Hello

      Birthday after Dorothea Tanning I can hardly believe you are real, come in the night with a present; here, at my door, in a snow-dappled coat, your hair illumined, your eyes small violets. I have doors beyond doors, canvasses propped against every...

      Sundays at Grandma’s Gran’s best friend Susan came every, single Sunday. Whippet thin, I often thought she’d disappear into the vacuum of her own cheekbones, she sucked so hard on those fags. Each week we sat through the drag of Sunday Mass, the...

      Mother’s Day Wrapped in her silks the blue and the dim and the dark, mists of scent, eyes closed against the half-light. Together we walk squares and shades, beneath spires like washed bone. We walk together faded streets hand in hand, we mime....

      Melyn (Yellow) I still thank you for making the daffodils grow outside my mother’s house every spring scared she’ll forget you   without reminders painted yellow spilling onto the block paved driveway the yellow trails into the house sits in a...

      Mud I’m a little girl wearing a floral dress and I jump straight into the muddy puddle I see before me. I am not even wearing wellington boots. I am unprepared for the dirt but I am sick of being ready for things. I want to talk my way out of the...

      Lighting Candles Odessa’s cemetery is a forest of granite, each grave with etched portraits. A football star rests by a famous burglar. We’re led to a few drab stones carved in Hebrew, rescued from the Jewish cemetery that was bulldozed for a...

      Beautiful Nubia sings And I remember my father dancing, A 2 step shuffle, Hips swinging, Palms face down, Elbow to waist, Lopsided smile. Seven mountains, Seven streams, And I remember my mother smirking, Face slightly raised, Back resting lightly...

      Maternal Audiology       Jen Feroze lives by the sea in Essex. Her work is featured or forthcoming in The Madrigal, Ekphrastic Review, Chestnut Review and Atrium, among others. Her first collection, The Colour of Hope, was published...

      pulling leicester from a plastic tube in a southbank market the marketwoman with tie dye hair flogs musty paper maps. spreads your hometown before us, slightly crinkled. in the crowsfoot creases your fingertips tease the contours, unfurl the...

      Hardly This little what called big These squeaks that think they are rules The drips that imagine themselves storming These less than nothing headlines or empty spotlights This barely hardly that struts so special Are what I call a pile of...

      Woman 2.0 Woman 1.0 had bagged half the market but further growth eluded us. Aesthetic upgrades! barked the CEO. We hired a consultant. The fur trim lacks thought, he hissed at the kick-off meeting. It needs moving HERE. THIS area screams for...

      Afterthought She knits something pink with curved needles, pauses only to check and recheck the lines of code that define the pattern she nibbles with her fingers. She casts off the raised levels of FHA, her daughter’s ovulation, the tantalising...

      From the Blue Life won’t be contained by how far the horizon, we don’t compose the song of each other but revel in the days of making. Love carries the seeds of its own tragedy and you can’t come through it unscathed, but endure the days of...

      Afoot Only, when your face slams into solid glass, somewhere outside Dorking – a squared-off edge unmentioned in map or guide – do you realise what’s going on, presence noted by a watchful deer, wary at the edge of woods, the skulk of abandoned...

      Valentine’s Day, 2016 The red-eye was delayed three times.  On the third I told them my father had died and I had to get home. I was given yesterday’s paper. My mobile rang: a woman wanted to change her contract. I told her my father had died. She...

      Driven I named him Driven after what he had done. Thinking of all the places we would go together under the canopies of the trees, the watery suns the skin of his knuckles popped out against the steering wheel one hand at two o’clock, the other...