Helen Sheppard

      Hair Growing up in small towns hairdressers offer crew cuts, curlers, wigs in severe bobs. In cities my fuzz is flat ironed, acid straight, topiary trimmed. In cosy bars, strangers clink pints on our table. Sweep sweaty palms across tips of my...

Dan Stathers

      Escape of Harold ‘Rubber Bones’ Webb Chaplain asked me if I’d renounced my criminal ways, Depends on my girl, I confessed rattling the concrete flinders in my pocket. I’d sprung by midnight, slipped down my chiselled rabbit hole following hot...

Richard Williams

    Dreamer Set the sat-nav for home but drive in the opposite direction without any sense of where or why you are going or where this will end or who you really are or might become each junction passed is a single recalculation of opportunities missed of...

Jon Miller

    West Beach, Berneray You want your days to spread along the bay, a coat of gold light wind harvesting machair tuned to a sky littered with geese, sanderlings skittering in every direction a ferry waltzing the low tides of the Sound where you walk on sand...

Celestine Stilwell

    Little boy dream  My brother used to burn ants with a magnifying glass. I blamed the sun for tempting his half-talking, grazed knees to kneel on hot tarmac. He’d run his pink-licked fingers through the slab’s trenches, collecting worm eggs beneath...