Whilst many people view the trade in enslaved people as something which took place along the so-called ‘Middle Passage’ between Africa and the Americas, between the 1650s and 1780s many hundreds of enslaved people were brought to London. Most were African although a significant minority were South Asian. What’s even less well-known is that while in the capital some attempted to and were successful in escaping. The average age of the runaways was 16. One of the ways we are aware of the existence of these enslaved Londoners is through many hundreds of short advertisements placed in newspapers by masters and enslavers who described and offered rewards for the capture and return of enslaved people who had escaped. Often called ‘runaway slave’ advertisements, they are in many cases the only surviving record we have of a particular enslaved person, but even then they may tell us very little and all through the eyes of those who enslaved and pursued them. For more than a year Ink Sweat...

      Family Tree Health Plan Blossomy buds circulate, fervid. Scarlet inertia steams past panacea from saps as unction. Closure was mental on a cliff's slope. Twig held to lost hope. Defensive surgery of bark heeds smoky premonition. Forced admission's choke delays triage fatally.     Ira Lightman has been publishing chapbooks for 20 years. His books include Trancelated , Duetcetera , Mustard Tart as Lemon and I, Love Poetry. He makes public art with communities and text, around the UK. He is a regular contributor to BBC Radio 3′s The Verb.

      Street-preacher She looks at me with that fearsome oil-sheen in her eyes, the weighty conviction of milk-heavy gaze and breasts, telling me (the spittle-flecked words like Words made flesh) of her Father, how he is unseen, felt unstirring in the Godless air. She is seized with her preaching like a fist about the neck, the knocks and blows of the world, wonderfully inflated with FATHER. I wish to tell her of my own faith, of my own father who, like hers, is a lack, a hole, an unfleshed thing, something I must believe in, remember. But there is a Rule — we do not talk to street-preaching loon-women, dear. We do not look in their shockingly flammable eyes, their eyes like cheap synthetic cloth that’s ripe for burning.     Zelda Cahill-Patten is a twenty-year-old university student from London. She is studying English Literature and has recently been awarded the Lord Alfred Douglas Memorial Prize for her sonnet...

      Dream State Covers tight as clingfilm. Tell them you fell headfirst, steadied yourself, sucked out what was left in your throat, coughed that creamy polyethylene onto the pillow. Eyeballs infused with miniature blue irises plunge into the well. The drop is colossal, blinking, brick by brick. I haul my right foot to a cold corner. Thousands of bed mites riot, gnaw at toenails, mouths like shoplifters’ swelled pockets, until I enter the last passage to a sandy beach, where sunrise is a palette of spiteful jellyfish, grains of sand gyrating on blades of grass, dew overly clingy on the spine of a leaf. Breath-draughts howl translations of every human sin. From the ceiling light, spiders swing their busy silk limbs over rising sea levels to the green carpeted corner; punishment to watch for its ingenuity. It won’t be long until olfactory organs locate victims.  On architraves, baby-eggs crack open, lock eight infant eyes as webs on the Bluebottle fly’s flat-winged...

      Widows Walk Evenings she puts on her second-best hat skewered with a tortoise shell pin, buttons up her heart in a mauve mohair coat sallies forth to pick a bone with the moon. On the red-leaded step she scans the stars imagines them white sparks from his hammer. Her heart is fierce: keen as his chisel, weighs like a bag of four inch nails. In her pocket she carries a fistful of humbugs matches, twenty Players Weights. She recalls the black kettle on stand-by on the stove hears the voice of the clock in the hall. On her tongue, a retort fit to slice a man open. In her head, a dozen what ifs.     Abigail Elizabeth Ottley writes poetry and short fiction from her home in Penzance. She has been published in a wide range of journals and anthologies, and is currently working on her first novel. Find her on Facebook and Twitter @AbilgailLaLoca.