On Stage in a home-made model theatre, c.1967 Glued to your block, in paint and ink you wait for Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life to stop. Smell of hardboard and hot bakelite. The lino curtain’s ready to go up. At which, the straightened coat hanger is shoved and on you...

Nothing bad can happen on a plane.
Engine fires, earache, hijackers; but no new grief.

Winged     Kirsty Fox is a writer and artist specialising in ecopoetics. She writes lyric essays and poetry, and has had work published by Apricot Press, Arachne Press, and Streetcake Magazine. She has a Masters in Creative Writing and is currently studying...

Sometimes I’d swear that
the ancient box fan I’ve hauled
     around with me for
     years is a receiver for
     the conversations of ghosts

Dead in a chest,
 are folded matinee jackets, bonnets, bootees and mitts.

Tissue sighs like the sea at Lowestoft,
   always Third week in August

We clipped a window through the currant, sat on folding chairs with keep-cups,
wrapped in blankets as we yelled through the prescribed two-metre gap.
Then took to mending – darning socks and patching favourite denims

Illness had left me
brittle as frost, icicle-thin
swaddled in borrowed warmth

on marble tiles bird like
I am a pin measuring drops in the toilet bowl

Doors

My parents’ house became a place of closed white doors,

where sound hung spare and echoes found no junk 

or clutter to rest themselves upon.