Zoë Green

      The Way North After Paul Flora’s Der Weg nach Norden II The way north is a savage smile that zig-zags the whole length of the page of ice. You pause on the lip of its jaw above dumb unspeakable black. Across the void you dream the flickering...

Helen Ivory on April Fool’s Day

      The Fool I am the man you see on a ladder square centre of a field on your morning commute. The rake in my hands clears a patch in the clouds for a clutch of sunflower seeds. Next time you look up from your paper a pother of songbirds have tatted...

Rizwan Akhtar

      Demands   now a surreal residue lives on your hair you play with in a corridor checking out light fading smiles a verisimilitude of close hands evenings spent on waiting chairs creaked but that decibel silence torn by a stubborn bird outside...

Michael Bartholomew-Biggs

      Break-out Session “I’ll stay here with the strawberries,” he said. He still supposed such droll remarks displayed his youthful eccentricity. The fruit in question, surplus to the buffet lunch, was resting, moist and fragrant, in a bowl, alongside...

Chrissy Banks

      Birthday after Dorothea Tanning I can hardly believe you are real, come in the night with a present; here, at my door, in a snow-dappled coat, your hair illumined, your eyes small violets. I have doors beyond doors, canvasses propped against every...

Lorraine Carey

      Sundays at Grandma’s Gran’s best friend Susan came every, single Sunday. Whippet thin, I often thought she’d disappear into the vacuum of her own cheekbones, she sucked so hard on those fags. Each week we sat through the drag of Sunday Mass, the...