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      Quiet, Elizabeth Elizabeth is hiding in the cupboard under the sink Small enough to fold between cream cleaner and floor polish Too big to keep elbows away from wire wool Knees away from the slick puddle of the U bend Nose away from the liquitab...

      Acts of Repair Did you hear about the rose that grew from a crack in the concrete? (Tupac Shakur) You wouldn’t believe how quick they grew — Our babies were men now. Lifting bags of concrete they rebuilt cities, slab by slab, reinforcing cracks....

      The Scorpion and the Egg I'd asked for this not to be recorded; this failure on my part, to be a good parent; this failure over the egg, my handing him a scorpion instead, my thoughtlessness. How can I explain that my mind was elsewhere? That I...

      Monkey Mathematics A monkey grabs one nut here, one nut there, and two more over there. He counts them with care. One two three four nuts —what a bounty! He rubs his belly, opens the nutshells deli- cately and eats the seeds oh-so- slowly: four...

      Self-Portrait at 30 - VIII. Be reasonable I find six errors in the proofreading manual & the irony doesn’t tickle me. I am enraged by typos, poor formatting, missing commas. This is my Big Girl Job, the one I always wanted — editing books,...

      Consulting the Doctor What seems to be the problem ? He asks in that slightly condescending tone. Seems,     I think,      Seems. It seems, I say, that I have a problem with my inner fish, or my inner fish has a problem with me. My Eustachian...

      Consistency My Dad once dismissed a friend as a hypocrite, which I took to be an induction to the truth. Lately though, I think the things I love in you I love because they’re grossly inconsistent. Your signature smell is rose, your delicate petal...

      Everything We are eating dessert when the urge overcomes her to scrawl mathematics, the night ticks on —I drink my whisky, her Merlot grows warm— until, sudden-smiling, she holds out a paper: a simple equation with nothing crossed out; laid out...

      The Rules of Spacetime in Dimensions Above Three Tom Giles once asked me if I had tools and at that time I didn’t because I was fifteen maybe sixteen but he was Adam’s big brother with a new flat so he was old and he knew things. He told us we...

  Molly Knox is an MA Music study at Durham University. She is a poet and theatre-maker. Some of their recent work can be read in Magma, The Braag, The Gentian, and Stone of Madness. 

      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...