Bex Hainsworth

      Elegy After the driest July since 1911, the earth is left bewildered. The soil cracks like paving stones and the trees sizzle in the heat. A sky, brazenly blue, leans closer to inspect brown parks, low rivers. Black birds circle above a shrinking...

Georgina Jeronymides-Norie

      A Gentle Warning When, as a child, we had a visit from an angel my skin rippled into a silver shade of cold. She signalled her visit by dropping a young pigeon feather on the pavement that walked us home. I didn’t know what it meant but mum...

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...