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      Holly Queen    She curled emerald tights about the core of an oak slumbering with thick bare limbs. He had lost his hair she noticed a vast shock of lemon green let fall to a muddy mulch below. Ivy’s agile twitches hugged tight twisting,...

On Stage in a home-made model theatre, c.1967 Glued to your block, in paint and ink you wait for Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life to stop. Smell of hardboard and hot bakelite. The lino curtain’s ready to go up. At which, the straightened coat hanger is shoved and on you...

      Airplane Mode   Nothing bad can happen on a plane. Engine fires, earache, hijackers; but no new grief. The heart is contained. Cupped in the silence, sorrow makes truce with the green lands below. In the regulate hum of the aircon, the news...

Winged     Kirsty Fox is a writer and artist specialising in ecopoetics. She writes lyric essays and poetry, and has had work published by Apricot Press, Arachne Press, and Streetcake Magazine. She has a Masters in Creative Writing and is currently studying...

      The Conversations of Ghosts Sometimes I’d swear that the ancient box fan I’ve hauled around with me for years is a receiver for the conversations of ghosts not unlike the way hats I’ve bought at vintage shops still hold trace elements of the...

All House Holds Dead in a chest, are folded matinee jackets, bonnets, bootees and mitts. Tissue sighs like the sea at Lowestoft, always Third week in August Once stuffed with baby breaths, the back bedroom holds only a tallboy with stashed school reports, ties without...

  Spindles   We clipped a window through the currant, sat on folding chairs with keep-cups, wrapped in blankets as we yelled through the prescribed two-metre gap. Then took to mending – darning socks and patching favourite denims, exchanging threads in...

  Finland, December 2015 Illness had left me brittle as frost, icicle-thin swaddled in borrowed warmth that couldn't keep out the wind's chill, prying fingers, shivering in at every edge. The lake, frozen, feet-thick, immense, swathed in drifts of baby powder. My...

  Eating figs on the bathroom floor         on marble tiles bird like I am a pin measuring drops in the toilet bowl disembogued into this locked space with depressions of earth staring at me the bathroom keeps the history of my enclosures fake windows chewing up...

  Doors My parents’ house became a place of closed white doors, where sound hung spare and echoes found no junk or clutter to rest themselves upon. You move quietly, in a house like that, learn side-feet, stop-breath, corner-pause, learn to turn reverberating...

      Homecoming Winter dusk soughs in, dark clouds threaten, tangle her wool. She sets down his heavy gansy, the jumper finished at last. A memory, that memory, sharp as now, catches her. Him so handsome on the shore that night, her so forgetful - that...

      Black on Black Black is the colour inside      black light   on blackened brick and slats       coaldust  and creosote     those sightless eyes     black as his  coalman’s  vest  and   grimy    coalbent back deep in a shed where he stacks cold...