The Woman Vegetable Vendor Fabiyas MV She pulls her handcart through her dream-debris. Now her PhD is just an agonizing adornment. She’s been denied white-collar jobs for religious reasons. Even a name is flammable in the fanatic drought. Here religion doesn’t purify, but petrify. Yet she surfaces, scuba-diving through her secret sorrows. […]
The House Plant Fabiyas MV Her possessor won’t let her grow beyond his conservative outlook. Her taproot is chained in the pot. Even her pale patches are decorations. Living among the plastic plants is choking. She’s denied sunny kisses. Rain’s romantic whisperings, she’s never exposed to such ecstasies. Her wound attracts […]
Northern Lights Sue Hoffman Green-born: a blessing; a child to unite tribes. Red-born: a gift; a child to bring joy. Yellow-born: a mystery; who knows the child’s fate? But I was born when the night was black, when the sky-dancers slept, their coloured capes folded to cushion weary heads, and […]
Hidden Rachael Barnes-Powell My father collects model trains Engines, stations, trees – all miniaturised populate his shed His own personal paradise over which he is god Plastic bodies lie cold Waiting for him to bring them to life I was allowed to watch as he worked in mausoleum-like silence […]
Machair Tomos Dargie We came to a meadow by where the sea crept in, where her breath was light with marram and the meadowsweet danced. There was an Island, left on a shell-strewn strand once the tide had ebbed away. There were terns, their shrill cry she carried down the long summer days. She […]
Pineapples Ruth Taaffe Panic in the aisles. Unmasked together in a queue we breathe discretely in opposite directions no eye contact, ashamed of this synchronised thinking. Ridiculous whims in the baskets, beans for protein chocolate for morale. The thought of weeks without fruit pinpoints an island of claustrophobia inside, a notion of scurvy voyages east or west on some wooden clipper. If only they’d had the Piña des Indes back then. The tin sits plucked from the shelf, adopted pet in the […]
An Alabaster Knight Kathryn Ratzko Still as stone, hands on your chest, an alabaster knight; protector, warrior who once slayed dragons. Dawn is here. The ferryman still waits; a bittersweet relief. I stretch. Cramped on a makeshift bed, I ache. I lean in close to hear your barely breath and whisper that I have to […]
Of Righteousness and Sin Ayesha Asad At dusk, I take my prayers and cradle them to my heart, watching them slip into volant arrows from my papery fingertips and slink up a tree, where they flutter, untethered and groan into the undulating leaves. After they dust grit off their wings, they rise – […]
Sleight of Hand Ruth Taaffe You were thirteen and crooked, about to embrace the retainer, conjure your own face from the pack. An x-ray then you lay supine against stuffed leatherette waiting for the show to begin. Behind the scenes the assistant prepared tricks of the trade for the maestro who appeared in the snap […]
In Waves James Croal Jackson It comes in waves, the grief, though you laugh as you say so, because we are in the Atlantic, children again, uppercutting large tides, and I never learned to swim, but the saying– the metaphor– is true, the water is relentless, and we were states away from the hospital, […]