Hooves leave a hard imprint, a dark wet mark.
Hoof-clop like the noise your tongue makes
When it leaves the roof of your mouth.
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ONE POEM – Siobhan Ward
Its big head, glassy stare
and halting hobble
from random ewe to ewe
made me think of you –
TWO POEMS – DS Maolalai
they sit on the bridge. they cluster
as close as the round bulbs
of road-swollen blackberries,
dusty with travel.
ONE POEM – Olivia Heggarty
Cutting my hair with the meat scissors,
being told off for not using a hairdresser,
explaining that if I don’t change something
often I will do something worse
Radio Music Magic – Paul Sasges
Turn it up, turn it up, little bit higher, radio Turn it up, that’s enough, so you know it’s got soul. ‘Caravan’, Van Morrison, 1970 The transistor radio came out between the vacuum tube in the fifties and the Walkman in the seventies. I spent many hours on our braided area rug prone upon my…
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…
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…
Back Home in Old Kentucky – Bailey Vandiver
Kentucky governor Happy Chandler once said Kentuckians are always either coming home or thinking about coming home. On the day that tornadoes devastated my home state, I was longing to be home. It was December 11, 2021, and I woke up in a New York City hotel room to the news that tornadoes had ripped…
The Trials and Tribulations of Route 17 – Zahira P. Latif
I stood at the bus stop, waiting for the number 17 into Birmingham city centre. I had been waiting for over 20 minutes, and the queue at the stop had now built up to well over 20 people. I can drive, but car ownership had lost its appeal. I was tired of having to cart…
ONE POEM — Diane Fahey
a frieze of lacemakers
intricately at work
beneath the bay’s
array of scintilla –
Right There — Lily Blacksell
‘Your place or mine?’ he typed, adding then deleting a winky face and pressing send.
‘Neither,’ she replied very quickly, adding ‘obviously.’
Porridge 