In the courtyard, at the entrance to the bookshop, an egg smashed on the cobbled ground – albumen, yolk and the bald outline and bulging eye of an almost-bird.
Category: animals
TWO POEMS – John Kefala Kerr
I grab the deck rail,
expecting a disturbance
—a pitching and yawing—
but the ferry glides smoothly
over the sea’s fleecy crimp,
like a brush through kid fibre.
ONE POEM – Aidan Dolbashian
That cow can’t walk. She’s all lame. I won’t touch her hooves.
Frickin’ Lion – Ann Kathryn Kelly
Olive the (lion) dog. Image by Andrea Farrow, via Instagram The mane streams behind the dog as it tears across weathered gray floorboards. “Frickin’ lion.” The seven-second Instagram reel auto-loops on my Thursday lunch hour and I become obsessed with this dog that I later find out belongs to my colleague Jessica’s sister, Andrea. I…
Dances with Rabbits – Walker Thomas
I stood under the alligator juniper that shaded my tent in the oak woods. Effie squatted between my feet. In The Maltese Falcon, Sam Spade called his receptionist Effie. But the Effie at my feet was no lady. I called her F. E. Cottontail in my journals. Cottontails are coprophagous – literally, Fecal Eating. That…
Disposable – Walker Thomas
“You can call me Mr. S,” my ninth-grade biology teacher told the class on our first day, “for the sssss a snake makes.” Eyes sunken behind wirerimmed glasses, he had a wide mouth with no lips that I recall, and long, stubble-blue cheeks like leather stretched tight to the bone. While he lectured, a red…
Horsing Around: Performative Media and Yuan Art – Chris Rouse
Chris Rouse is Porridge‘s Non-Fiction Editor. He is a PhD candidate at the University of Birmingham, researching representations of East Asia in medieval European maps and travel literature. He has a keen interest in interdisciplinarity, global history and the history of ideas and ideologies. In his spare time he can often be found in old churches making bad…
TWO POEMS – Ricky Garni
Image: ‘St James’ (acrylic on canvas) by the artist Pigcasso, who was saved from the slaughterhouse as a piglet and has taken up painting to international acclaim. Ricky Garni grew up in Florida and Maine, was educated at Exeter and Duke, and has lived off and on in the Triangle since 1977. Over the years he…
TWO POEMS – Damon Moore
Image: Henri Matisse – Horse, Rider and Clown (Le cheval, l’écuyère et le clown) from Jazz (1947) Damon Moore runs an arts project in Frome, Somerset. He has a particular interest in the narrative style but his short-form poetry has found a home in RAUM, The Literateur, Eyot and Forage amongst others. He is travelling somewhere in Europe…
What is a Wolf? A text on the relationship between writing and animals – Fergus Doyle
Fergus Doyle is currently studying a masters in Literature and Modernity at the University of Edinburgh. He is interested in subjects prefixed by ‘post’, such as postmodernism, post-humanism and post-truth. What is a Wolf? A text on the relationship between writing and animals It is on long winter nights such as these, when the…
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