Julian Dobson

      The city asleep Street after street, ears bright to bass and tune of two thudding feet, gradients of breathing. But rain is brooding. Sparse headlights, ambient drone of cars kissing tarmac, merging — but rain twists senses, fractures distance,...

Oliver Comins

      Milk break, lunch break Working the land on good days, after Easter, people would hear the breaks occur at school, children calling as they ran into the playground, familiar skipping rhymes rising from the babble. An ample fence stood between them...

George Turner

      Patience Some days, the privilege of living isn’t enough. The weight of the kettle is unbearable. You leave the teabag forlorn in the mug, unpoured. Cooking seems too great a price to pay for eating. Instead, you sit and you look at a book without...

Craig Dobson

  Funeral   Slowly, ordinarily, the unimaginable happens, lowering the past into the dark, covering it. You’ll live to receive the haunts of jagged occasion blunting to dust and dream in the sift of going on. Till then, though, this keeps you. The bleak clothes...

Clive Donovan

  Clive Donovan has three poetry collections, The Taste of Glass [Cinnamon Press 2021], Wound Up With Love [Lapwing 2022] and Movement of People [Dempsey&Windle 2024] and is published in a variety of magazines including Acumen, Agenda, Crannog, Ink Sweat and...

Rose Ramsden

      The Last Train Home We left the play early. It was the last day before the start of secondary school. Dad told me off for slapping the seats, wanting to see the dust rise like smoke. Floating to the ceiling, dirtying the lights. The doors hissed...