My Mother’s Quilt – Clare Reddaway

This is my mother’s quilt, but many other women have had a hand in it. It was started by my mother in the 1950s, and she made it for most of my life, in admittedly rather a desultory fashion. I remember her sitting on a freezing, pebbly beach in Suffolk, with the grey North Sea…

TWO POEMS – Janet McCann

Something Lives Something lives in the crawl spaceAbove my room.  A bird? Maybe a rat?Sometimes it seems to be shaking out its feathers.But then there’s a scrabbling overheadAnd the squares of insulation quiver. I’m not afraid of you, I tell the shaking panels.We all have the right to be.And I will not pursue you with…

Tea for a Pandemic – Terry Kirts

1. My grandmother was a kitchen singer, an apron wearer who trilled the rs and drew out the tra-la-las in all the old songs while she kneaded bread dough or blanched tomatoes. Some days growing up, I spent more time in her windswept farmhouse outside of town than I did in my own home, my…

ONE POEM – Constance von Igel

Brazil has 27 administrative regions, and we found 
The strongest evidence of your ancestry, 
In the following 10 regions. 

ONE POEM – Sofia Lyall

I find the roots of an oak (dead, upturned, twisted)
and am left more disoriented than before.