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      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...

      Anthropophony I’m tuning in to territories like we’d tune in to stations on the radiogram. The shortwave chiff-chaff with the dial stuck, the maudlin willow warbler, the blackcap trying and failing to be a nightingale. And this is work. In the...

      The Interior We gather around the machine, looking down at the fallen trunk, with little hope of being able to put it all back together. The grandfather had the tools, and the skills, but he bequeathed none to us. The sand under our feet is orange...

      A Mawkish Ode to Murder She was night at its blackest heart It’d be stupid not to, right? It began with slaying metaphors, that gifted an initial rush like blood orange splatter in the opening frames of a thriller. They were in birth removed from...