Steven Taylor

      SPORTS NEWS A very long time ago Stephen Fry’s godfather, the Justice, Sir Oliver Popplewell Who chaired the inquiry Into the Bradford City Stadium fire that killed 56 football watchers, contrasted The quiet dignity of those relatives With the...

Amirah Al Wassif

      A Thumb-Sized Sinbad under My Armpit Beneath my armpit lives a Sinbad the size of a thumb. His imagination feeds through an umbilical cord tied to my womb. Now and then, people hear him speaking through a giant microphone— Singing, Cracking jokes,...

Mark Smith

      Divining In the portacabin that morning, men smoked and looked at last week’s paper again. There was no water to fill the urn. The first job – to get connected to water and power. A slow hour went by of dirtied cards landing on the table. I was...

Toby Cotton

      Napsack A blustery day – the wind too strong for kites or for lifts to the sky. “To a thoughtful spot,” it cites and pins me to the earth. A dragonfly perches atop a little asphalt hill but zips off when the hill twitches and sniffs the air....

Ansuya Patel

      I Cast Out Everything except this burnt red vase. Hand shaped in the muffled roar, devouring flame in the furnace’s mouth. Sand becomes skin of light. Its glass body trembles like a sea animal remembering its salt. I hold the lagoon’s sigh,...

Hannah Ward

      Under The Plum Tree Look, Drew, the plums are in pieces beneath us. I dreamt: you let the sweet ones rot at the bottom of your pocket, sagging like the canopy. Hannah is thirty feet long in a field of dandelions, waving...