Philip Dunkerley

      Day Off Vultures don’t fly on Sundays, it’s their day off. No use saying you’d like to see them flying about, they won’t do it, haven’t for ages. I can tell you where they are – they’re down by the disused railway hanging out, walking up and...

Anna Beddow

      Clocking off from Sankeys This young man’s veins run with smelted iron. Shift ends. Furnace bellows push him home. He feels for his key in the oil worn bag rummages for fags    wedged between Sketchpad     and empty sandwich tin. Lighting   on the...

Bill Greenwell

      Out Of Bounds   The sweet shop, for starters. Dabs, dibs, Creamola Foam, anything with a fizz. The maids upstairs in their own dormitory, who passed us a copy of Modern Sunbathing. Travelling too far beyond the cricket pavilion, where temptation...

Helen Evans

      The calling You’re sitting in the half-light, in a cavern scoured from limestone, on a boulder by an underground stream. Behind: a dark tunnel, too narrow to crawl through, where water flows from, cool and clear. Ahead: heaped debris, the walls of...

Rosie Hadden

      The sisters of stone wend their way in a line one after another the sisters of stone walk across the hollow lake quieten their legs on the dry drowned bridge listening they prayer their fingertips around the cupped whim stones that hold neither...

John Grey

      Proposal Oh yes, I can still rise with the best of them, sink with the worst. I can play my violin outside your door as easily as spit on your roses. How would you like your jazz? Perfectly syncopated or horribly atonal? I got the sun in the...