Hello bi+ poetry fans!

Thank you to all who came to our first book launch at Queer Britain on Bi+ Visibility Day - Golnoosh Nour, Holly Moberley, George Parker and all those fab open mic-ers (including surprise contributors Davina Bacon and Eoin Kelly) made it an unforgettable night. Eagle-eyed viewers will note we also made an appearance at the Bisexual Research Group conference last month too, which was a joy and an honour!

This week we celebrated National Poetry Day and started to send out orders of the Bi+ Lines anthology. We have LOVED seeing everyone’s excitement online, so please keep sharing your favourite poems from the book and tag us at @bi_poets and @14poems/@fourteenpoems on Instagram and Twitter. If you haven’t already, you can order the book here.

We want to remind you that next Wednesday 11 October is the only online launch of the Bi+ Lines anthology, and we want to invite bi+ poetry fans all over the world to come.

On National Coming Out Day, we’ll hear full sets from Jen Campbell, Fadairo Tesleem and Shivanee Ramlochan (pictured above), and other contributors to the anthology will join us to share their poem from the book, including: Jane Flett, Paul S Ukrainets, Mish Green, Suyin Du Bois, Noah Gower-Jones, Rory O’Sullivan, Kyla Jamieson and Imogen Osborne.

There are plenty of free tickets - all participation is pay as you feel. We’ll kick off at 8pm BST.

We want to make this a huge gathering of the bi+ community worldwide, so tell your friends and book your ticket now.

To whet your appetite, here’s a taster of what’s to come - Fadairo Tesleem’s poem from Bi+ Lines that explores the theme of in-betweenness in the context of borders, forced migration and grief. Take care - we’ll see you soon.

A Fistfight On Memory Lane
by Fadairo Tesleem

Every day, we pray for peace and protection.
– Boussam Abdullahi, Nigerian refugee

At Azraq Refugee Camp in Syria,
guards stand with their guns,
a gallery of lost things:
pictures of our dilapidated huts,
the race my father ran
before the bullet outstripped him.
Memory unbraids the sutures
we fight so hard to heal.
My father was a mountain of endurance,
but the gun’s mouth is a storm of destruction
that leaves nothing in its wake.
Tonight, I feel the silence
of my dead village.
There is a tiny space
between what has happened
and what is going to happen,
I mean: the only time my father
could hasten his pace
was before he got robbed of his breath.
I do not have records of survivors,
but I witnessed we all ran: myself,
my siblings and the girl I gifted my soul.
My father’s watchword was
we are from Allah and unto him is our return,
meaning: every treasure from the soil
has its ways of crawling back to it.