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      Today is Tomorrow I remember this from before, a sudden plane hoovering up the sky more energy than a wasp its direction is its excuse – a new war somewhere. I stand on the fresh autumn grass as the thrumming plane disappears thrusting into space,...

      EYEWITNESS OF THE INVISIBLE A homeless moon lingers over the town. I linger with it, both of us bracing for single combat with oblivion at the crossroads where silence is spoken. I was interrogated once again during the night but betrayed only...

      #mahsaamini Today I want to be loud and clear and round like an O or hold my gun like an R and live in Revolution I ask the words as I chant them to slip into curves and folds of my body and rise with me Today I'm as woman as possible here's my...

      Then After a time of fires in oil drums, eddies of dog packs where the hospitals had been, first histories were published elsewhere, first conferences counted the spent cartridges. Wildflowers meantime came straggling back to cover the poisons,...

      My Albatross and Me my albatross is an over-stretched suitcase spilling out stuff I must remember my albatross was small but she grew like Topsy now she will not fit back in her box my albatross is a story, a black and white movie, a steam train...

      Containers From on this cliff top, I can clearly see the quarter-mile-long ship across the bay, a dark shape of unseen complexity. I am a sack of bags, with tubes that go between them, and with fine wires everywhere. I am the mind that feels this...

      Rapprochement (Glosa)             Maybe it happens one night, driving             Through an unknown suburb, the realisation             That nothing is going to change, the time             Will never come for explanation – Too Late by Ruth...

      Into the Forest Some of the liveries…are of people who do service so that they receive them as wages, such are the custodians of the palaces, the guardians of the royal temples, the pipers, the seizers of wolves… The Dialogue of the...

      Muscle memory I cut up my plaster cast and buried it deep into the earth. Mystics say if you offer pain to the natural world, it will heal what’s left behind. I prayed out loud when the wind howled and rain cleansed me of grief.  Now it seems my...

      Morton’s Laws Think me not a pessimist, Or, for that matter, a cynic. But my First Law (I don’t Care a fig for Newton) states: If it makes sense it will not Happen. The corollary states: The more sense it makes, The less likely it is to happen....

  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.

      Tinder Box Bugle weed and bee-blossoms catch the sparks and pass the flames lifted by the dry Santa Ana breeze, from black cottonwood to blue oak, down to the shrubs of the chaparral. The wind raises burning embers, fireballs like giant orange...

      Buzzard In the third month of drought we swerved round a buzzard that stood in the road. A hedgerow deep breath for the moment to register, to name the thing. We turned, drove back. In the hazards she was shaded with the forest. Was she stunned?...

      Mountain Lover You stand there like someone who left six thousand years ago and I was to blame. You will not speak of your symptoms of being, you couldn’t give a fuck. Always that distant look but I can walk to you in an hour. Your feet — who...

      Moor It seeped down from the moor smoke first air laced with flakes of ash dancing then settling on roofs, shoulders, eyelashes we dipped our feet in buckets then travelled—bleach clean— along those footpaths branded into land like stitches...

      An interview with a Cigarette How do you cope? Sometimes, I watch old movies where I am a symbol of rebellion and bike-sheds, of good times had, or a moment of pensive freedom, or a last request. Or I recall when you would call me Gauloises or...

      Cindy Botha lives in New Zealand where she began writing after 6 decades of doing other things. She is published in New Zealand, the UK and USA.      Olga Dermott has published two pamphlets: apple, fallen (Against the Grain Press) and A...