The Lonely Crowd will feature new work by a different poet each month throughout 2025. For December, we are delighted to publish three new poems by Jack Houston. The first of these, ‘magic city’, is published today with two more poems to follow throughout the month.

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magic city

 

it sure seems as if the claw

 

 

should hold

 

 

the plush princess

 

octopus

 

unicorn

 

 

all the way over      &   into the waiting

 

 

prize aperture but

 

 

no matter what

 

 

we feed to the machine

 

 

nothing’s won

Jack Houston is a parent, writer and public librarian from East London whose work has appeared in The Butcher’s Dog, Magma, Poetry London, The Rialto, Stand, The TLS, Wild Courtand in a debut pamphlet, The Fabulanarchst Luxury Uprising (The Emma Press).