by Memoona Zahid | Apr 21, 2021 | Featured, Poetry
Homing I My mum used to say that when she died she wanted to come back as a well looked after cat. Two weeks before, for Christmas, I bought her a cat onesie. We assumed she would be spending plenty of time on the sofa with our tabbies – enough for the...
by Helen Ivory | Apr 20, 2021 | Featured, Prose
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...
by Helen Ivory | Apr 19, 2021 | Featured, Poetry
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...
by Helen Ivory | Apr 18, 2021 | Featured, Poetry
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....
by Helen Ivory | Apr 17, 2021 | Featured, Poetry
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...
by Helen Ivory | Apr 16, 2021 | Featured, Poetry
Roses The postman was my friend, rang the bell, wouldn’t leave until he’d reached me, handed me broken stems of roses — thorny with their heads at crooked angles, buds that tried but only turned to rusty paper. They’d found you by the postbox...