Rizwan Akhtar

      Demands   now a surreal residue lives on your hair you play with in a corridor checking out light fading smiles a verisimilitude of close hands evenings spent on waiting chairs creaked but that decibel silence torn by a stubborn bird outside...

Michael Bartholomew-Biggs

      Break-out Session “I’ll stay here with the strawberries,” he said. He still supposed such droll remarks displayed his youthful eccentricity. The fruit in question, surplus to the buffet lunch, was resting, moist and fragrant, in a bowl, alongside...

Chrissy Banks

      Birthday after Dorothea Tanning I can hardly believe you are real, come in the night with a present; here, at my door, in a snow-dappled coat, your hair illumined, your eyes small violets. I have doors beyond doors, canvasses propped against every...

Lorraine Carey

      Sundays at Grandma’s Gran’s best friend Susan came every, single Sunday. Whippet thin, I often thought she’d disappear into the vacuum of her own cheekbones, she sucked so hard on those fags. Each week we sat through the drag of Sunday Mass, the...

Julie Mullen

      Mother’s Day Wrapped in her silks the blue and the dim and the dark, mists of scent, eyes closed against the half-light. Together we walk squares and shades, beneath spires like washed bone. We walk together faded streets hand in hand, we mime....