Moor It seeped down from the moor smoke first air laced with flakes of ash dancing then settling on roofs, shoulders, eyelashes we dipped our feet in buckets then travelled—bleach clean— along those footpaths branded into land like stitches...

      An interview with a Cigarette How do you cope? Sometimes, I watch old movies where I am a symbol of rebellion and bike-sheds, of good times had, or a moment of pensive freedom, or a last request. Or I recall when you would call me Gauloises or...

      Cindy Botha lives in New Zealand where she began writing after 6 decades of doing other things. She is published in New Zealand, the UK and USA.      Olga Dermott has published two pamphlets: apple, fallen (Against the Grain Press) and A...

      Anthropophony I’m tuning in to territories like we’d tune in to stations on the radiogram. The shortwave chiff-chaff with the dial stuck, the maudlin willow warbler, the blackcap trying and failing to be a nightingale. And this is work. In the...

      The Interior We gather around the machine, looking down at the fallen trunk, with little hope of being able to put it all back together. The grandfather had the tools, and the skills, but he bequeathed none to us. The sand under our feet is orange...

      A Mawkish Ode to Murder She was night at its blackest heart It’d be stupid not to, right? It began with slaying metaphors, that gifted an initial rush like blood orange splatter in the opening frames of a thriller. They were in birth removed from...

      Gold A shower of gold? Old Zeus? That’s the village gossip except I saw her legs wide to the sun. Well, we’ve all been there, haven’t we, girls? And if a passing goatherd happened to linger in a jangle of leaping bells what do you expect? It was...

      Hello, I’ve crafted myself a god from the kind of modelling clay you fire in your kitchen oven. I can lift my god with my hands, carry god around. Look, my god has fourteen heads, each one mounted on its own elegant neck — fourteen necks rising...

      I saw I saw American night in broad daylight I saw houses worth millions of dollars and houses without windows on the outskirts Detroit I saw my ancestors’ American dream several Mexicans cleaning in a hotel where I danced YMCA at a wedding...