Hello

      Hamlet in the Scanner Can’t hear yourself think only the bass line of a heart thumping. Your head’s clamped. You can’t move. A panic button slicks a palm, a soft wet plum. You could be bounded in a nutshell and count yourself a king of infinite...

      The Insanity Ensemble   It is not like an egg cracking or an exquisite shiver of shattered glass. It is not a supercelery bone snap or a wired ballerina bend. A cortisol swoosh floods your certainty a prefrontal cortex throb threatens thunder. A...

        High-Visibility The precondition for being a ghost is not only death but faith in an afterlife. Kit Fan. When I lost loved ones last year I thought my childhood fears would return. Sleeping in mum’s house waiting for the seen and felt, the...

      Lesley  Burt lives in Dorset. Her pamphlet, Mr & Mrs Andrews Reframed, was published by Templar Poetry in 2023, and  Alice spins her Glitterball by Tears in the Fence in 2024.  

      On sunday morning you lay together laughing She gets into your bed like when she was little. Flowers grow out of the wardrobe, moss claims the windowsill and a vine snakes its way to the bed post, climbing. You are laughing. Imagine she is...

      I had a leaf in my hair when I arrived the receptionist thought it was a hairclip I didn’t know how to tell her I’d been doing my pre-op under a beech tree, leaves drifting down like snow fungus like a great carved shelf bracketing the...

      My Dad Complains That The Hedges Are Overgrown and the word bemuses me, implying as it does the concept of excess in what can only be good. Why do we crave these straight lines and clean edges? The hedge itself is a border, a defining. A this is...

      Between the Ears For Seán Street, in celebration of his 80th birthday (2nd June 2026)   Molluscous receivers, would that you could turn your talents inwards, and pick up all that goes on in the cerebral swamp that separates you, with its...

      Twitch There's a flash of colour from the hedge. His arm shoots up and hangs pointing - at the empty space where the movement was. As he names the bird he thinks he saw     Luke Moran is from Folkestone, he works there in the public...

      And when you step into the clearing there will be dancing. The unsteady moon, shaken to ribbon; shimmering through regalia of clouds. Shawls, as if ermine, still scurrying (wee winter-whitened weasels). & the one elm sways too. Lit, like a...

      Again Again the rock is wet. Again no spring. Sheltered under the ridge the fence post leans where it always leans. Mud. A buzzard mews, turns in the wind, a faraway engine grumbles. On the ewe-path worn to here, close to the face of cold granular...

      Knowledge She doesn’t know what she is doing. She chops and boils, snacks and sneezes, sits. Classical radio plays, imbuing the scene with comic dignity and wit. I close my eyes, wrapping truths in wool and wearing them about me. To be frank is to...

      Ivy’s deference and not Ivy thrives despite dependency. It hangs on, has its other day. Ivy does not press its case. Its patient face is no surprise. It does not draw attention to itself. Its business is in secretive delight. It’s second violin to...

      Interview with my sonographer How much water did you have to drink this morning? Did you sip your coffee without worrying about its diuretic properties? Was it sunny where you were? I took your advice about the elasticated waistband, the full...

      Humanoid I was cutlery left out in the rain, rusty by morning, a side-slipping fiddlestick desperate for music, starved for company. You were a knockoff  BOGOF version of a briny punk with a commitment phobia permanently out of your habitat and...