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      Questions     We were always in the car that year the price of having a nice house in a nice area get in get in it’s time to go where are we going our friends the supermarket the cinema the mall just for a drive between banks of jaded...

      Stuffed Monkey from Jane Grigson’s English Food It’s impossible to foretell what will provoke tears, the sort that well up and tip over while you hold onto the kitchen sink waiting for them to subside. It could be a bunch of keys, so many of them...

    Mean sister We are stuck in our own words, not hearing each other. Sixty-somethings, we may as well be six, throwing sticks down the beck or poking dolls eyes out of their sockets, scribbling on their perfect faces. We are well rehearsed, know our cues,...

      The Day Of Un-Visitation ..there is a day of visitation given to all... Robert Barclay of Ury, 1678 I heard a calm, clear voice. But not with my ears. Not my outward ears. It wasn't madness. For a moment I was Lady Julian. For a moment I was...

        How the Wych-elm Once Reached tall as the absentee house. How the girl moored her hands and heart     charmed by riven bark.   How its name was thrilling     frightening as the adults     disguised witches. How the woman returns...

      Lovely Feet I dream I’m at the hospital massaging your feet, your tiny feet that I have freed from their tight white stockings and covered in aromatic oils, as your lover lies beside you stroking your lioness head which turns and gently purrs at...

      Rough Tor When fog falls over Rough Tor, the world creaks on the end of a string, its veils too flimsy, dancing like a threadbare kite on the wind, a farm here, there the trembling memories of a hill, the day coated all in white, its bright...

      Snow’s Reset The roofs blend with the snow-laden clouds, borders softened so it’s only memory that differentiates my space from my neighbour’s. The wet smell confuses pets whose footprints meander over territorial edges, leave crazed patterns like...

      Toughened Bark it takes a hefty blow sometimes to split you open a sharpened blade to split through years of tough old bark in the deeper channels feel how sap and resin thicken sap to carry nourishment keeping the woodiness supple resin to...

      A Space of Her Own A thirty-year-old woman walks into the wee sma’ hours of a December night. Snow is light on her hair and the back garden shrubs. It thickens. The sky turns white. She stands still. Her boots are coated, and the heels disappear....

      Cremation morning after your cremation   I wake no calls to make to stethoscopes or wreathes your bones no longer at any postcode watch black smoke clouds from neighbours’ chimneys   ghosts how can your blood now be this urn of ash to lick my...

    Siberian Larkspur     Jemma Walsh is an Irish poet based in London. She is currently doing an MA in Creative and Life Writing at Goldsmiths College. Her work has been published in The Irish Times, Moth Magazine, HOWL Magazine, Crossways...

    Quiet Joy   Stay silent under eyes of stars quietly watching,   the cat slinks by my house, pads slow, wary,   a mouse like a dreamer’s sleep in her mouth.   Single light from a top window opens its shadows.   She leaps with...

    Dingo in a World Heritage Site     I won’t forget her on the beach – fur the colours of sand. We wouldn’t have spotted her were it not for the jiggle of her gait, the turn of her head with ears pricked, the spine’s taut bow and torque of her...