Moor
It seeped down from the moor
smoke first
air laced with flakes of ash
dancing then settling
on roofs, shoulders, eyelashes
we dipped our feet in buckets
then travelled—bleach clean—
along those footpaths
branded into land like stitches
understanding what it was, eventually
that cloying scent of hide
heavy teeth, thick skull
hooves dangling off fluid limbs
thrown onto mounds from trucks
then burnt into sky.
Lydia Benson (she/her) is an emerging writer, based in Folkestone, England. Her publications include 14 Magazine, Litro and the Oxford Flash Fiction Prize anthology.
It’s like
a house I saw as a child
with its face torn away
stained wallpaper
bath hanging from the pipes
dressing gown fluttering
on the back of the door
an iron wrecking ball
a steel hammer drill
foundations exposed
rotten brick dust flying
everywhere
Geraldine Stoneham currently lives in Devon but will be moving to Adelaide in South Australia in the near future. She has published in Finished Creatures and Obsessed with Pipework.
High Summer on a Shropshire Hill
Cocksfoot, crested dog’s tail, Yorkshire fog,
Common bent, Brown bent, Italian rye grass –
sown way back, to improve the ley. Wavy hair grass,
fine fescues, soft rushes, bromes whose awns irritate
animal palates. Wefts of herbs: sorrels, bedstraws,
mouse ear, hawkbit, eyebright, tormentil, vanishing
flowers: yellow rattle which tells when to cut hay,
slow-growing harebells – dying on verges from nitrous
exhaust, knapweeds, speedwells, trefoils, timothy,
yellow oat grass, sweet vernal grass, all names and niches,
rhizomes and runners, all paraphernalia of panicles, ligules,
shoots, sheaths, spikelets and glumes. All waving grace
and grain – millions of years’ resilience to cutting and cropping.
Famine waits as we taint soils, strain genes, skew climate
Chris Kinsey grew up in Herefordshire but always wanted to head for the hills and landed in Mid-Wales. She’s had 5 collections of poetry published, her most recent: From Rowan Ridge was commissioned by Fair Acre Press, and includes this poem.