Hello

  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...

      Birdsong in the playground   I asked a sea-gull on a see-saw what’s it all for, what’s it all about? He said nowt and flew away. I asked a crow on a swing the self-same thing, but he refused to say anything, he just hopped off to the roundabout,...

      She believes herself to be a field creature   Nessie is losing her mind boiling cotton with bleach all year long. She stalks lands and fields at twilight, fashions a dress from a beetle’s shell. The women in the dormitories don’t sleep a jot for...

  Holly Bars is a mature student currently studying at the University of Leeds. Holly’s poems have been published since January 2021 by The Moth, Ink, Sweat & Tears, Fragmented Voices, Porridge, Anti-Heroin Chic, Visual Verse, Runcible Spoon, and more, as...

      The Waiting Game Waiting is a great leveller. sitting in the waiting room, differences of height and status are almost invisible: we are equally powerless, subservient to the unseen list and the occasional calls of doctors and administrators....

      Garden I’ve woken at peace; it’s important not to think. I return instead to familiar images; steam rising from the boiler below the house, the pale leaves on the tree whose name I never learned. All I’ve ever done with these things is try to know...

      Consider the snowdrop How it toils through barren months, withstands snow and frost with alchemy of proteins and alkaloids in its sap. How it forges lance-shaped leaves hard-tipped to pierce frozen earth, gifts fresh growth to shaded places. How...