Jane Salmons

Jane Salmons

Love in the Suburbs Daylight fades. Between the azalea bushes, a pair of yellow eyes slowly blinks. Inside, at the dinner table a pristine cloth, china plates, an untouched glass of wine. Face blanched white, a daughter freezes, as her father seethes and spits. You...

Cáit O’Neill McCullagh

      THE MOTHER TREE Go to the pine to learn of the pine ̶ Matsuo Bashō Spring empties us of snow, spits us winter-lean    Fat gritted rhizomes, our roots upend feeble as sea foamed on rock fast with limpet full dulse.   & we swing sparse growth...

Pam Thompson

  Hotel Blue (after John Ash) 1. Above each of the sea-facing windows of Hotel Blue, a canopy. At night the smell of fish and vinegar. It’s a good place to fall out of love, fall in love with someone else, a good place to tip out clutter from your bag or pockets....

Tom Branfoot

      I work in a former abattoir code switching like it’s going out of fashion yawns sieved through my terrazzo mouth sunless mornings one bus every hour peopled with rage rainwaxed floors slippery as heritage once I would have cut myself like a...

Patrick Deeley

  Sean’s Ghost leans over the garden wall next the hairpin bend to hand me a rosy apple with the same gesture he himself showed of a stumblebum evening when I was a child making my way home after a bad day at school. Though the apple holds no substance now, and...