Terry Jones

    Lines Written in Early Spring The Lake District Tourist Board has had no input into what you are now reading, but I so miss Cumbria in Holy Week; late March or early April; snow on the tops or a cold sun vying with a cold wind; congregations of chaotic...

Mary Mulholland

      Red as a fairytale Who will pick the apples now she’s gone? Orchards of eaters, cookers, some red-fleshed that she’d harvest and lay on racks, then gather those on the ground, struggle down with bag-loads to dump on my doorstep. No note. As...

Samantha Carr

      The Girl with Goldfish Under Her Skin She has few secrets with her translucent map skin of blue underground rivers visible to scale. Contours of overlapping knots oblivious to each other and to you – mesmerised by the girl with goldfish under her...

Alison Patrick

    Cepaea nemoralis A dozen snail shells exposed on dry soil in the archangel’s cut brown stalks. Banded like fairground sweets and helter-skelters, but forget all those frivolous stripey things. These are brittle, open-mouthed vacancies, void of the...

Julie Egdell

      Notes from the Constanta train station   At the shore of impossibility last moments come to nothing all our plans die in the salt air of another new day on the black sea. There is a sadness in the way we leave the ocean in summer that no cocaine...

Elena Chamberlain

      My trans friends and I just want to go swimming in cold water without a thousand eyes watching. to dunk our very own heads under and feel as the breathing world is wiped out. to get an ice cream from a van in the park and watch it drip down the...