Crow drop

Crow drop

A radio show I sometimes tune into has a long-running feature where listeners write in about objects that have fallen on them from out of the sky – a slice of white bread, an unopened Mars Bar, jar lids and bottle caps, once (or did I imagine it?) a lady’s watch....
A two poem blog

A two poem blog

Here is one of my favourite poems from the current issue (No. 90), of the magazine. CATFORD CYCLING CLUB RACE THROUGH ASHDOWN FOREST The normal fawn-coloured morning is scored through        with a fast-moving artery of red the jerseys of young bearded men on a...
1 Poultry

1 Poultry

Shoot up in the fast lift, poke the faux gras with toothpick heels. Late lunch at the Coq d’Argent – accept a drink, plan your exit. After two pm the old religion can be smelt – some urban plague myth – even here, halfway to the holding stacks of City-bound planes....
Decompression by William Stephenson

Decompression by William Stephenson

Decompression The induction program’s willow pattern eyes and terracotta lips matched those of the woman I married in my first incarnation. She whispered, Just you and me darling me darling – a glitch, surely, A stutter in the software – so make yourself yourself. She...
HOW TO BAKE A GINGERBREAD GIRL   BY EMMA SIMON

HOW TO BAKE A GINGERBREAD GIRL BY EMMA SIMON

HOW TO BAKE A GINGERBREAD GIRL   by Emma Simon Paint blue icing on her fingertips, fingers that could snap with cold, dipped into fridges and glass chillers placing cockleshell cakes in pretty rows. Tie back her hair, dress her in sexless tabards, dab with jam. Press...
Home by Neetha Kunaratnam

Home by Neetha Kunaratnam

HOME by Neetha Kunaratnam June 23, 2016   I Go Home. We voted leave… Her indignant jaw trembled as she seethed, and the deadpan response I might have mustered froze on my lips, as she brandished a crumpled flyer and unleashed its litany of stats. I’m going I said and...
TO DAVID FOSTER WALLACE  by Ben Wilkinson

TO DAVID FOSTER WALLACE by Ben Wilkinson

[See end of post for image credit] To David Foster Wallace   by Ben Wilkinson Since I was old enough to know myself I’ve been trying to figure it out – the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing, like half the time I’d chuck it all in; throw...
Dragged Under  by Ian Humphreys

Dragged Under by Ian Humphreys

DRAGGED UNDER   by Ian Humphreys So many wet shaves in a lifetime. How many thousands and thousands?  So many ………….rituals at dawn’s bleached-bone altar, a falter of sharpened steel on skin. So much water               feel it slide...
A WITNESS   by Amy Carrington

A WITNESS by Amy Carrington

A WITNESS   by Amy Carrington I’ve been watching the letterbox, I’ve been watching her at the letterbox. Her arm is stuck in the rectangle, but not stuck getting out she can’t seem to get it any farther in. A gloss-eyed pot fox peers through the...
FIGHT SONG  by Paula Bohince

FIGHT SONG by Paula Bohince

FIGHT SONG  by Paula Bohince August 2014 A crisis on a monitor, and there’s this football field, white chalk formalizing grass, a spongy black track where I walk off my no-baby weight. A deadline has passed, so a journalist will leave this world violently as I go...
Tristia   by Jacqueline Saphra

Tristia by Jacqueline Saphra

Tristia   by Jacqueline Saphra My friend, we’ve been anchored here for years arguing the toss: semi-colon versus the long dash, our views on Ovid’s Tristia though I haven’t read it, nor have you – and as the room rocks gently underneath us you pour for me a rare...
The Booze by Charlie Bird

The Booze by Charlie Bird

THE BOOZE   by now, the booze is you, you are the booze, mid-rant you stand up too fast, keel over, turn your ankle and I’m supposed to help you up. Oh! the heat and stench of you cursing the world, cursing me, you burst into tears, blurt, ‘I’m...