Gill Horitz

      Being a Mother I look back and ask, how did we get by? Was there too much angling after exactness? Did I promise you something and fail? Unfathomable, the way things become, like winter, a stretch of bare garden. Gone the violets, the brittle...

Susan Taylor

    The Trickster Talks of her Tears I wake and, for no reason other than life itself, my face feels like it’s made of tears, and they creep along the insides of my eyelids, like rain shifts across a windscreen at speed, but somehow they’re only ghosts of...

Maggie Harris

      If I was that woman If I was that woman. If I was that woman in the big house with the tall windows like eyes staring across open farmland where the late afternoon sunset glazes the manicure of her lashes. If I was that woman whose Italian...

Rachael Clyne

      What I Asked of Life When I was six, Life gave me cartwheels, bilberry pie and all of us at the mirror, comparing purpled tongues. From thirteen to thirty I pleaded, Give me a Christian nose, legs up to my armpits. And please, stop me having...

Ruth Stacey

      Colour is Distracting Feel the Prussian Blue pushing against the eyelids. Oxide Green touches the arch of an undressed foot. Raw Umber brushes against the neglected fold of an elbow and leaves a Red Ochre rash. Gold and Silver fill the throat....