I see the cat before the cat sees me.
White with black splotches, a longhair.
Leaving the law behind it,
stealing easily as light fails
Author: Porridge Magazine
ONE POEM – Andrew Button
Everybody called her ‘a character’,
a regular in the library
in her shabby Barbour jacket
and crumpled hat perched
on hair dishevelled as a bird’s nest.
ONE POEM – Paul Brucker
When I bent down to give her a kiss,
she quacked
Then exploded with loud report
into hundreds of pieces.
Hoop — Harriet Sandilands
There is an unspoken rule in a therapy group that you are not going to go out for a beer afterwards. It’s the same way that no-one actually tells you that you shouldn’t have sex with someone you just met on the third day of a meditation retreat, but you still know it isn’t a very good idea.
Porridge Books of the Year 2022
Discover the books that the Porridge team enjoyed reading this year.
After Midnight: Nightclub Photographs from the ‘50s and ‘60s – David Ford
In boxes of old photographs, you sometimes come across nightclub pictures from the 1950s and 1960s. These images sit at the boundary between the public and private, the posed portrait and the casual snapshot. They were taken by ‘snappers’ who worked in the nightclubs, taking pictures of couples and groups of adults enjoying themselves which…
FLASH FICTION — Hibah Shabkhez
They do not know that the sun terrifies me.
A Love Letter To Twitter – Danny Bate
At time of writing, the infamous bird app, Twitter, is going through a rough patch. For those of you who are enviably unaware, the platform recently gained a new owner, whose grand designs for his acquisition are still being revealed to everyone, apparently even to the man himself. The site currently has an ‘end of…
Anti-Concretism and Architectural Atheism: In Defence of Brutalism – Tom Jones
The pro- and anti-Brutalist building camps can be defined in two words apiece. There are those who believe such buildings are ‘concrete poetry’, and there are those who believe that each one is a ‘concrete monstrosity’. Like the battlefields of WW1, there is nothing living in between. Brutalism’s tenure at the forefront of architecture was…
Cures For The Common Cold — Sarah de Souza
Thinking about this, they grow wide-eyed and speak so fast that the windows become flecked with child spittle. How can they have made themselves so ridiculous by dreaming?
COMFORT FOODS // Mediterranean Diet — Natalie D.C.
come inside! we’ve got so much to show you! over there you’ll find a mosaic-laden platter of figs, dates, & grapes, little green & purple appetizers like bougainvillea petals against a vine-entangled fence.
Kaleidoscope — Jenna Clake
The horoscope said: You are a fish. You will come to understand this. She found this funny because it seemed like something more suitable for a fortune cookie, and because she had once had a boyfriend who, during arguments, told her that she kissed like a koi carp.
Porridge 