The Cost of Living after Deborah Levy His hair was not silver and not pinned into a bun. I’ve been reading it over and over. Obsession over something harmless must be a good thing. It’s a book, safe, I’ve been told. A woman saying things I like to hear, moments closer to me than my own skin on my fingertips typing, writing, removing heavy mascara, light silky eye prime off my face, my skin… before I go to bed, living in The Cost of Living. It gives me what I need; keeps me hydrated, you see, which I otherwise tend to forget. So, yes, this man, his hair was not silver and not pinned into a bun, but all I saw was a man with silver hair pinned into a bun having dinner with me when I was 19, just like the girl in the book telling him a story about her scuba-diving in Mexico. She’d been underwater for twenty minutes and then surfaced to find there was a storm, a whirlpool, an anxiety, a realisation of death. “You talk a lot, don’t you?” is what the man says to the girl....

    Homing I My mum used to say that when she died she wanted to come back as a well looked after cat.  Two weeks before, for Christmas, I bought her a cat onesie.  We assumed she would be spending plenty of time on the sofa with our tabbies – enough for the dog’s suspicions to subside.  She unwrapped it in her hospital bed, using her bulging abdomen as a table, like you see on TV.  When we picked up her things it took a week to notice the missing bag; after all, when someone dies like that it’s hard to keep track of what’s really been lost. II Creeping down the hard shoulder of the M20, she is thankful for the slippers in that bag.  Cats are kitted out for the cold, but no one wants to learn a new body in January.  It came as quite the shock to be spat out into the clean hospital room from a Tesco bag, although she’s not quite sure what she expected.  Something softer.  The nurse silently shooed the new arrival, as if it happened all the time.  The woman in the chair by...

      Cutting Through The tea-light flames would dance as if a modernist ballet were being staged in each of the glass dishes from expensive supermarket puddings. He had dotted them around his ground floor flat, on various pieces of unlikely furniture or next to the open window where, subject to errant breezes through the ill-fitting frame, they would convulse, shake, almost gyrate. He wondered if pedestrians on their way to the park at the end of the road had ever noticed them, felt obliged to spare more than a sideways glance at his window and make assumptions about the man who lived there, and the life that he lived, the carefree and romantic spirit of a soul who did something so utterly beautiful as place tea-lights in glass dishes from expensive supermarket puddings. The only people who came down his road at this time of night were the skateboarders. Misshapen furniture surrounded him like cemetery stones or stunted teeth, the sad cityscape of his bachelor flat....

      Shadowtime Romney Marsh, Kent, February, 1287 That night a slice of moon rose, mottled red like a scratched wound. The sea was torched, wind-charged. We heard the tide roar twice across the Marsh and knew it was here, the hour of the dead. Hulls creaked. Roofs lifted. Churches sunk. Great oaks were wrenched from roots. Rivers swelled in ferment until they became our streets. While we dreamt the earth shifted in shadowtime. We woke to find oceans where we’d once farmed. Islands landlocked. Hamlets now great ports. And our town lost to us, buried like some secret shame beneath a crookbacked bank of bone-packed sand. From beneath I smooth your prints, pay the debt. And I whisper. I warn you. Watch. Your. Step.     Josephine Balmer’s collections include The Paths of Survival (Shearsman, 2017), The Word for Sorrow (Salt, 2009) and Chasing Catullus (Bloodaxe, 2004). She has also translated Catullus, Sappho and other classical women poets...

      from: Seize i. I fear my poor old soul may be a fixer upper. I strive to find out – it’s that forensic streak I have, I suppose – by too often drinking on an empty stomach. There’s a view afoot, I think, that a proper soul needs proper seasoning. Not the terse latency of an untrammelled youth, casually hopeful, a quietly relieved recognition of having skirted traumatic symptoms of a more reasonably catch-as-catch-can Freudian temper. My therapist now suggests meeting every other week. We’ve become nearly telepathic, anyway. The Greenland shark, lentissimo across human generations, is, I think, a cartilaginous fish of a more melancholy disposition. I think it knows itself its own tragic monomyth.     Chris Cusack is a writer and academic based in the Netherlands. Recent work has appeared in Poetry London, Poetry Ireland Review, Abridged, The Manchester Review, The Honest Ulsterman, and elsewhere. Find him on...