Hello

      TOSCANINI In later life, he will profess to dislike it, this symphony from a besieged city, this masterwork of human resilience its score smuggled to the States on microfiche, spy-story tradecraft the order of the day. Still, it is his the...

      Waking Memory Whether the documents, separated by type, format and function are easily accessed depends on the amount and the quality of the oil applied to the filing cabinet. There are nights when the metal doesn't glide, nights when the rollers...

      Action Man When he was a kid, he crucified Action Man He enjoyed that the rubber hands submitted perfectly to the hammer, nails passing easily into the wooden cross. As Action Man hung in the garden he reflected upon how unhelpful the trappings of...

      Freight Train For Elizabeth Cotten (1893 -1987) American blues and folk musician, singer, and songwriter. At a gas station in Malta, Angelo fingerpicks that song as the boys eat ricotta pastizzi and Ruth restrings her banjo and Romey plays at...

      The Sorry Letter I’m nine years old & it’s 6pm & I’ve been sent to my room. I open a new pack of felt tips & grab some Victoria Plum paper. It’s time for The Sorry Letter. I want to be in the laughing living room, watching Knight Rider...

      Sephardi Legend When Susona ben Susòn betrayed her father did she beg for her head to be severed from her body and nailed to the door or did she hide in the cloisters of a convent an orphaned Conversa enduring her days in penitent contemplation or...

      This is about violence This is about the surprise you felt as you lay on the kitchen floor at your friend’s house, his hands round your throat their dog barking and whining. This is about the way you thought you were strong (and you were strong)...

      Polyamory Did you mean me to hear this you in a lift loving her, both of you yawning in the foreign morning light, tired after clubbing all night in modisch Berlin? I speak, screech really, try to alert you to the concealed me in your pocket but...

      Noor’s Song His heart sings with each song of Noor until the day she loses her voice. Six-year-old with no speech only mime at a time before endoscopes reach Karbala. Noor skips, plays with her dolls as before whispers unlettered air. Her parents...

      Don't Tell Once, in the confinement, word went round of a gathering, that night, in the ruined Auberge du Roi. Twenty minutes, the woodland way, a half moon in two minds, but what the heck? And then, spilling from unglazed openings, the thudthud...

      Until Later, I marvelled at where I’d been until that moment I looked out the window and saw you watching me from across the pebbled yard, the cicadas thrumming my heart like a violin, the shimmering heat miraging the fields of yellow wheat, and...

      I Think My Poem About You is Unfinished, says Sal. How so? I ask her, and she says, there are just things I want to add. Like how you suck your thumb, how you pace the room, and how you smudge your eyeliner when you cry, and your dresses, I’ve got...

      Ulysses Loses Identity When a local mistakes your oar For a fan that winnows the grain You won’t have to search anymore, May your spirit abandon pain. Yes, the locals will take your oar For an artless winnowing fan! But until you have reached that...

  Oz Hardwick is a European poet, photographer, occasional musician, and accidental academic, who has published ten chapbooks and collections, and loads more interesting stuff with other people. He is Professor of Creative Writing at Leeds Trinity University....

      Refugee I know the earth belongs to you in the same way the moon does. You’re the unspoken clause, the question nobody wants: how bad does it have to be to begin an inventory of what you can take:  the clothes you stand up and lie down in, the...