Hello

      How Much For This? Your body hangs like a dartboard. Clothes snake the slippery floor ready to bite. A curtain holds you back imperfectly as a Tetris block. This is the first time you have been out in three weeks. Today sits like a joker between...

      New Year Fog The garden shudders, brushed with ice, its edges slightly blurred away by cloud unfolding over the grass. The sun just doesn’t want to try to bring the day into the world, preferring to hold its watery eye half-way closed above the...

    CW: Car accident and loss of life. Death Knock. A fen road took them, sometime in the early hours, when the mist hung over the muddy dykes and the reeds sighed with grief and the handsaw lifted, on solemn beats of its grey and shrouded wings. They left...

      ELECTED For safe keeping they split the truth into manageable pieces. They hid some between silence and promise, let it grow to myth. Hid some between action and contrived headline changing its shape. Hid some between hearing and interpretation,...

        The Blue Whale (Natural History Museum, London) The mandibles look like the tusks of some gigantic bull elephant bagged by hunters posing for a photograph in pith helmets next to a tent and a wind up phonograph. I reckon the Titanic’s...

      Keep Going Aldgate had its usual smell of dirty metal and coffee. I jumped from platform to carriage. I squeezed beside a Tate Britain poster, clutched the grab-handle. When I chanced a glance, I saw I was the only one standing. Everyone else was...

      mercury rising we groan as the mercury hikes climbing with the ball of fire the Hot Weather Warning surrenders its flag feels like 40 and it’s only May Day we survive in gasps between air-conditioned bubbles like goldfish the elderly populate...

      Portbou After Mary Jean Chan Reminded of my body by the climb I feel the sun, its love and anger, a baked red brick rubbed on the back of my calves. Hiking in a binder was a shit idea, My lungs reach to surface, come short. There’s a sweat mirage...

      It Starts Before Birth Your tadpole-self, displayed to strangers for a thumbs-up. Then childhood illnesses, faithfully documented. Late-night rows, embalmed in messaging apps. Missteps preserved for future employers. Lost loves, transfigured into...

      Limbo We have our eyes on the chairs, ready for when the music stops. Nobody wants to be in the space where a seat had been before. The limbo stick goes lower again. Those left in, contort their spines to hover in the gap, avoid collapse. I cover...

Sue Proffitt lives by the coast in South Devon, UK. She has an M.A. in Creative Writing and has been published in a number of magazines, anthologies and competitions. She has two poetry collections published:   Open After Dark (Oversteps, 2017) and  The Lock-Picker...

      Fuglafjørður I This curved town exhales fishy breath gusted in tons from berthed trawlers gashing the quay the north hauled to land groceries shopped into cars with studded tyres grinding their knuckles home lit by Christmas lights rigging a...

      Let it be okay that it took me a while to get here If not better then equally fine to be the goldfinch who took weeks to even notice the weirdly suckered perspex shape. A phase of hover and flee then shy balance on the lip, choosing hollow still...

      Mountain Rescue How do we pull ourselves back when we’ve nothing to hold on to? Find a way clear or stay? Wait. Song will arrive again from scrub, from burn, from leaf. We feel the weight of hope, are shocked to life by the rawness of...

      How to not exist Allow yourself to be elbowed aside become a non-person an avoider of lingering looks Ask how can I best be ignored? foster a gnawing sorrow howling complaints to imaginary friends In portraits your eyes should be nebulous stare at...