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      Doctors in difficulty after Helen Mort A trainee in difficulty is one whose progress is causing concern or who is not meeting curricular requirements. This may be due to ill health, life events, difficulties with learning or through less than...

      My early days with junk food When we got home from junior school, Mum was still working. We would go to the cupboard where multi-packs of Fine Fare’s basic crisps were sorted into old shoe boxes, one for each child. Although Mum said those should...

      Lightheaded Sick of steadying the base of the ladder while you ascend to fix or fell sculpting, tweaking real and here when mostly I feel hardly real and hardly here. I’d rather be inside pretending I’m not pretending commentary inside my head is...

      In the Event of [        ] Read Poem Most things have their uses, some have value or worth and a rare few acquire some purpose and even meaning. Some things we hold in trust, some we forget we even own and then there’re those items we hang onto...

      Somewhere to get to The light is growing in the East the headlights skim the road that runs beside the flooded fields we’re a month off blossom when it comes I will drape myself in the year’s renewal and ask how many times I will see my little...

      Coping strategies With the neon-splashed night at the window I counted each contraction down, obediently, as my mother had told me to do. Ninety-eight, ninety-seven… This instruction reminds me of my friend’s advice: if you’re ever in public and...

      You ask me why I put myself through that, as if I jumped out of a plane 14,000 feet of fear and longing. As if I were a camel pacing two-toed, unhindered into the eye of the needle. As if I plucked the thorn instead of the rose, wrist of scars no...

      The Circles on Your Ceiling You wake up (so you tell me) to the lurid gold of summer splashed like paint across your tea-brown walls; curlicues across your bed- room ceiling: complex, inter- locking circles (‘rings left by Goliath’s teacups upside...

      Fortuna rolls the dice in Tumahole Free State, South Africa I have never seen a baby so tiny outside a womb. You hold her jigsaw of bones in a blanket, afraid to scatter the pieces in case they’d sail like seeds onto the road. A dung beetle rolls...

      The Longhouse The Renault rocks left to right, waddles up an unmade road, squeezes through the trees. Now I see it - a low-slung, stocky, lengthy, extended longère and, at right angles, ancient barns remodelled with stone, glass, wood. My hosts...

      I'm looking through a lattice of magnolia  not yet ready to blow open its thousand furring buds— every year the same urgency—same innocence— on an anniversary serious enough for champagne and a room with mullioned windows—the view outside is a...

  Lesley Graham lives in Bordeaux where she is a lecturer at the university. She is originally from Scotland and started writing poetry relatively recently.

      Red Sky in the Morning Red sky at night, shepherd’s delight, Red sky in the morning, shepherd’s warning. Country proverb Our family does weddings. When Rosalie married, first time round, and the cars assembled for the drive, it was in fact a...

      Meeting a Fig Tree I know a fig tree walks in beauty singing a fair song as soon as my heart beats. She uses elevators & electric stairs. People are astonished by her actions, but she doesn't even bother to argue with them. She is very busy...