Category: Issue 2 / Spring 2012

For Evan Blumgart I’ve never said anything that rivals your one pointed breath the finest thought I’ve ever known. You belong in the slipstream of casual carless love and wanderings in a city that beats out your name on worn asphalt heat rising off a loft roof in waves. You are afraid, ‘…edibility of my… Continue reading Oliver Quincy Page

Years and so much life – years full as the sky in a Dark August. I wish that words could rain from my hands too, but they never come out. But my sister is more beautiful; she is the yellow room Set against thundery skies. Even when we were small, She was Snow White to… Continue reading Lauren Strain

close[t/d] you’re determined that nobody knows what you’re really like how you actually are what planet you’re from it’s difficult to construct an impression when you do it so badly perhaps that’s why nobody mistakes you for yourself I never would have picked you as if that is a kind of compliment you wonder if… Continue reading Alex Taylor

National Anxiety The party is very loud and mostly the view is just of a hundred pairs of highly glittered or neon shoes, wide angled along a gummy hardwood floor. So much coloured and stomping and endless stomping. Late in the night, when bodies finally hang like deflated Lilos over couches, you, in someone else’s… Continue reading Magnolia Wilson

La Strada Roads are never busy here – the further south you go, the less narrative you see. It’s autumn – going south means gold. A gold that will soon turn to just tree. I stop to visit an old friend, her new baby. Another place, a new couple – I drink wine and relish… Continue reading Lynley Edmeades

Holes I am the man who digs a trench, four walls for you walls made of mud four eyes made for the cathedral how pretty it would be to be with a beauty in the country but here I am with the worms in the mud I can smell excess this hellhole reeks of excess… Continue reading Cameron Churchill

World of Floods Driving on the curb cured of swamplands and horizontals my atmosphere dear takes wholesome bites of water outed are the undersides of bridge smudged chasms birdy hellcalls and undone song he knows only fire pursues the winged torn letters three years gone of the antediluvian disintegrated into charm and clarity and the… Continue reading Megan Towey

School’s Out Autumn leaves; ain’t no summer up here, I’m crawling along the roof school’s out and so are the lights. Not much of a weekend – usual entertainment: a DVD a game and a piss-up; instead I’m up here. The night-chill stiffens my cheek. I prise off the copper right beside the High Voltage… Continue reading Mark Pirie

self-timer Subject matter: self, at a teetering age. Self, in skinny furs, enamel brooch slipping off sagging blouse, an avalanche. Self asks self, are you okay. There is no need to be. Harnessed clutch of hair, trailing over shoulder as a bundled animal. Self is ruptured open by the cold. Confused lambs die in the… Continue reading Katie Winny

Sandra, 41 the back of her van says ‘exotic plants’ but i am not so sure if there’s many plants in there at all because when i saw her husband – let’s call him glen – unload a box, beige and unfussy, (he wore khaki shorts and a plaid shirt himself) i did not see… Continue reading Eden Bradfield

After Seventy Years Her kisses are missing. Call 911. My mother, her eyes, are missing, their colour, blue, Precambrian lake blue, that old, that used to a world, in its spin, its rounds around a necessary brightness. The sun is missing. The purple flowers of the Agapanthus lily are missing. Gone seventy years. My mother… Continue reading Richard Osler

1 We were going to. After switching damaging recover. (we need more pronouns.) Grass aches against the epicentre of baldness. Since, may, continuous, concede. (Mother. Move your hair. The bald spot is showing.) To abnormalise: (Describe the worst event in your childhood.) To thaw pre-frozen emotion: (Imagine you’ve just won a prize. What do your… Continue reading Zarah Butcher-McGunnigle