Late last summer
Jayant Kashyap & Nadia Lines
In the aftermath of the bombings, you visit
refugees coming to us in boats, and your feet in walking
write words in the sand on this white beach; like you the words
are kind, and kinder every day as you learn warmth better
—if you ask me, I’m taken by your inherent talent
for calligraphy: I fall for you day after day, every day
* * *
Paisley
A Golden Shovel after The history of home by Laura Potts
that night, we’d talked for eight hours without pause but
after leaving, lover,
the words you left stuck in my throat—like a stale kiss—ache to this
day; afraid of the wishful dark, I never turned off the only light
in your room that, alone, hangs on
the discoloured, empty wall; the wall that, dry like your
winterhands, must think of your touch; the way I think of how your lip
that touched first my left cheek—once—was
cruel; the way your quiet is always remembered
* * *
Apple
A Golden Shovel after Genesis 3:13, with Nadia Lines
Ten hours since we sat by the lake—and they left for the
Barbican; so today becomes one of those days when we talk about how the Serpent
—like time—tempts us to sex, and now you have me beguiled,
tracing the obscure trees of my tattoos—me,
my curls damp, hung to you like fruit. How late last summer I ended up loving you, and
today you kiss me with the taste of cider on your tongue—and I
think of what it usually did
to me ’til sixteen. I stop to look at you in quiet: your cooking apple eyes—as if to eat.
* * *
Café
You knocked at the car from the side and it was raining
and you asked if I could drop you at the next corner
of the street and I decided no time better than the present
and asked if I could take you to the coffee shop instead
and together we could wait for the rain to stop
—that if you don’t like the weather in Ireland, just wait…—
and see where it goes and I hadn’t thought you would agree
because why would you but you did and now when we
come to the shop we aren’t asked what we want and instead
they dust a quiet table and get us an iced latte with
no sugar for me and an iced mocha with a little sugar
for you and you’ve often said this feels nice so thank you—
A Note on the Authors:
Jayant Kashyap is the winner of the Poetry Business New Poets Prize 2024 for his new pamphlet ‘Notes on Burials’, selected by Holly Hopkins, and has published two other pamphlets: ‘Unaccomplished Cities’ (Ghost City Press, 2020) and ‘Survival’ (Clare Songbirds, 2019) before. He is also the author of a zine, ‘Water’, published by Skear Zines in 2021. Kashyap’s poems appear in POETRY, Magma, Arc, Denver Quarterly, Poetry London, Poetry Wales and elsewhere; have been featured in the Wordweavers Poetry Contest 2021 and longlisted for the TFA Awards for Creative Writing in English 2022 and 2025; have won prizes at the Wells Festival of Literature’s ‘Young Poets International Competition’ in 2021 and at the Poetry Society’s ‘Young Poets Network’; and received two honourable mentions in the ‘Dan Veach Prize for Younger Poets’ in 2021 and 2023, organised by the Atlanta Review. One of his poems was also presented at COP26, the United Nations Climate Conference 2021. Kashyap was also shortlisted for the Poetry Business ‘New Poets Prize’ twice earlier, in 2021 and 2022 and nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2018 and for Sundress Publications’ ‘Best of the Net’ in 2022 and 2023.
Nadia Lines is an awardwinning poet and playwright. She won the 2019 Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award, the 2019 Orwell Youth Prize and the 2020 Tower Poetry Competition, and has published poems in the Keats-Shelley Review, Modern Poetry in Translation, Epoque Press, perhappened, The Mays Anthologies 29 and 31, and extensively with The Poetry Society’s Young Poets Network. Lines’s debut poetry pamphlet ‘Stephen the Phlebotomist’ is published by Nine Pens Press. Lines’s play, The Book of Margery Kempe, which has been performed across the UK, was the winner of Best New Play at the 2024 Cambridge Festival of Drama.