Tamsin Flower

      Girls Smell Sweaty. Hyacinth-sprayed, nylon girls. Typing. Cats-eyeing you, their manager. Staring. Each other, full watery of last night’s bar/ argument. Boyfriends. They don’t understand. How to handle them? Surly at home and at the office. But...

Katherine Meehan

      The Pleasure Club Stumbling towards the daytime party, the summer humid and loud in the pine wood, the quarry lake filled in with the reflection of trees —here is a cold beer bottle. Press it against your sunburned face. You have agreed to the...

Janet Hatherley

      Skirting the banana skin Did you leave that for me to slip on, I ask. My daughter’s baking and we laugh because we both know since my stroke nine months ago she and her brother question why I’m wearing flip-flops, tell me to hold on when I’m...

Nastia Svarevska

      don’t watch your mouth you were cold so i moved closer hungry for more your hands under my striped jumper that still smells of my mum silently stripping for you dancing the outline of your broken voice call me when you need me but i dropped my...

Gregory Kearns

      Archive of a friend’s tenderness For Luke You made red velvet cupcakes to mark some minor victory of mine. Without the egg and dairy, you compensated with sugar and I think I’m still high off it now. Though you find yourself too ill to practice...

Rachel Spence

      Haiku Calendar January, fear Like a preacher, elsewhered, dubbed To a moonbeam howl February – wolf Lopes across rock-snarled borders Inhuman stone tongue March – willow-wand faith Unbridled, even tonight As the mouse roars by April –...