Tanya Parker

    Circus We are the leave-takers, rolling our hearts in tents. Rootless, our life is soil, any soil. With the first flutters of red we drive a stake in a ground, peg ourselves to the here and now. Harlequin knows the grist of a place, instantly: takes his...

Patrick Wright

      Postcard – Untitled   Before Mark Rothko As the floor gives way, I’m a bird always burning up in the desert. Every few years, I tear off my layers. I eat the ashes of predecessors. I’m the torment of cells, neural connections. I’ve learned...

Alison Jones

      Union This marriage was not meant to happen, too hasty,  driven by needing to make everything right.  Late night urge to clean my grandmother’s saucepans, to rekindle how it was to be hearthside with her. Too keen and desperate,  now look at...

Nejra Ćehić

      Dangerous Bird She wanted grace. she wanted to feel her limbs lightweight to know flight without wings where light was dim & bass louder than bodies hitting ground. she once saw her body hitting ground purposefully, carefully planned &...

Barbara Crossley on International Women’s Day

content warning: gynaecological examination     Naming of Parts                                        (after Henry Reed)   Today we have naming of parts.                        Yesterday we had no idea they would need to be named. Two students avoid my...

Anne Berkeley

      Door I opened the door A girl stood there her blonde hair drifting in the wind She said My mother told me not to go to the mountains she said there is nothing to eat in the mountains and she said I will get lost in the mountains and I will slip...