Hello

      Neighbourhood News Hi, I’m Bill. I’ve just moved in to that little house on New Street (you know the one, it’s been covered in graffiti for God knows how long). I’ve got six dogs and a dead rabbit which I keep in the fridge as well as lots of...

      Imagining myself as a bitter, old woman   Here I am as old as you said I would grow altogether alone drinking tea curled up with a gossip of stars and the milky thaw of the moon – the thrum of the air still thrums in me as the flowers fold in...

      Afflictions   I swallow the seams of the moon – they have always riddled me, if I lay on a stage of feathers I would still feel the underneath of dark atoms, afflictions you pull from the bridge only when god has given you to the water....

      Shadows night blinds the forest tracks pins itself to pine needles antennae frisk its long coat and small foxes learn their trade each leaf sleeps ponds close their one eye woods are busy in their dark diaries as all the shadows unbuckle slip...

      There is a paradox of the irresistible that wonders what happens when it meets the immovable. * A man tried to sell a shield & a spear his marketing spiel had such a fatal flaw it triggered a Chinese word for contradiction. * There was a fox...

      The Way North After Paul Flora’s Der Weg nach Norden II The way north is a savage smile that zig-zags the whole length of the page of ice. You pause on the lip of its jaw above dumb unspeakable black. Across the void you dream the flickering...

      The Fool I am the man you see on a ladder square centre of a field on your morning commute. The rake in my hands clears a patch in the clouds for a clutch of sunflower seeds. Next time you look up from your paper a pother of songbirds have tatted...

      Demands   now a surreal residue lives on your hair you play with in a corridor checking out light fading smiles a verisimilitude of close hands evenings spent on waiting chairs creaked but that decibel silence torn by a stubborn bird outside...

      Break-out Session “I’ll stay here with the strawberries,” he said. He still supposed such droll remarks displayed his youthful eccentricity. The fruit in question, surplus to the buffet lunch, was resting, moist and fragrant, in a bowl, alongside...

      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...