Hello

    You always ate oranges I am peeling an orange at the end of something At the end of a line from each time you took up the fruit Dug your thumb in, hooked out a chunk of skin Pulled pith from flesh from round heralding its colours so loud no one could...

    Mum’s Skull Contains a Vacuum Cleaner Every five minutes it does its job, hoovers every inch of her memory, declutters all pains and sorrows. It booms, roars, heats up, leaves no space for nostalgia. When I ask her if she’s had dinner, she says she...

    The Work of Hands And once the father frowned As the boy struggled to fasten The drawbridge on his fort. ‘He’ll never be any good With his hands’ he declared, As if the boy wasn’t there. And once he beat the boy For palming a Dinky toy His mother refused...

    Afterlife Perhaps the friends of Lazarus, who died and slipped his shroud, on seeing him might swoon or rush to hear the tales of that beyond they hoped and feared to face. Perhaps some cried or shook and got themselves quite drunk by noon. Or had the...

  The Memory of Lives incarnation. God in his worn, greasy jeans like a car mechanic is lighting a new life from an old one. a new cigarette from a cigarette butt. and you are merely a flame between the two worlds, smoked on an empty stomach. while he breathes...

      Erato It takes ages. Tell me what it is you’re after she says, when finally I get through. Rain, I answer, rain that falls softly in a garden, and on the Aegean, the noise they make together, trees in the rain, and the way rain brightens the green...

      Olympics I devoured the Olympics, filled my mouth and scrapbook with sticky ephemera. I stalked a torch, seized my shining, perforated prey, and stared into the void of Wenlock and Mandeville’s eyes. Sometimes, I am in the Olympics. I crawl from...

      Craftsmanship beneath night’s skin he unearths raw stones serrated     encrusted    enigmatic    cold tumbling them in two-twenty grit wears away the dull four hundred    six hundred highlights the delicate garnet’s exposed seam     agate’s...

      Morning Outing with Mum we are at a cafe        just round the corner from hampstead heath                     & sipping berry sunrise smoothies    out of soggy paper straws        we are watching tangles of cockapoos too many       north...

      Old Master Goya was an octopus that smelt of funerals on Mondays. Sundays, the scent of getting ready. Goya liked to swim with sensory stimulus. He would splash about his palette. Goya made two circles on a first encounter. His grip was firm, a...

      Herb of the Sun The pain comes plucked from a field in garlands of sunlight. So many women weave aches into strings of marigolds, with bent backs from children, livelihoods of pouring orange petals, scents of sweet incense and the sunlight is...

      Honesty Lunaria annua Honesty has her green season, her red season, keeping the next generation in her purse, close to her chest, held in. After many moons I am perhaps readying to speak. All the windows in my house are broken, my feet cold, the...

      Jess Phillips reads the names, again Each year in March, on the eighth day, the one we’re allowed to call ours, slowly, Jess reads our names, not the bitch, slut, whore we died hearing, but the gifts from our parents. Remember us now in this careful...

        Julia Webb is a neurodiverse writer from a working-class background who lives in Norwich. She has three poetry collections with Nine Arches Press: Bird Sisters (2016), Threat (2019) and The Telling (2022).  She is a poetry editor...