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  An Elegy for a Stinking Pigeon I jump at a thud against my window, but nobody’s there. I look into the courtyard and glare, see nothing, until My sight falls upon the pigeon, dead as a dead pigeon, The corpse nestled into the leaves to hide from the wind....

Hysteria say you’re on stage or in Tesco buying tinned fish for the dog or it’s a dream in which you’re arguing with your mother and your womb starts moving about your body like it’s got a mind of its own the Ancient Greeks called it wandering but a better word might...

  The day the soldiers come they’ll give you twenty minutes to pack. Think now what you’ll need without this place you call home. And remember the woman too stunned by those uniformed men, who smoked and laughed in her kitchen, to use that precious time. She sat...

  Chalice You are invited to the special dinner where I’m turning turning the blood on the costume a birthmark shaped like a question on your lips there is a wasp an asp in my milk you would have me fail.   Trelawney has been shortlisted and commended in the...

You Eat a Moon as a Metaphor for Pain Here’s what’s going to happen: the moon is going to fall out of the sky and land in the basketball court in front of the apartment where your dad died. You are going to swallow it. Here’s what you are going to do: be buried under...

  to a chandelier Wo viel Licht ist, ist starker Schatten. Goethe fire-drunk, you dangle like a bad metaphor: a too-ripe melon, tugging umbilical at the ceiling. your shape:       just right:       the élan of a soap bubble your flux:           too bright:    ...

  Founding these boys have iron bones forged in foundries tongues like metal latches hinged at the shoulders names    clattering clasps on stone their forefathers knew soot as dawn light the trudge & lift of it worn in their palm lines bit lips tasting of...

      Row Your Own Boat, Please. It’s hard to be a bird in the winter – legs dipped into cold, dirty Thames’ water.  No roof to hide under. It’s hard to stand against the current to prove your fallacies, your name, under your oppressing fog. It’s hard...

      Of Shadows and Blebs November, the slow month, crowds the morning streets like a herd of brown ponies looking for a patch of green Ferries, laden with mint and cauliflowers, sprout on the Hooghly River like blebs on its soft skin Calcutta, full of...

      I am about to do something bodacious Barefoot in the yard, eating a slice of buttered toast, I feel a tremor in my bones. Usually, I am full of plans, but not today. I cannot picture the future. I am carried along by the sensation that I am about...

      The necklace was a gift from where they mine it out of the mountains. Haematite: an iron stone. Dense beads as grey as the metal; polished. It is cold against its wearer till it borrows some of their blood heat and if they should move too freely...

Julie Laing is a Glasgow-based writer and artist. She won the 2022 Wigtown Poetry Prize and is a recent Clydebuilt Verse Apprenticeship mentee. Her work has been published in several anthologies including Gutter and The Edwin Morgan Centenary Collection.  More...

      Cassandra Atherton is a widely anthologised and award-winning prose poet and scholar of prose poetry. She was a Harvard Visiting Scholar in English and a Visiting Fellow at Sophia University, and is Professor of Writing and Literature at Deakin...

      Slow Burn My mother’s life was fire, a smoulder inching along the spliced fuse of her life. Among her first words were coke and coal delivered by the black-smeared coalman who emptied sacks on his shoulders into the cellar. The chunks glistened in...

    A.M. P.M. Step out into the day’s whiteness And breathe the bad air. The early chill reminds you you’re here. The sky is birdless, And planes chew through the sinewy clouds. The taste of coffee is dark In your mouth. The hot black shock Tore open the...

      Morning, Mister Magpie Think of all the chain letters you had to write, the time you were almost knocked down crossing to avoid a window cleaner’s ladder, the look on your face when I put that brolly up indoors. For you, 13 isn’t an ordinary...