Hello

      Heels for Libby I don’t wear them or have any but you gave me a pair of seven-inch goth platform heels. They made me six-foot-eight. I was twenty, or maybe nineteen, sixteen years ago dancing in the bar at the end of the Curry Mile. Don’t put your...

      Mom, We’re Not the Same Anymore: Our Equations Have Changed! Nothing changed much, mom, but everything did. They say change is a constant, but this constant became a coefficient always racing to catch me (before me). Had it been π, I would have...

      Scott Elder’s work has been widely published and placed or commended in numerous competitions in the UK and Ireland. His second collection, Maria was published by Erbacce Press in 2023. A third, My Hotel, is forthcoming by Salmon Poetry in 2026. ...

      Tour of the Excavation Collaged from text in the ‘Ice Age to Iron Age’ gallery at the Great North Museum, Newcastle, UK The enigma is why this civilisation became extinct at the same time as a peak in carbon 14, which is a natural element, but in...

Agony Because of all the sleep, the rooms that show up reddest on heatmaps for recording the use of space in houses tend to be the bedrooms. Orange or orange-yellow, the next most-used – the kitchens. And so on, getting colder – living rooms, green or turquoise – till...

      Animals on Leads We entered the town and the first thing we saw was a woman taking her ferret for a walk. ‘Nice day for it,’ I said significantly. The ferret was going everywhere at once, an absolute possibility engine producing the energy of a...

      AFTER YOU HAVE GONE Morning moves with tempered sound. A heel turns by the green gate. The alley setts rest in purple curves. Some night seems to have been left here. Pots of sweet herbs are placed to fill the yard with subtle scent. Somewhere a...

The Black Pool 14,000 BC Midsummer’s Day On flat plains of low juniper scrub monolithic, massive remnants of ice dwarf the land, draws the herds: mammoth, deer, horse watch calves, fauns, foals while people, wolf, lynx, bear wait in the shade. The ice fails, cracking,...

      Flat Holm Not the boring twin. Not even benign. This is a proper island: rocks, foghorn, lighthouse. Chinkle of footsteps on slate roof fragments – the detritus of war and peacetime paranoia. A glut of leadberries at the defensive ditch: juicy,...

      Jacob Burgess Rollo is a poet and prose writer based in Dorset, his work is featured in From the Lighthouse and Avant Cardigan, a zine he founded with friends. He has an English Literature BA from Durham and is going on to study for a master's in...

      a ghazal for Doggerland —after Doggerland: Lost World in the North Sea, Rijksmuseum van Oudheden (2021) we walk through the exhibition hall lost amongst water-logged bones, a sunk haul lost grave-deep underwater, newly unearthed as North-Sea...

Time Travel Whilst the Kettle Is Boiling It is late at night and the kettle is boiling, a quire of steam fanning out in the white kitchen you are holding me as if I were your girl again you are speaking of how much you missed me. Late it is to be taking the outlines...

      Let me tell you about a house on the street where I live #39 It’s the house at the end. White paint flakes off the front gate, wood rots beneath. The rusted latch doesn’t shut it — when the wind changes it takes the gate with it. Someone forgot a...

      Willow Island Hey cat, you’re doing really well, three fields stalked and only one to go. I’ll wield my stick if cows come trampling the cuckoo flowers and clover. Let’s climb the arch of this willow bridge cracked by the wind so it bows its crown...

      In praise of commercial radio and local taxis After you’ve flung yourself inside with your rain-soaked jacket, broken brolly half-mulched paper carrier bags, your crap clattered all over the backseat and down into the footwells where you know...

      Excerpt from the interspecies internet, author unknown, circa 2036* My sky is a hole from which the bucket drops. Like all heretics, I am put to work processing stones. The task adds weight to our silence. Here in the half-light; a boulder rounds...

      Almost nothing To impress you, I became a seven-year-old son of Sparta. A little hard man, crayon marching down the page. Favourite colour – Grey. Favourite animal – Snake. Favourite food – Bread. Favourite drink – Water. Favourite TV show –...