I see you standing there – starch white lungi draped
7AM freshly shaved – wooden spoon in hand
Commanding your caramelising populace.
Category: family
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.
ONE POEM – Paul Bavister
You slid the nit comb through my hair
then rinsed and laughed about how
you loved hunting them down
ONE POEM – Harriet Sandilands
legs floating, brush of seaweed
bulging water moves us
up and down
the shore seems very far away
FICTION | Rooms: A Love Letter – Annemarie McCarthy
Inside the atoms of the cavity block extension live the remnants of a thousand John Players.
DIGITAL ART – IJWBAA
Family is my way of honouring the Filipino spirit, where the bond of unity, the guidance of elders, and the hope carried by the younger generation come together to form a love that is simple, yet profound—one that transcends individuality and connects us all.
Wood for The Trees — Joanna Garbutt
There is something in her hands. Something in a large Pyrex dish. It is hot, very hot. She nearly drops it on the floor but instead the kitchen work top catches it. The dish itself doesn’t smash. It isn’t a big enough drop for that. She looks down at it, trying to work out what it is.
The Season of Dying Birds — Harriet Sandilands
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.
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?
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…
The Other Half-Orphan – Thomas Stewart
I was not the first. I knew that when it happened. But you feel like the only one it’s happening to. Because it’s happening to you, and there’s only one you. My father died when I was 23. He was diagnosed with oesophageal cancer in July and died in February the next year. For the…
On Visiting My Elderly Parents After Lockdown — Mark Czanik
A sprinkling of much needed rain has fallen overnight, and some of the roses have left broken mosaics of red and yellow petals on Dad’s newly cut lawn. Ideal conditions.
Porridge 