How Would You Draw a Bear?
after Jen Campbell
Grass seeds planted in doormat fur,
fish scales stiff between tree-root teeth and
the cave-deep noise of animal-sleep.
Still, how would you
know it for a bear?
How would I?
You would call it bear, sure of the feeling of its name in your mouth,
you always can tell, without checking, it’s bear, not lynx or coyote, and
you would tell it to keep to the tight woods, stay, not to roam.
But if it wasn’t a bear, after all that?
Would you listen to the sound of its paws on moss
and watch it scratch its true initials into the bark?
Would you let the bear go, under the clear and flannel-wet sky,
even if you never were sure, in the end
if it was a bear.
Philippa Greasley (she/they) is a queer Autistic writer from the Cotswolds. Their fiction and poetry has been published in literary magazines including t’ART Press, Anarkiss Zine, The Poetry Lighthouse, and placed in the final stages of the Bridport Prize 2026.
on good days
I believe a thousand
California condors
will fly headlong
into the future
not looking back
believe the colours
of a paint-box sky
aren’t pollution
but light scattering
the way it’s meant to
on good days I think
we’re doing our best
or at least our bit ‒
not running
with scissors
think that ice caps
could grow back
if we manage things
a bit better
and keep a cool head
on good days
I trust in clean cobalt
and sustainable grain
in hybrid cars
and healthy hives
imagine whale-song
is booming
that bats can make it
out of here alive
and forests will get old
think the hawk drops
then snags a pebble
and a brown bear sleds
the snow drift
for the joy of it
that a blackbird
pecks and pecks
at the halved mango
to paint his beak
in dazzle
Cindy Botha was born and raised in Africa and now lives in New Zealand. Her poems appear in magazines and anthologies in New Zealand, Australia, the UK and USA.
This poem was previously published in Acumen 110, September 2024.
Seventy-One Gannets
Halfway to the island, the engine falters
and every cup trembles in its ring.
A boy kneels backwards on the vinyl seat,
one finger keeping place against the glass.
Each gannet enters the wind like a thrown knife,
then folds, vanishing beneath the ferry’s wake.
His mother says sixty-eight, perhaps to calm him,
and he begins again from the first white wing,
as if the sea might return what it has taken.
Beyond the deck, rain hangs from a single cloud,
a grey curtain stopping short of the water.
Through it, the island appears room by room:
houses, a steeple, sheep startled into brightness,
white roads climbing where no road was before.
The boy forgets his number.
For three breaths, even the engines seem to listen.
Then seventy-one breaks cleanly from the rain
and is gone before he can point.
He keeps his finger raised against the window
where the empty air is still becoming a bird.
Niklas Pettersson lives on the island of Stavsnäs in the Stockholm archipelago. He writes poems and short fiction about ferries, weather, and ordinary island work.