Hello

      At the State Fair I wander.  Caloric food stops me. Sometimes there’s good music. This year a man in a black shirt plays a country guitar in front of a shining ferris wheel. He sings about love, it’s endless, which I guess makes it real.  Even the...

      Signs My dad when driving liked to read out road signs, shop signs or the shouty, foot-high letters on advertising boards. ASHBOCKING. THREE MILES. GOLF SALE. THE BEST A MAN CAN GET. Recently I’ve started doing this myself. My children find it...

      Found At the end of a sunny parquet corridor: the shock of mud dumped on the pristine, polished floor. Closer in, vision adjusts; the lump seems like a salt-rasp sob that clots the building’s throat. Dread-dense as a sea mine, heavy as a bell cut...

      Grace Trailing the outer path of Regent’s Park like a half-lit ghost grieving the foetus I’ve shed I crawl under the skirts of a pink rhododendron. I enter a womb of writhing branches, humming blooms, pink filtering light. A bee homes in on my...

      The Bus Pulls Up The bus pulls up at the curb beside the half-smoked cigarettes, a single rain-soaked woolen glove, and two face masks, one with peacocks, the other with Pikachu.     Andrew Shields lives in Basel, Switzerland. His...

      Skate Music Everything went wintry. You skated out hunched and tentative – your fading skill recognising limits. Each scrape of fate came smaller, and we watched you skirl until you were out of reach of sight or ear, free and final as a...

      Please accept our apologies as we stand with a basket of light, brighter than its weight in gold. Cherry-picked too. The old lady pledged that it could withstand quite the storm. Perhaps she was right, but the painted sign says in bold: Sadly, The...

      Lies From my window I watch leaves flutter. Seagulls stamping their feet, I play with my loneliness. I write stories, I tell lies like: “My heart leaps at the thought of love.”     Mariam Saidan is Iranian/British and has worked in the...

      Mushroom Picker Mushrooms grow well in chicken manure, but there’s a rumour the farm is experimenting with faeces from the local zoo. We traipse into the shed: a corrugated half-cylinder. I wrangle a ladder that’s taller than me, stuff blue...

      Off colour 1946: a green rabbit and a grey giraffe, crafted by her uncle in hospital in Palestine, where making leather toys was therapy. Good solid toys, and wipeable, sturdy in a toddler’s hand. She wobbled round clutching the giraffe by its...

      Flashback One afternoon (in your next reincarnation) you’ll remember all this and laugh.     Zoe Broome is a Yorkshire poet whose first collection, Back To Yesterday was published by Three Drops Press. When not writing, Broome can be...

      Boy Goes Swimming Boy dives so deep his parents can’t see him, holds his breath pulling rucksacks of air into his lungs. Under the water, his belly scraping the bottom of the pool, Boy opens his eyes and just before the chlorine-sting he sees...

      The generosity of the dead cannot be reckoned in coin or note is peculiar to the moment is subject to whim for the dead are not beyond fancy varies with the season (you might think it greatest at Samhain Dia de Muertos All Hallows’ Eve no: then...

      The Kiso Road For WSW I Kiso: clear as a bell among the mountains. Write me, the river says. Witness the road beside me. II The clouds are still tonight. The sky is smoke-blackened but the fires are cold. Time claims the haiku. The children grow...

      M. Dubois’ Dreams Day is a blown clock, its last wisps ceding to horizon. Heron’s doppelgänger floats belly up on the lake; night, laid like a thousand year egg, breaks over her. The stir of wings whispers a prayer for earthly things; the quench...

      Malt I was a sickly child and for my health Ma fed me Malt from a big brown jar. Glass, big bellied with a silvery lid that we used afterwards to hold a candle to light the cellar. Malt was thick. More gloopy than syrup or treacle and folded back...