Lori D’Angelo

Give Me Some Sparkle, and I’ll Pay You What You Ask For The cat puts his paw on my hair, and I think about where we could go if we weren’t here. Maybe the nail salon, which seems like a good destination for kill time Saturdays. Except that the proprietor always...

Lucy Wilson

      Dear Fish, Forgive Me Dear Fish, you swam from life and gave your flesh; forgive me. In your ice-tomb, your scales a rainbow of tiny glaciers, frozen in flight; like you, I let myself get caught, sank my heart in a false sea. Factory-ripe, hooked...

Amirah Al Wassif

When I Met God for the First Time The God I know works as a baker in a local shop. From time to time, I see him feeding the kittens bread crumbs soaked in milk. He is not as huge as the religious men tell us; his hand is small, a normal size like all of ours. He even...

Cliff McNish

Heaven For starters, the standard works everyone gets: three trumpets blown in unison; your name acclaimed to the galactic hegemony of stars; plus assorted angels with ceramically smooth hands (the nail-work!) casting wholesale quantities of petals (flowers of the...

Paul Stephenson

Rhubarb after Norman MacCaig And another thing: stop looking like embarrassed celery. It doesn’t suit. How can you stand there, glittery in pink, some of you rigid, some all over the shop? Deep down you’re marooned, a sour forest spilling out beneath a harmful canopy....