Pound of Flesh

He took
more than that –
one and a half pounds

or 647 grams,
plus seven grams
of lymph nodes,

four of them in total
each one weighing
1.75 grams or thereabouts,

the third measuring
only thirteen by
eight millimetres

half full of cancer,
less than
a gram’s worth,

or approximately
half full
of nothing.

Kate Hendry‘s poetry has been widely published in magazines, including Poetry Wales, Mslexia and The Rialto. Her first pamphlet, The Lost Original, was published by Happenstance Press and her second, MX SIMP, is due out with Mariscat Press later this year. @hendrykate

For the past 84 days I’ve been co-editing with Andy Jackson a post-election blog called ‘New Boots and Pantisocracies’, publishing each day a new poem by a different poet exploring the different political landscape we seem to have entered. Perhaps it’s time now to review where we’ve got to.
By way of proper introduction, the blog’s name is a portmanteau term combining the title of Ian Dury’s marvellous debut 1977 album with the name given in the 1790s by the young Romantic poets, Samuel Coleridge and Robert Southey to their utopian scheme to set up what we would think of as a socialist society in America, a project reimagined by Paul Muldoon in his 1990 poem, Madoc: A Mystery. The intro to ‘New Boots’ is as follows:

‘The 2015 General Election has made manifest the great sea-change that has been occurring in UK politics over the last fifteen to…

Ambit Magazine announces the launch of its 2015 Poetry and Fiction Competition. There’s no theme this year – just send your best work on any subject, in any style. The poetry competition will be judged by Dan O’Brien, and the fiction competition judged by Alison Moore.

The first place prize in each category will be £500, second place £250 and £100 for third.

The three winning poems and three winning stories will all be published in Issue 222 of Ambit, and the poets and writers will be invited to read with judges at the launch on October 22nd 2015 in London.

The competition opens May 1st and closes July 15th. Winners will be announced on September 1st on the Ambit website.

About Ambit Magazine:

Ambit is a 96-page quarterly literary and art magazine. It is created in London, published in the UK, and read internationally. It’s available…