Prayer Shawl My friend handed me a handmade prayer shawl but the truth was I hadn’t prayed in a very long time. The garment was thickly knitted like something my grandmother would have made. I put it around my shoulders immediately feeling safer the way a seatbelt might keep me inside the car in case of a crash. Later, I put the shawl on my lap traced my fingers along the edges wondering how she chose to go from orange to purple to blue to green. Thankful that she made this just for me to pray the way a maranta plant bends inward at night its shiny green leaf hands gathering in the middle.     Jennifer Novotney’s work has appeared in Buddhist Poetry Review, Poetry Quarterly, and The Vignette Review where she was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. In 2014, she won the Moonbeam Children’s Book Award for her debut novel, Winter in the Soul.

      untitled dreaming of donne’s saints and becoming them in a world that urinates money to live is a torture standing on sticks and licking clocks with no time to hold each other’s’ faces planting cacti between our teeth to smile and say yes to doing ‹fill in the blank› which means nothing     A recent graduate of Masters in Creative Writing from Durham University, Avleen is a postman who is learning to write poetry to deliver better letters to the world. She has been involved in giving writing and well-being workshops with various organisations in India and the UK and spends her time drawing leaves on every surface when not dancing around trees.

      Into the Furnace Show us your metal, they say as if I was threaded through with a girder of steel, a strut of unbending resolve. Times are difficult, they say: babes without silver spoons, the unalloyed pain of those without jobs, income. It’s a copper-bottomed truth that each and every blow, struck with a weighted hammer, leaves lives misshapen, out of true.     Sue Wallace-Shaddad has an MA in Writing Poetry from Newcastle University/Poetry School. Her pamphlet A City Waking Up was published by Dempsey and Windle in October 2020. Sue writes poetry reviews and is Secretary of Suffolk Poetry Society.

      Semerwater Open water. Before the crowds come with their floating crafts and litter – I prepare myself. I wait for you to find me, hide within the scar of a fell, secret cavern flooded from the hills. I know you’ve long since stopped believing, turned away from any God. Testing yourself instead, how near to paradise you can get. Think you’ve found it on my shores. I am not heaven, but I can be for the time that you are here. Enter flat dark calm and settle; teach your mouth a new religion. Pray to me.     Gill Lambert is a poet and facilitator from West Yorkshire. Her collection Tadaima was published by Yaffle in 2019 and she's working towards her next one. She runs writing workshops and swims in rivers, lakes and waterfalls. https://www.gilllambert.com/  

    Mind the gap Warm air billows up my legs. If I close my eyes I won’t see Eva Herzigová’s HELLO BOYS HELLO BOYS HELLO BOYS cleavage as I slide down the escalator. My own push-up bra is wonder-less. It performs no miracles cutting into ribs, hiding spaces - the places where fat should be. All morning my reflection seeks me out; shop-fronts, car windows, the airless black of this underground train window. I check I haven’t grown in the time between leaving home and arriving - that my stomach is still flat. A group of girls get on at Embankment spilling out of tops – girls who I know will finish everything on their plates. The next station will be Piccadilly Circus. I drift light headed to doors, the train whooshing into light, a fist of oats in a belly eaten too many long forgotten hours ago. I could slip down    so easily     wisp of a girl. Mind the gap.     Eleanor Punter has recently written a pamphlet exploring the complex relationship women have with their...