When I read my poem about stretch marks

you said it was a funny thing
to write about. I felt a flare,
low down, an orange hazed ember
you’d have to blow into life.

. . . On the edge
of sleep it comes snuffling
through leaf litter and we forget
bed; the cold prickling
our bones.

Monks spend days shaping mandalas
with coloured sand in intricate lines
as an offering, then blow them away.

Wait, I’m talking.
It’s my turn.
Be patient.
It takes me a while.
I have to work it out.

Your focused eyes on a box of plantain.
Deep concentration making them filled
more brown than white.
A different mouth asks if they sell iru.

-Rhian Parker

My cockatiel, Pippin, has learned to listen
for that particular resigned sigh of the bus
as it passes the living room window
and shrieks whenever he hears it.

-Madailín Burnhope

you wanna know if it screams like a man or a girl?
i want to rip a throat out
teeth bared
growling
guttural
it builds in the back of my throat
i scream like an animal
sick of losing siblings

-mithago

the feminine urge to bleed
all over the bedsheets, to refuse
to grow his babies, to abandon your
responsibilities, to forget to buy his toothpaste,
to move everything on his desk an inch to the left,

and waves jumped like giddy children
onto the stones.
Jellyfish loomed, a cove of beached moons.
You stood in your room for hours
a rock pool
waiting for the sea to hold you

Daddy’s girl, always. Tea done, you fetch Glen’s lead and we climb the hill to the spread of The Links. We talk. It’s as if we have met in a previous life, the click – you, a pipe smoking fan of Bertrand Russell, always think, think, and think the eternal puzzles of existence. Our walks are adventures in language, in invention, a form of The Great Egg Race without eggs.

Your smile
Woke something –
Up.
If you knew,