by Fathima Zahra | Dec 14, 2024 | Featured, Poetry
Spindles We clipped a window through the currant, sat on folding chairs with keep-cups, wrapped in blankets as we yelled through the prescribed two-metre gap. Then took to mending – darning socks and patching favourite denims, exchanging threads in...
by Fathima Zahra | Dec 13, 2024 | Featured, Poetry
Finland, December 2015 Illness had left me brittle as frost, icicle-thin swaddled in borrowed warmth that couldn’t keep out the wind’s chill, prying fingers, shivering in at every edge. The lake, frozen, feet-thick, immense, swathed in drifts of...
by Fathima Zahra | Dec 12, 2024 | Featured, Poetry
Eating figs on the bathroom floor on marble tiles bird like I am a pin measuring drops in the toilet bowl disembogued into this locked space with depressions of earth staring at me the bathroom keeps the history of my enclosures fake windows chewing up...
by Fathima Zahra | Dec 11, 2024 | Featured, Poetry
Doors My parents’ house became a place of closed white doors, where sound hung spare and echoes found no junk or clutter to rest themselves upon. You move quietly, in a house like that, learn side-feet, stop-breath, corner-pause, learn to turn reverberating...
by Helen Ivory | Dec 10, 2024 | Featured, Poetry
Homecoming Winter dusk soughs in, dark clouds threaten, tangle her wool. She sets down his heavy gansy, the jumper finished at last. A memory, that memory, sharp as now, catches her. Him so handsome on the shore that night, her so forgetful...
by Helen Ivory | Dec 9, 2024 | Featured, Poetry
Black on Black Black is the colour inside black light on blackened brick and slats coaldust and creosote those sightless eyes black as his coalman’s vest and grimy coalbent back deep in a shed where he stacks cold...