Daisy Henwood

      Hawthorn The gangrene smell is gone by the time the berries grow, and I am tempted to cut red branches and arrange them in jam jars throughout the house, too full of sour roasting fruit to remember the warning I heeded in May. I start to wear...

Robert Garnham

      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...

Josephine Balmer

      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...

Chris Cusack

      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....

Mick Gidley

      Home Front For days after the children leave for their homes in the South we discover unexcavated battlefields, nonsensical as Towton. Small formations of infantrymen guard the lower book-case shelves, lone snipers lurk behind the curtains, and...