Philip Dunkerley

      Day Off Vultures don’t fly on Sundays, it’s their day off. No use saying you’d like to see them flying about, they won’t do it, haven’t for ages. I can tell you where they are – they’re down by the disused railway hanging out, walking up and...

Anna Beddow

      Clocking off from Sankeys This young man’s veins run with smelted iron. Shift ends. Furnace bellows push him home. He feels for his key in the oil worn bag rummages for fags    wedged between Sketchpad     and empty sandwich tin. Lighting   on the...

Bill Greenwell

      Out Of Bounds   The sweet shop, for starters. Dabs, dibs, Creamola Foam, anything with a fizz. The maids upstairs in their own dormitory, who passed us a copy of Modern Sunbathing. Travelling too far beyond the cricket pavilion, where temptation...

Helen Evans

      The calling You’re sitting in the half-light, in a cavern scoured from limestone, on a boulder by an underground stream. Behind: a dark tunnel, too narrow to crawl through, where water flows from, cool and clear. Ahead: heaped debris, the walls of...

James Young

      Quince There is a quince tree in the Alice Munro short story The Moons of Jupiter, and also in the poem “Lunch With Pancho Villa” by Paul Muldoon. In the novel The Love of Singular Men, by the Brazilian author Victor Heringer, a mother beats her...