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      Burglaries You have been burgled. While you were out with the dog, a burglar made best use of that yawning kitchen keyhole to spook through tracelessly. They were a ghost, floating through your house, with all the time in the world to inventory...

      Cemetery A pity the door is locked. You have to climb in over the fence, which is low in places. A large cemetery, matzevot crushed by falling trees - Tripadvisor review I step through missing bricks. Green graves cluster on a rise under a yew....

      Woof Woof She came growling at me like a wolf, muttering moonlight out of her throat and blood is the future in my skin. No more good girl. She kept moving in her frightened threats, unstable pain swallowed in an unspeakable way. Like me with my...

      The Uncertainty Principle But though she kissed me as a child would do, She clung on a little longer than she needed to. Jake Thackray “The Kiss” Hold a rule beside her measured look. Precisely fix the time it took to meet and break away....

      By Nectan’s Well being unnatural he fixes his sight past the fields of bere and oat and the woods of birch, his goat-eyes watch two worlds at once he knows to boil henbane with bitter vetch so he can see what exiled angels scrawl on the bark of...

    Unbound It was so quiet she could hear her hair grow, heartbeat stretch across measures, nails twist into mobius strips. She unlatched the window so the hair had somewhere to go, tumbling and snarling like water released in spring. He came every day –...

      Making a new picture from another picture I cut a bright patch free sunlit ochre that I loved placed it high up in this picture ditched the grim grounding and from another picture salvaged the russet which had warmed me excised the violet shades...

      Village Mela In one of those colourful stalls A gentle man with golden fingers Carves a wheelbarrow from broken wood With fine wheels and spokes, A toy you hold with string And pull along the village green. You are the owner of the universe All...

      The Fly I’m not looking where the others are seen something closer focus intensely, a relief, maybe just a fly but look notice the gleam of its body how pointed its wings are its comic crooked legs it’s made of many elements a flying saucer for a...

      The poet disregards the soup she reencounters it on the hob at a merry boil not a slow simmer as instructed borscht like bubbling blood melds fingerlings, carrots, onions in garnet guise isn’t it enough that she peeled the beetroot palms, apron,...

Antonia Taylor is a British Cypriot communications strategist and poet. Her work has appeared in Propel, Ambit, Harana, Marble Magazine, Dear Reader, and Indelible Literary Journal among others. She is a Nine Arches Primers 2023 finalist. Follow her on Instagram at...

      Tulip You seemed to be born blind. At first in cracked pot, in frosted compost Your leaves pined – jaded limp swords Fingering in, I could find no core, nothing that might bloom. So we passed the days. You grew lankier with the light. But still,...

      Yours truly, If only my tongue were context then my teeth would be meaning and when I opened my mouth to eat I would find a story there each time. The one of the blue boy whose mother fed all the out-of-work-actors in the neighborhood but never...

      Municipal Pool That particular, chemical clarity, sun into blue, ripples on the ceiling. Rare days when water rests between the ropes, unbroken and the lifeguard dreams by the open door. You slip in then, quiet, smooth - thinking otter, thinking...

      Bulk I suppose this beautiful bright dawn is the sky trying to offset the wild gusts of last night like a rescue mission. We still don’t get what we thought we’d got. I suppose our serial wrangling to solve the weather we’ve caused is even more...

      Her Mother Quizzes Her About Fruit She says, Yes, I’ve tasted pomegranates and I know what they do. The sense of vertigo: happily dizzy at first, as if you’ve downed a bottle of Shiraz or Merlot. You live by night, dress like a Goth; dark bars and...

      With Grandad gone I had the back of the car to myself, listed the seven counties Dad drove us through every year, three of us boxed on the leather seats. How did we get there, all in one day? Under the gear stick, tarmac in view, open to puddles...

Father wound My sister’s father wound is the flush cut on the bark where she lost her foothold and fell, the trunk burning red between her thighs all the way down the tree to the ground. It happened in the fatherland where the sky is a rock of shale grey covered with...