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      from The Lorch Family Magic Trick Adolf Althoff is used to riding tigers so when Gestapo soldiers come looking for Irene he plies them with Schnapps while Irene squeezes into a passage tight as a magician’s box – contracting in size until she is...

    Telling the Bees Little vials into which the sun has poured I tell you all I know about the failing crop, a marriage party, a stricken cow. Last summer I tied a ribbon to the top of your home, whispered with a sweet tongue that a new master had come....

    How it feels to be a bat There are the headaches, then the feverish sense of darkness. Taste, none but the crackly limbs of gnats. Hate is a constant on the radar and immense blank surfaces block the call by which I come to belong in the shape of a...

    A defence against all sabotage I shake out the creases from my coat, and climb the hundred steps leading to the feet of a bronze giant, its right hand raised, welcoming. I’m meant to lift my eyes, to take in its magnificence, to be stirred up into...

      The Slip Hold on tight to my writing hand, darling boy. Who knows how many words I have left. Don’t let me give them all to the page.   Holly Conant is a new writer and mature student, currently studying at the University of Leeds. Her poems...

    IMMEDIATE ACTION REQUIRED We have detected a trojan virus! I have developed affinities for dying in peculiar ways such as being choked by the moonlight’s shaking hands or swallowing a cup of live rattlesnake babies Personal and banking information is at...

    Vanishing Mother A jar of Pond’s cold cream glows in amongst her female debris on the dressing table; talc sprinkled with a lipstick smear across a comb. Tissues fluff out of a slit – half-done magic trick beneath a heart-shaped mirror, picturing the...

    Ecco the Dolphin Sega Megadrive, 1992 Ecco roves immaculate 16-bit oceans, pierces through jellyfish sparkling their assigned scores. Ecco rotates side on, a perpetual loading icon, flips through scrolling screens of digital habitat. Ecco is neat between...

    Mix & Match but what if we mixed the smoke of my incense sticks & the smoke of your rolled-up happiness in a room only suitable for two? what if we mixed & matched your hundred fingers with my four fingerprints? what if we let my kundalini...

    do not eat you dry out my tongue, dry off, dry off, wither in my mouth like the ripe white leg of a lamb breach-born, caught dangling between guts and dew, fingers of mist still laid in the valley biscuits in a long cardboard tube sticky with crumbs, the...

    The unsheltered places The unsheltered in their places might remark if asked, that a pavement at close quarters is like the surface of the moon just before the sun disturbs itself to snuff out, one by one each florescent streetlight’s fizz that crowds...

    HELL IS REAL Travelling southbound on Interstate 71, motorists pass a sign which reads HELL IS REAL. It stands in a plowed field and serves as a reminder to all God-fearing farmhands that they must indeed fear God. I am not so easily influenced, I could...

      The Film-maker and the Poet after ‘A Matter of Life and Death’ (1946) The film-maker begins at the rim of space where he hurls constellations through Shakespeare and war; from a place where he condemns a man to unrequited death. His screen fills...

    daphne & moonlight daphne on the bonnet of the car her father stole off with your head daphne in a black lake moonlight plays inside me in the wrong register in the rearview my legs below her legs above the moon is white i slice peaches with magic...

      Towards A Dennis O’Driscoll Re-write of A Cesare Pavese Poem   Stupid takes after you, its smirk the one you wear while confidently doing whatever it is you do worst. You wouldn’t recognise stupid if it superglued your eyes open, threw a bucket of...