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      Hawthorn The gangrene smell is gone by the time the berries grow, and I am tempted to cut red branches and arrange them in jam jars throughout the house, too full of sour roasting fruit to remember the warning I heeded in May. I start to wear...

    Back to Normal He unfurled for nine months like paper folded more than eight times over, springing outwards in his eagerness, and this morning parts of him were birthed again.   MRI round three and it’s knockout, brain scans showing water before it...

    We spend a slow morning At this hour, the air is wind unstilled by the April sun. The mynahs are on errands – I hear less song more wing. I am warmed by the habitual honey lemon and beside me the dog is snoring. At this hour, the room is a cup and...

    Bake yourself some unicorns After Rishi Dastidar Start your day with a cheese board; wear lycra to work; decorate your eyelids with glitter made from reclaimed rainbow tears; slay your greetings — wink with both eyes — say goodbye instead of hello; only...

    What is there to say About petals? They precede seeds, And return every year: each happening Contains its own undoing, brings The next one in its wake. The world in a perpetual State of adolescence, everything Not quite this anymore, but not that yet. A...

    Froglet Bisexual began in the tiny black pupil of a frogspawn pearl. It grew inside a jellied eye, shuddering out a tail, feathered gills. Dilating as it observed a dim world, sucking in light like a vacuum. Collapsing in on itself, reforming, nudging...

    The depressed girl makes a smoothie Strawberries. Cut them up into pebble-sized pieces. They’re supposed to go out of date in three days but one of them already has mould growing on it. It reminds me of the sky I see through my bedroom window on a mostly...

    The Cost of Living after Deborah Levy His hair was not silver and not pinned into a bun. I’ve been reading it over and over. Obsession over something harmless must be a good thing. It’s a book, safe, I’ve been told. A woman saying things I like to hear,...

    Homing I My mum used to say that when she died she wanted to come back as a well looked after cat.  Two weeks before, for Christmas, I bought her a cat onesie.  We assumed she would be spending plenty of time on the sofa with our tabbies – enough for the...

      Shadowtime Romney Marsh, Kent, February, 1287 That night a slice of moon rose, mottled red like a scratched wound. The sea was torched, wind-charged. We heard the tide roar twice across the Marsh and knew it was here, the hour of the dead. Hulls...

      from: Seize i. I fear my poor old soul may be a fixer upper. I strive to find out – it’s that forensic streak I have, I suppose – by too often drinking on an empty stomach. There’s a view afoot, I think, that a proper soul needs proper seasoning....

      Home Front For days after the children leave for their homes in the South we discover unexcavated battlefields, nonsensical as Towton. Small formations of infantrymen guard the lower book-case shelves, lone snipers lurk behind the curtains, and...