neither smoking nor dancing
the temporary fence was already claimed
woven with some quick growing weed
and a silver socket
graced the floor
purposeless
I am always kneeling to face you
to meet your smallness
to match your presence
know the world as it happens
but this is, of course, impossible
now I am grown
endlessly distracted
you see,
a young man sits on the kerb
by the open back of a van
to smoke one more
and I remember youth
neither smoking nor dancing
but watching
drink in hand
or Christmas lights,
strung, over the canal
unused in May
empty, it turned out
I thought the bingo hall had gone
but it had only lost its sign
we used to pass it all the time
but our patterns have changed
Anna Brook (they/them) is a poet, writer and lecturer. Their first full-length poetic work, Motherhood: A Ghost Story, is out with Broken Sleep Books. Anna’s practice centres around the complexity of motherhood experience, grief and violence.
The Thing Impossible
Otis Redding pops up on her Spotify as she’s driving home from dropping her daughter at school. So of course she starts thinking about T, the NYC performance artist who was artist-in-residence decades before at a college where she and her husband E—then boyfriend—were newly lecturers. Being an art department Christmas party in the early 2000’s, they were all drunk and loose. Standing near the stereo, bodies close, they’d overheard T overheatedly telling J, an assistant professor, that Otis Redding was far superior to the blatantly appropriating Allman Brothers. She winces now recalling how she’d peeled, “Oh, I love Otis Redding!” How scornfully T had regarded her. His silence is pregnant with subtext. He’d quizzed her on her favorite Otis song. Put her on the spot. She feels again her flush of pleasure at his surprise—because she hadn’t said Dock of the Bay or Stand by Me—even then she’d understood that much. He’d turned to the stereo and put on the song she named. Another test. She feels it still. The rest of the night is lost to her now, but she sees as if through blurry film her own head tilted back, eyes shining back the Christmas tree light, hips stilling to move as the song slow builds, lips parting for Otis’s booming croon. They’re all watching her; she knew then it too, E, J, and even T. Inside the time capsule of her car, she’s awash again in surrender to the thing impossible, at once incredibly powerful and full of tenderness.
Katherine Forbes Riley’s writing was long-listed for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and appears in many peer-reviewed academic and literary venues, including the Wigleaf Top 50 list. She teaches in the Writing and Rhetoric program at Dartmouth College.
What’s left of Christmas
This too must pass, this day of days. The shops will reopen and look sad. There will be marked down Christmas crackers, pigs-in-blankets, festive wrapping paper and cards, though who buys this stuff this early for the year to come no one truly knows. Pavements will be littered with overflowing bins, piles of cardboard, half-dead trees with no needles. In less fortunate streets, those not blessed with bins, black sacks will flap their wings like monstrous crows. People will forget what week it is and put out all their refuse at once: plastic bottles will rattle and blow after midnight and beer cans will be kicked along streets. And people will put out their food bins too late because the day has been changed due to the holiday. Seagulls and rats will break into those bins and offer up prayers to their gods. There will be new graffiti and new broken windows; a few dreams will linger untarnished. In Market Jew Street, a shamble of drunks will be sleeping off the revels of New Year. There might be noise of an un-festive kind: a few tears, a few bruises before bedtime. There might be a street fight, possibly a stabbing. It will probably piss down with rain.
Abigail Ottley writes poetry, memoir and short fiction. Her collection Out of Eden (Yaffle, 2025) offers an insight into the lives of working class women and celebrates their fierce strength and resilience. Find her on Instagram @ abigail_elizabeth_ottley.