Black Carr im I shall not want… Greensleeves shunted through an ice cream truck in the boroughs, & leaf-gagged noise in this snug gorge….under the corporated ruins of Leeds & Bradford, the mayflower is stage-managed here: spectacular fists of white foliage opening….opening over the clay pits. I’ve sat at this crossroads, smug, where the horse shit hardens under the cow parsley, & finally once the quad bikers sod off & leave me in peace, you see that for whatever reason some bloke is stood in the thorn bushes....snaps polaroids— the click & whirr on his pretentious antique annoys me. & then there is the angelus of the ice cream man, the tinny resonance reaches me...hail mary, full of grace… & soon enough, a polaroid is spat out from the ejection slot: the pretentious bloke wags it about, and what forms out from under his fingernails is a catherine wheel of thunderflies sprocketed through the clean air: so ends the account of celluloid....

      Red-tailed black cockatoo (Ngoolyark) Kaarak, kaarak The red-tailed black cockatoos call from bleeding limbs of the blooming Marri. Chet, chet, chet, chet They peck the honkey nuts. Hard fruit falls to the boort and bilara of the djarlma floor. Krar-raak, krar-raak Ngoolyark cries, pierces the mango and pink skies with the sound of home – summons us still overseas. Waa waa, waa waa they are south west: breast of streams milked to mother duct – Goorbiliyup – a river in Bibbulmun country. Karee, karee Can you sing us back in time? To when red-tailed black cockatoos called from bleeding limbs of the blooming Marri. Noongar (also spelt Noongah, Nyungar, Nyoongar, Nyoongah, Nyungah, Nyugah) are the indigenous people of the south west of Australia. In Noongar language, the south west is Bibbulmun country meaning ‘place of plenty’. From an aerial perspective the region looks like a breast and the syllable “bib” means breast – a symbol of nourishment named for the...

      The Drowning We slept that summer in the small house Bedded in a meadow of foxgloves and thistles, Just a cry from the ocean -- Everyone knew about the boy Dragged from the water onto the beach, His lungs pumped with kelp and fry -- You’d span the field to the shore And enter the water like a flecked stone Skimming the surface before a plunge. The ocean loaded with new frequency, You crackled through the surf, Unwound like a cord lashing in the currents You welcomed the dark pitch of the wave, Jinking through the avalanche of water Until you’re rolled and crushed To the ocean floor, and a moment of stillness As under a slide of snow after the fall, Before you break elated into blue.     Julian Aiken’s poetry is rooted in family and landscape, and much of his work has engaged with the emotional resonance of place. Originally from the UK, he has lived and worked in Belgium, Spain, and the USA. He occasionally tweets...

    Extended Magic Cat Metaphor Once you disassemble it it’s all fucked up. Turns out just despair held it together. Blinky the magic cat laid sweets — paper-wrapped, coloured or  plain, familiar or unknown like eggs for years, then one day Blinky broke: Victorian earthenware. Child lurched, or Blinky’s spirit moved. One shudder, one ectoplasmic ripple and nothing ever went back. Ten years from break to mend. Even glue only works where the pieces can touch each other. After all this business three weeks lying in bed I got up one day and moved the bed across the room, ghost that I am —just like that— who can barely move myself. Now it’s just the phantom pains. The opposite of that Japanese gold repair thing: kintsugi. Who has gold anyway? I have to live with it, darling. So Blinky in the kitchen surveys me in my solitude, light streaming through his cracks.       Katy Evans-Bush is a poet, blogger and essayist. Her latest book is Forgive the Language (Penned...

      Panning His gardening cleats punctured her left knee when she stumbled at his feet in a sack race. There was talk of tetanus. In the holidays she pretended to be his nurse. She made sandwiches when he’d just eaten. In case he had forgotten his pills, she hid two in the filling. Again, she would ask to see the butterflies mounted and labelled in a tallboy of shallow glass drawers— bright as jelly. The puncture healed to a dimple that flattened when she used to hitch up her uniform, place her knee on the counterpane and in unison with another nurse hook a wing and press down through her thigh to haul the patient up the bed and flattened when she used to kneel between a woman’s parted legs one hand poised one feeling for the cord for the pulsing while watching for shoulders to rotate as she waited for the next contraction. Now the dimple is less visible. When she is sleepless the butterflies return— iridescent bodies coded and speared through each squeezed thorax....