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…
Tag: porridge magazine
Something You Can Feel in Your Teeth — Hannah Stevens
Neither of them talk much in the morning. Somehow things are more difficult in the early hours. She feels more fragile, more lost, more oppressed by the narrow confines and the lack of light.
The Ache for Home – Sally Gander
The ache for home lives in all of us, the safe place where we can go as we areand not be questioned. Maya Angelou The box room where I was staying was dark, always dark. The window let in only a sliver of light and the lamp cast a weak pool of yellow over dark-painted…
Lord of the Ocean – Aneeta Sundararaj
“China is going to take over our world,” my friend declared. Unlikely to happen! I didn’t say the words aloud, though, for this man’s convictions were delivered with such ferocity that any meaningful debate was impossible. Rumour had it that he believed that every country was doomed to inevitable failure unless it bowed down to…
ONE POEM – Kira Scott
these are the tears that we cannot shed
as we comment on the beauty of the glen and
how wonderful it must have been to live in such a place.
White Noise Inside the Supermarket: Reading DeLillo during a Pandemic – Michael P. Mazenko
Wandering the aisles of my neighborhood supermarket, the kind of place Don DeLillo once wrote evoked “a sense of replenishment … and fullness of being,” I tread cautiously out of suspicion and respect for the potential “airborne toxic event” that is the coronavirus pandemic. As the world continues to pass milestones of Covid infections, I…
TWO POEMS – Tim Kiely
the cake is made of Walthamstow
a dense and glutinous Walthamstow
we are going to make Walthamstow
a Titanic success for Walthamstow
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…
ONE POEM – Claire Sosienski Smith
paring knife, won’t use it to make
the pierogi. The potato goes
soft in the microwave,
the onion falls apart
and fries itself.
ONE POEM – Noemi Gunea
I wanted you so much
I started making things up
ONE POEM – Hideko Sueoka
Bright rays reflect, shape, shake her portrait on the water skin
and it’s broken, burnt, soon gone.
ONE POEM – Bernadette Gallagher
Get some hens
dig up the garden
sow and plant.
