We are looking for original works that can serve as essential witness, critiquing the systemic factors—political, economic, and historical—that lead to how human beings fleeing persecution are perishing in the cold waters of the Strait of Dover.
We are looking for poems that remember the dead and which confront the policies, ideologies and beliefs that make these deaths permissible and the people unmournable.
We are looking for poems that remember the dead and which confront the policies, ideologies and beliefs that make these deaths permissible and the people unmournable.
I. SUBMISSION GUIDELINES
Poems: 40 lines or less; Short Fiction/Prose: 100 words or less.
Submission Limit: A maximum of three pieces in total.
Format: Submissions must be included in the body of an email or as a single .doc attachment; Include a short biography (50 words or less).
Send to: forcedmigrationandthearts@
Deadline: Friday, 31 October 2025.
II. THE ENGLISH CHANNEL: A LOCATION OF IMMENSE LOSS
The English Channel is increasingly a deadly route for refugees, reflecting political failure and human tragedy.
As of late September 2025, between 17 and 23 people, including women and children, have died attempting the crossing. The previous year, 69 people died in the Channel, and became part of a global catastrophe with nearly 9,000 fatalities on so-called ‘migration routes’ worldwide.
Analysis covering 2018–2024 reveals that citizens from six countries—Iran, Afghanistan, Iraq, Albania, Syria, and Eritrea—have constituted approximately 70% of those detected crossing in small boats.
More crucially, between 2018 and 2024, the asylum grant rate for people who arrived by small boat was 68%, substantially higher than the overall grant rate for asylum applicants. This confirms that the vast majority are indeed refugees fleeing persecution, directly contradicting political and media rhetoric that attaches criminality to the people and which criminalizes them.
III. CENTRE THE PEOPLE
We invite poems that center the people: the men, women, and children, with their hopes, dreams, families, and communities, who are reduced to victims. Poems that name the dead, and which show that these deaths are the direct, lethal result of political choices;
poems that resist the anonymizing language of statistics and politics;
poems that bring alive the perilous journey—the hopes, the cost, the preparation, the launch, the journey, the crossing, the fear, the voices of those drowning, and the traumatic burden on rescue teams, witnesses, and survivors;
poems that delve into the material reality of the drowned: their bodies, their unmet needs, and how death by drowning and death at sea are understood across cultures and in the cultures from which the people who are drowning are coming from; and
poems that extend allyship and solidarity, mourning the impact on families left behind and providing support for survivors and the bereaved.
IV, ENTER THE THE ENGLISH CHANNEL: A BIOSPHERE, SITE OF SACRIFICE AND HARVEST, AND A GRAVE
We invite poems that explore the English Channel as a multifaceted biosphere—a site of vibrant life, from bacteria to mammals—that has been tragically re-coded as a place of refugee sacrifice and death, and a grave.
We invite poems that look at the refugees who are drowning from the perspective of all beings and non-beings in the English Channel.
A. THE METABOLIC EVENT: BIOMASS AND CONSUMPTION
We invite poems that understand that some of the people who are drowning end up being consumed by marine life; that some of this marine life ends up being sold in fish markets, supermarkets and restaurants and ends up on the dinner plate, in British homes and restaurants, on political and corporate menus, and as fish and chips;
poems that acknowledge the presence of the drowned refugees on menus and at the dinner table; poems that show how UK antipathy and border policies are turning Black and Brown refugees into biomass, involuntarily incorporated into a food chain that ends on British consumer plates;
poems that fuse the localized perspective of the UK (as the consumer) with the migrant experience (as the consumed), and which explore the idea that the crossing is a metabolic event that literally implicates the entire receiving nation;
poems that make the public metabolize the consequences of border policies, compelling them to realize that eating "fish and chips" is part of a cycle of ingestion;
poems that explore the plurality of the consumers and the plurality of the ways in which refugees and migrants are harvested, prepared, presented, sacrificed, and consumed;
poems on the elements, and on the man-made and natural systems and structures, and marine life and seafood that interact with the drowned refugees; poems on the marine life and seafood which are sold and end up on the dinner plate; poems on corporations earning billions from border surveillance and from containing, warehousing, processing and shipping refugees; politicians gaining power from xenophobia, racism, Islamophobia, and far-right ideologisation; and media organisations selling and profiting from anti-refugee rhetoric;
poems that explore the Channel's high-value yield (e.g., sole, plaice), generating millions of pounds in sales domestically and for export; poems on the uses the industry makes of African and Asian migrant labour on and off fishing vessels; poems that show the entire journey—from the sea to the plate, and poems that show the relationship between the industry's financial value, and how the value and consumption are subsidised or paid in exploited labour and drowned bodies.
B. MYTHOLOGICAL RECKONING
And we invite poems that draw on global mythological stories and archetypes (e.g., Charon, the Ferryman, or Mami Wata, the Water Spirit) to process the tragedy, and
poems that affirm that refugees have a right to life, and a right to seek protection and refuge.
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