David Gilbert

      Imagining Green   The leaf is the paradigmatic form of openness: life capable of being traversed by the world without being destroyed by it (The Life of Plants. A Metaphysics of Mixture. Emanuele Coccia.) I was imagining green light like two...

Simon Williams

      Tawny Owls I’ll take your owl, Paul, and Sylvia’s and raise you two, that call across the meadow on August nights; male and female: one twit, the other twoo. I won’t say which is which. No, I haven’t seen them, haven’t risked my bald pate, don’t...

Sarah O’Connor

      Newgale You stand at shoreline watching. Unaware the tide advances, despite decades of life by the sea, you dip your toes in icy Atlantic swell. But decay has arrived as a rip tide – pulls you under, drags you out into the bay. The men throw a...

Laurence Morris

      Plantation blues Morning light is warm quicksilver on the desert plateau of the high Monadhliath, bare stone and scoured earth the seed of man and winter. The upward flow of pines is genesis not rewilding, redcoat drumbeats on the drove road still...

Ysella Sims

      Changeling Away over the hills the girl’s father is shapeshifting – grown grey and yellow, wheezing against the pillow’s soft sink, feet that have polkaed and gavotted, tangoed and waltzed vaulting him now, into the submission of the couch....

Fiona Perry

      The Mirror   Eimear’s half-brother, Julian, died and left her a terraced house. I offered to help Eimear clear the rooms and to do runs to the charity shop with anything worth passing on.  We discovered that he had amassed about a hundred...