Tessera

Bad Lilies

@badlilies.bsky.social

A digital poetry journal, edited by @kathryngray.bsky.social and @andrewjamesneilson.bsky.social Enjoy our blooms! badlilies.uk

236 Posts1988 Follower 426 Folgt

Bad Lilies @badlilies.bsky.social · last wk.

Bad Lilies is delighted to be part of the inaugural Firelit Poetry Prize. We're in exciting company! firelitprize.org

FIRELIT
PETRY PRIZE
COMING
JANUARY 15, 2027

32 Poems • Atlanta Review • The Atlantic • Bad Lilies • BODY • Baltimore Review • Bellevue Literary Review • Birmingham Poetry Review • The Bombay Literary Magazine • Contemporary Haibun Online • Copper Nickel • Eclectica Magazine • Ecotone • The Fiddle-
head • Image • Island • Light • Literary Matters • MacQueen's
Quinterly • Mezzo Cammin • The Missouri Review • Modern Haiku • Thẻ New Criterion • New Ohio Review • The New Republic • New Verse Review • Nimrod International Journal • NOON: Journal of
the Short Poem • ONE ART • On the Seawall • ONLY POEMS • Plume • Poems for Persons of Interest • Poet Lore • Poetry Ireland Review • Poetry London • Porticon • Pulsebeat Poetry Journal • Rattle • Rust & Moth • Sheila-Na-Gig • Smartish Pace • The Sonneteer • The Southern Review • Subtropics • The Summerset Review • The Sun • SWWIM Every Day • Tar River Poetry • THINK
• Times Literary Supplement • The Threepenny Review • Trampoline

Bad Lilies @badlilies.bsky.social · last wk.

Bad Lilies is delighted to be part of the inaugural Firelit Poetry Prize. We're in exciting company! firelitprize.org

Bad Lilies @badlilies.bsky.social · last wk.

Our issue spotlight is over! You can read the whole of our latest clutch of flowers here badlilies.uk/issue-twenty-five

Issue twenty-five — Bad Lilies

Issue twenty-four of Bad Lilies

badlilies.uk

Bad Lilies @badlilies.bsky.social · last wk.

Our issue spotlight is over! You can read the whole of our latest clutch of flowers here badlilies.uk/issue-twenty-five

Issue twenty-five — Bad Lilies

Issue twenty-four of Bad Lilies

badlilies.uk

Bad Lilies @badlilies.bsky.social · 2w ago

Two poems by David Briggs badlilies.uk/david-briggs-1

Hauntological
How many hours spent scrolling through Other people's glamorous online schticks?
Or loitering in the photogenic purviews Of the image conscious and attention rich?
But only with the listless, disinterested style Of a midlife man on statins in the dairy aisle.
For while you may not be midwifing turtles With the kids on a sun-bleached archipelago,
Nor surfing in Rincon California Or Rincón Puerto Rico;

Bad Lilies @badlilies.bsky.social · 2w ago

A poem by Ali Choudhary badlilies.uk/ali-choudhary

Entrances and Exits
After Father X reads a prayer
over the monks' graves, he walks beside me, telling me of this abbot and that one—
which one grafted his mind into saplings for God, what life
was led by the one whose grave is speckled

Bad Lilies @badlilies.bsky.social · 2w ago

A poem by Mark Day badlilies.uk/mark-day

The shear line
The key fitted snugly into its slot,
its teeth nudging the pins to the precise boundary of the shear line. I twisted my wrist and the lock spun smoothly in its cylinder. I heard the rasp of the deadbolt retracting.

Bad Lilies @badlilies.bsky.social · 2w ago

A poem by Róisín Tierney badlilies.uk/roisin-tierney-1

The Erratics
See them there, caught in the full throttle of their spring frenzy, bucks and does.
With jointed skulls and precocial habits, their whole lives have set them up for this roister of chase and fight, of fisticuffs, of scratch and slap and hind-leg rake.
It's all love, really. She treats him rough - these are mountain hares, not pet rabbits — but later he'll cover her, biting her neck. Mottled foxgloves will quiver and shake as his white scut dips, dips and rises.

Bad Lilies @badlilies.bsky.social · 2w ago

Four poems by Alex Wong badlilies.uk/alex-wong-1

At Your Earliest Convenience
Dear Sir/ Madam, I have Pleasure in attaching-O!
Dear Sir/ Madam, I have Pleasure in enclosing.
My friends do not rejoice in being Dearer. They get dearer, though.
And everything I find that I have Pleasure in, I fear I'm losing.

Bad Lilies @badlilies.bsky.social · 2w ago

Two poems by David Briggs badlilies.uk/david-briggs-1

Bad Lilies @badlilies.bsky.social · 2w ago

A poem by Ali Choudhary badlilies.uk/ali-choudhary

Bad Lilies @badlilies.bsky.social · 2w ago

A poem by Mark Day badlilies.uk/mark-day

Bad Lilies @badlilies.bsky.social · 2w ago

A poem by Róisín Tierney badlilies.uk/roisin-tierney-1

Bad Lilies @badlilies.bsky.social · 2w ago

Four poems by Alex Wong badlilies.uk/alex-wong-1

Bad Lilies @badlilies.bsky.social · 2w ago

A poem by @matthewepaul.bsky.social badlilies.uk/matthew-paul-1

The Island
Like Drake's horde singeing the King of Spain's beard, A crowd of us binged across on the ferry for a febrile Long weekend in your brother's partner's father's hotel.
Saturday morning brought Princess Di's funeral. I lurched Into the sea at Sandown, as if swimming fully-clothed Were à la mode-even we republicans sensed weirdness

Bad Lilies @badlilies.bsky.social · 2w ago

A poem by @gbclarkson.bsky.social badlilies.uk/geraldine-clarkson-2

London Pride
Look up and kiss me, London Pride, saxifrage of the city! Blake-naked, with William and his wife in the garden, like Adam, like Eve. Eve's pudding for afters. Beguiled by limes. The very thinnest china, of the very finest willow pattern, the traditionallest apples and sweetest custard sauce, the goldenest cutlery, the lowest chair, and William, surreptitious as a fish, his knees scaly and prone to float backwards and to the side.
Mirabelle! He salutes his wife. See the crimson peaks in the sky! See the awfullest East.
I see your blushing breasts, my dear, and we are not halfway through dinner. We will go and play on the green. My tiger, my lamb. He will worm it out of me as usual, the dirty thing. I will sleep better, he'll say, visited by hummingbirds and honeyed rose bits on my nipples. A maimed dove on guard at my bedhead.

Bad Lilies @badlilies.bsky.social · 2w ago

A poem by @taylor-strickland.bsky.social badlilies.uk/taylor-strickland

Where God After Finishing His Work
Shook His Hands Clean
for Dyind Rangøy
Along single-lane road to road's end, things run amuck: seawrack and
pine spiking through pink
heathery lack the way today's third visitor arrives, reverses after collecting dilettante collateral,

Bad Lilies @badlilies.bsky.social · 2w ago

A poem by Stuart Henson badlilies.uk/stuart-henson

She wore
'a hat as big as a wagon wheel
on which there was room for all manner of things pom-poms the size of puffballs, sunflower plates and pumpkins, owls' eggs, bows of acetate...

Bad Lilies @badlilies.bsky.social · 2w ago

Two poems by Dane Holt badlilies.uk/dane-holt-1

Grief
is busy, right now, explaining itself
-its remit, its desired outcomes at a dinner table at a conference
about grief; it is turning itself inside out; no one is able to eat, is either bored, concerned,
or embarrassed, the margins are thin.
One day or one month from now it might be a window looking out
onto another window
across a harbour of years. Until then, it is not the sun standing by after
an afternoon of rain, sorry.
And it is not this poem which is nothing
if not the last word on that moment the rain stops but the windscreen wipers
keep going, clearing-what?-away; or a night of close, almost-unbearable heat, the car alarm outside
you sort of miss once it stops.

gbclarkson.bsky.social @gbclarkson.bsky.social · 2w ago

I love the @badlilies.bsky.social style -- the distinctive blush setting; the showcase of circa 15 blooms per issue; each deftly hand-tied (spot the ingenious links between poems!)-- a tour-de-force of floristry craft from super-editors @kathryngray.bsky.social & @andrewjamesneilson.bsky.social! 🙏🌹💐

Bad Lilies@badlilies.bsky.social · 2w ago

A poem by @gbclarkson.bsky.social badlilies.uk/geraldine-clarkson-2