Our traveling was so fluid it’s like we lived nowhere in particular.
Category: Contemporary Culture
COMFORT FOODS // The Taste of Forgiveness – Sarah Islam
We are three siblings, scattered across continents, each of us carrying the taste of a different kitchen.
COMFORT FOODS // Gulyás – Liam Skillen
I look at a photo of my Hungarian grandfather and his compatriots in Carr Bank Park, posing by the flowerbeds on Woodhouse Road, and know it is possible to belong to more than a single place.
Flash Fiction | Salvage — Ian C Smith
Faces are remembered, words spoken; that brief encounter at the fair, the smell of old sunlight, a slow night train.
COMFORT FOODS // Ends and Pieces – Lisa Ochoa
You’ve probably never noticed them. Their red and white box usually sits well below their thick-cut, smoked, and maple-flavored cousins in their clear ‘look at me!’ packaging. Or, sometimes, Ends and Pieces aren’t displayed at all, and you have to ask the butcher for them. Because mind you, they are the ends and pieces, the leftovers, the scraps. Who would want them?
My mom, that’s who.
Book Review: The Woman Dies by Aoko Matsuda, translated by Polly Barton – Arbnora Selmani
Reuniting with translator Polly Barton, Matsuda revisits similar themes in this new collection; across fifty-two stories, she tackles the pervasive misogyny faced by women in contemporary Japan and beyond.
ONE POEM – Susan G. Byron
It’s these questions I have. (An astral whodunnit: a whydreamit).
ONE POEM – Atma Frans
They’re small animals
wriggling to get out
Just let us touch the crust, they say
feel it crackle
ONE POEM – Satya Bosman
I know it’s over when I picture the train carriage
it’s an old-fashioned carriage with burgundy velvet seats
a little room in my memory.
ONE POEM – Emily Tee
and there, by the weekend-quiet school, at the edge of the pavement, was the mouse
lying on its side, a small trickle of blood / from its open mouth
ONE POEM – Susan Shea
we can sit next to each other
looking out in the same direction
at our life smudges
together
TWO POEMS – Catherine Redford
The air is suddenly sweet-smoked and humming,
and I’m back in the incense-wreathed
Lanes of 90s Brighton
Porridge 