Anne Ryland

      Self-Portrait as an Old Schoolhouse Restless two-hundred-year-old village elder, a ragged playground of words, or is it weeds – fragments of chant to slaps of skipping rope. Sash windows, shoothered open, once shed ample light through dreich...

Colin Dardis

      Mausoleum A house is a machine for living in.- Le Corbusier I have never climbed a tree, never broken a bone and will never walk on water. I open my little window and worry about possibilities: imprudent intruders of bird or cat, the wind, the...

May Garner

      The House Keeps Score The house keeps score in places no one checks any longer. A hairline crack behind the fridge. The soft dip in the hallway floor where grief learned how to pace. We didn’t mark the days after you left. We measured time by...

Sally Spiers

      Windless Day Night’s white noise is over. Day arises to stillness. Light crouches behind windows, presses through chinks. Dawn’s chorus conceals a speck of silence that casts a shadow stretching vast across the floor. Double-checking in the cereal...

Tim Brookes

      Flock In the charity shop I try on a coat flocked with fake shearling, shaved-soft almost: fibres fired onto plastic to fool the wrist. At home I snap it. A dust of fur lifts, hangs, then drifts onto the draining board, the bulb, the bruised...

Kim Waters

      Letter to L You’re a character, a Roman numeral, an internet meme. Descendant from a peasant’s crook or cattle prod, you’re the twelfth letter of the alphabet, but missing from a baker’s dozen. You’re in every email I ever wrote, appearing in...