Revenant

By | 12 August 2025
  1. AI starts up a literary magazine: only accepts submissions from AI.
  2. Occasionally, God sneaks in to one of the poems
  3. To read anything on the net, you have to accept a cookie.
  4. The government calculates the estimated time to heads-on-sticks paraded in the streets
    is twenty-eight days.
  5. The government calculates unrest.
  6. The poem which started as a sonnet is not a sonnet.
  7. Yesterday I was riding a bicycle. Eating a banana passionfruit.
  8. Pain changes your personality.
  9. I did not believe I would become a ghost alive.
  10. What you learned from a velvet rope around an artwork: it is precious and you are not.
  11. To enter a cold universe as David Fincher makes.
  12. Gregory Crewdson’s solitary dreamscapes.
  13. Todd Hido’s homes at night.
  14. Headlights on the Venetian blinds at 3am.
  15. The way the military have of saying actual.
  16. A queasy feeling like ground disturbed.
  17. I was dreaming of another blanket.
  18. I had to find a way of finding another blanket—
    in an institution that controlled all the blankets.
  19. (I dreamed of a man wearing a red hat who controlled all the blankets.)
  20. When I woke I was cold.
  21. I said the comforting mantra: Death.
 


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Wes Lee lives in Aotearoa New Zealand. She has three poetry collections, and her work has appeared in a wide array of publications, including Best New Zealand Poems, Westerly, Poetry London, New Writing Scotland, The London Magazine, The Stinging Fly. Most recently she was awarded the Magma Editors' Prize 2024/05; the 2024 Free Verse Prize, by The Poetry Society, in London; the Heroines/Joyce Parkes Women's Writing Prize 2022, in New South Wales. Placed in The Plaza Poetry Prize 2025 and The Fish Poetry Prize 2025. Shortlisted for The Kathleen Grattan Award 2023 (Otago University Press), and the Alastair Reid Poetry Pamphlet Prize 2024, in Scotland.

More by Wes Lee on Cordite Poetry Review →

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