Ross McGivern is a poet harvested from the deep, fertile flatlands of South Lincolnshire, who also dabbles in painting and music. He is a poem trapped in an endless edit,  rubbish at a crowded bar and used to make the best Cappuccino in town.

Ross’ work has appeared in two D.I.Y chapbooks: The Featherstone Readings (2017), Interpret (2018) )inspired by a collaboration with the Norwich based artist Charlie James), and The Fallow Page (2020) published by Maplestreet Press. His work had also appeared have also appeared in previous editions of Impspired, The Plastic Brain Presents Podcast, Lincolnshire Strange Delights, Hedgehog Press, Black Pear Press, Backcombed Magazine, BBC Radio Lincolnshire and Openings – the annual anthology of the Open University Poets Society.

In normal times, you’ll find him out in the wild, flitting between flatland poetry nights whilst balancing Pernod and sobriety.

R.A.F Stenigot

We drove out to RAF Stenigot 
to find the abandoned parabolic dish.
A giant, rusted remnant of the first cold war.

Puddles froze, patterns formed in ice
tractor treads fell captive
imprisoned in sub-zero stasis.
Breath steamed glasses and cold air
permeated bone marrow.

We walked for a shivering hour
map coordinates in hand.
Towed off the land for scrap
a month or so earlier 
(or so I've since been told)
the bowls had vanished.
Erased from the landscape
echoes of ghost frequencies resonate.
Its static ploughed from the field,
static that followed us home.
Static I hear now.

Mayday. Mayday.

Alcohol Rub a.k.a Obligatory William Carlos Williams Rip Off Poem

This is just to say

I have drunk 
the alcohol gel 
that was on 
the worktop

and which 
you were probably
saving
for your hands.

Forgive me,
it was delicious
so neat
and so pure.

Daylight Saving

Prompt as the tear of a new calendar page
October's flamboyance fades.

Among bundles of leafy spoils that litter the ground
a scuttle of dunnocks sift through unclaimed seed.

Disclosed branches curl in bare embarrassment
marking the hibernation of character and pause for renewal.

In the recesses vacated by lost hours of rewound clocks
I look down upon an evaporated year, 

trace the thousand pensive steps that scar the lawn
and count the discarded remains of summer vice.