnest layer of snow & someone, it seems, has written a love letter in it. I can’t make out everything, but I can clearly read, “You are loved” & “in love” & there are lots of handprints & hearts. I put on my special goggles & try to see who did it. I do this for a few minutes but come up with no answers except that maybe Buffalo herself is confessing her love to me. Something soulful is happening here. When I drive off, my windshield wipers swipe away the words, but the love remains. 91.3 is blaring. I can’t get enough of this place. Go Bills.
Hors D’oeuvres
Si Griffiths
It must take an hour for us to order,
the waitress keeps coming back,
first with a smile, later a laugh.
And seriously, we do try to spend
just a minute with that menu.
But here we sit, hand-locked, eyes held.
Not one kiss has passed this table’s lips,
across its white linen I tease,
my drum-roll feathered, a play,
palm to forearm.
Our talk a fusilli of twists and turns,
vegan ice cream to theories of change.
Your words alert against mine,
a rehearsal of a sort, an embrace
of a kind.
Finally, we decide, then pick and push around our plates.
A first date, an online match,
but what code could predict this mix?
Set a whisk to work, the friction of heat
and air leaving us both almost
fit to explode.
I look up and am struck, tables cleared,
chairs on end, a thicket of dark wooden spikes.
We ease ourselves out, all giggles and thanks,
gentle, as between us there’s egg white
ready to fold.
Still Life
Jennie E. Owen
a wild bloom in the bent arm of the brook,
mossy infant all pink eared balsam,
pale stemmed. Rooted, naked and tangle-jointed,
under the low sky. Skin a mother’s lips
could have warmed now cool as the water,
that moves him, running
where a heart should have beaten
its moths wings.
He awaits discovery, wet muzzles
to worry over him gently like a bone.
Only a bone.
In sleep, his fingers open blue petals,
a puzzle,
too small,
to hold the world so vast.
You Could Be Good
Briony Collins
Young boys gathered at the bay:
footballs and sandcastles.
This is where their mums told them they were good
and in those words they found a life to make warm,
to hold in their hands like a newborn, a soft head
cupped in a calloused hand, swooning at the scent
of milk and Sudocrem. They believed it. This is where
they became fathers, at the shoreline of teenagedom,
the future unrolled like a birth, like a wave bursting,
gathering froth and sparkling into calm, where they first
knew they could do it, one day, and do it well.
Then the grey sea coughed against rocks, lurked in pools,
sought them in the moats they carved with spades,
swept away worm castings and brought half-rotten crabs,
reminded them of the way of things.
eschatos
Paul Robert Mullen
shadows lengthen
sweep through the ruins
to the sound of fine rain & sirens
Babylonian exile
in drag
a lens through which we seek divinity
crisp packets scuttering
across pierheads at dawn on
sundays
the world just ash
under red skies
littered with reminders & candy-floss meditations
end days in a chip wrapper
seagulls stuffed with shit
stragglers lost in the now &
the not-yet
missing posters half-peeled off
rusting lampposts
scarred like sacred texts
his eyes full
your eyes weak
a town on its knees giving head
cab drivers craving sleep
& we’re both bound
by the beauty of a new day dying
the number of the beast
the temporal & the eternal
used condoms & consequence
dualism // creation
pulling all-nighters after a few bumps
unsexed self-destruction
cold snow in warm stories
roses in the dust
the scent of prophecy
Daniel’s final vision
clunky nightclub exits
the abyss that green boots travail
the divine mediator
friendships smashed like rotten eggs
a figure straddling the worlds of men & gods
His voice like thunder
a beacon in the rubble eight days later
skirts hiked up in alleyways
a flare inside the silence
bobbies changing shift in quiet offices
ocean rains
untouched by flame
we move through changes
finely woven
like stitches through the abdomen
&
the end is not an end
just a gateway to the unknown
a threshold
beyond time & space
far from the crowd
a stage without an exit
Thirteen Point One Miles
George Sandifer-Smith
My wife bought me a raincoat, lucky. Yellow umbrellas
hold back our elastane tide. A man in an ark costume
flanked by animal suits, waiting by the barrier.
Thousands stretch their quads by Cardiff Castle.
Flagging on the bay barrage, red Pierhead bricks
to my left, the curling sea and world to my right,
a red and black marvel blasts can’t get no satisfaction.
I pull ahead, trainers bounce on boards, ukulele jammers
strum for country roads as we pass the Senedd.
A drag queen in pink cheers from the rainbow stage.
In the last three miles, the paramedics gather.
Cameras snap on Museum Avenue, medals clattering.
Winter Singing Sequences of Sequins and the Crunch of Copperhead Snakes
Damien B Donnelly
This wind /
this unmalleable thing /
a hissing of snakes
in song /
a season
shedding skin |
Lost leaves
are sound bites / collectives of copperheads /
waves of final percussion /
strings snap / surrender /
have been plucked from trees /
have been fucked
by winter’s call to the coffin |
Eden
is not a place of permeance /
there are other patches waiting to be fingered /
found as fertile / flirtatious /
other apples
begging to be bitten
beyond this viper’s pit /
this stench of things stayed too long / staled to shit |
On the lake the sun is an orchestration of light conducting
a sequence of sequined scales across liquid
bluer than a sky it’s envy cannot disguise |
Distraction is a dirty thing like monotony / monogamy
slivers by the shore
as sea snake / now slipped from skin / slips unseen
below the surface |
Under water / snake songs grow smoother /
swallow all that light
before that mandible / now so malleable /
cuts into core |
Crunch
of carpet under boot over burial /
hissings wriggle into worms
as Mother belches
in the digestion of all she once expelled |
Last leaves
on this hardened soil / on these soiled sheets / now crisp
with their ripened stink / of a lost summer’s sweat |
A hissing beneath the mulch
of a seduction
that blew us once into surrender under another name |
I shiver in the sun where the light is dark
in your absence /
in a season of snake songs
hissing /
as leaf is left to Fall
No One Lives Here Anymore
Peter Devonald
Telephone rings in an empty room,
vacant spaces and silent voices,
mouths taped up and sent away,
coins on eyes remain unspent.
Phone keeps ringing in empty hope
of change, clanging and screaming,
sirens sound for no one in particular,
alarms were never heeded anyway.
Warnings of crisis and catastrophe
seen as merely white noise,
even when disaster is so obvious,
emergencies ignored with temperate ease.
Sun burns down so terrible now,
scorched earth burns in terror,
no one sees or notices,
empty tables in empty rooms.
Half-eaten processed food rots uneaten,
civilisation laid bare for nature to repair,
huge stark buildings testimony to hubris,
pride always leads to despair.
Derelict roads are just scars now,
landscapes shaped, warped and burnt,
for all our sublime civilisation
we never realised the gift we held.
The Thief
Paul Short
Every baccy-coated breath,
every lung-rattle is malicious theft.
Oxygen stolen from the world.
Atmosphere draining.
His slurred lips stagnant in rubber perma-grin,
from too much booze;
flutter disrespect.
If justice existed, he’d drown.
In fake cider and cheap vodka.
Choke on his vomit, maybe.
The police could have done more when they arrested him.
Showed some prejudice,
used batons, boots and mace, the locals think.
Violence is never the answer until it is.
Forty-five years of life drenched in drink,
now scarlet-soaked with the blood of two teenage girls he ploughed into.
Three times over the limit, through a red, no lights on...
Warped hatchback-metal concertinaed
around young, innocent flesh. A gory, graven monument to their lives.
He escaped. A bruised ego, his only injury.
He taints the mourning town.
A vapour trail of self-loathing and loathing others
spills from his pores with sour alky-sweat.
In self-pity, calls himself an unlucky drunk driver.
Others call him Waster. Arsehole. Scum. Murderer.
The pubs unbelievably still take his money.
An act of self-disgust to pay their people.
He’ll be jailed soon enough they reason.
If not, they can poison him slowly.
I failed
Karen Pierce Gonzalez
I failed
to stay within the lines of rhythm and blues
when Jericho, a poet whose truths hit hard
—sudden hail on an already brittled day—tweet-prompted:
write R & B lyrics without naming the despair
that comes from love’s sorrow.
So I wrote:
One shadow, in the sun we shared same skin
between sheets we tossed, pillowed together.
Her initials mine, tattooed roots, underground
blood ink fueled my morning’s rise.
Now he tells me this beat of mine is
not in sync
not despondent-metered enough
not A-B-C-B or something like that.
There’s no BB King in my genes
but I say
blue it is because one day,
one day this mood, zipped up inside me,
burst open, up and flitted away,
as gone as gone can be; a ghost-fog.
In her wake I cannot part the sea between us,
cannot even part my hair, a mess of strands -
tangled howls won’t uncurl long enough
for midnight, tired of my funk, to tuck me in.
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The Broken Spine is a poetry and arts collective proudly published on the coastal edge of North-West England. Founded in 2019 by Alan Parry and Paul Robert Mullen – two school friends reunited after twenty years through a mutual love of poetry.
