Hello

      Airplane Mode   Nothing bad can happen on a plane. Engine fires, earache, hijackers; but no new grief. The heart is contained. Cupped in the silence, sorrow makes truce with the green lands below. In the regulate hum of the aircon, the news...

Winged     Kirsty Fox is a writer and artist specialising in ecopoetics. She writes lyric essays and poetry, and has had work published by Apricot Press, Arachne Press, and Streetcake Magazine. She has a Masters in Creative Writing and is currently studying...

      The Conversations of Ghosts Sometimes I’d swear that the ancient box fan I’ve hauled around with me for years is a receiver for the conversations of ghosts not unlike the way hats I’ve bought at vintage shops still hold trace elements of the...

All House Holds Dead in a chest, are folded matinee jackets, bonnets, bootees and mitts. Tissue sighs like the sea at Lowestoft, always Third week in August Once stuffed with baby breaths, the back bedroom holds only a tallboy with stashed school reports, ties without...

  Spindles   We clipped a window through the currant, sat on folding chairs with keep-cups, wrapped in blankets as we yelled through the prescribed two-metre gap. Then took to mending – darning socks and patching favourite denims, exchanging threads in...

  Finland, December 2015 Illness had left me brittle as frost, icicle-thin swaddled in borrowed warmth that couldn't keep out the wind's chill, prying fingers, shivering in at every edge. The lake, frozen, feet-thick, immense, swathed in drifts of baby powder. My...

  Eating figs on the bathroom floor         on marble tiles bird like I am a pin measuring drops in the toilet bowl disembogued into this locked space with depressions of earth staring at me the bathroom keeps the history of my enclosures fake windows chewing up...

  Doors My parents’ house became a place of closed white doors, where sound hung spare and echoes found no junk or clutter to rest themselves upon. You move quietly, in a house like that, learn side-feet, stop-breath, corner-pause, learn to turn reverberating...

      Homecoming Winter dusk soughs in, dark clouds threaten, tangle her wool. She sets down his heavy gansy, the jumper finished at last. A memory, that memory, sharp as now, catches her. Him so handsome on the shore that night, her so forgetful - that...

      Black on Black Black is the colour inside      black light   on blackened brick and slats       coaldust  and creosote     those sightless eyes     black as his  coalman’s  vest  and   grimy    coalbent back deep in a shed where he stacks cold...

      Singing Lessons for Beginners Necessity, that scold’s bridle, held her humble and mean, So that she no longer spoke, just looked - Her world reduced to a search for special offers, Fluorescent beacons that steered her far from Shelves profligate...

      Astral Projection Mrs Norris had thought ascension would be whirligig rides in bright violet rays, as the training books all implied. She worked hard on her technique diligently preparing an inner world, a kaleidoscopic version of her garden, neat...

      All that unpicking at the mercy of wind The tide unpleats from her godet, zig-zags in running stitch round the base of the côtil. Her quick fingers unravel raw edges, unpin seed potatoes, rip daffodil seams. She pulls hems from fence posts, tacks...

                                  Matthew Caley's latest and seventh collection is To Abandon Wizardry [Bloodaxe, 2023]. He's made a Poem-Film with film-maker Jesse Adlam for Unicorn...

  Jenny Robb has been writing poetry since retiring from a social work and NHS career in mental health and children’s services. She’s been published widely in magazines and anthologies. Her second collection is Hear the World Explode, Yaffle Press 2024.  X:...

      Ballad of the Cobbler’s Shoes Rural Action Derbyshire charity reports children are doing P.E. in wellingtons. You try doing star-jumps, steps, or squats, in knee-high wellies. One at first, then in twos and threes as term ran on, turn-up for P.E....