By Lillibit Ray Opening the door to the tavern Rotten royal scent fuming from the neck of an empty bourbon flask. Drunk eyes staring to the fly on the wall That watches a girl drown her liver And compromise her soul All to take the sting of the real world away. Curly club roller coaster, jukebox pulsates To the beat of the empty heart in the corner With an empty home and empty bed And wallet of twenties and clouded head. Grin of stone with a glass of whiskey to wash it down,

By himragged I awake from a feeling of midnight’s wine-intoxicant shroud of mull seed-cake, dreaming again I was my sis/ter, dreaming again I brought somebody else home, finger the surgeon’s trans scar, reach out for you, touch you in your sleep, but see the winged shadow shimmering in summer’s dead air. My groin is wet. Blood. Black wax. She stands, watching, hungers for the fouled world we have made today, or its corruption is found in tomorrow’s false dawn. I have read of

By Johanna Sargeant When the tarmac steams and the children stand in the centre of the street with faces up and tongues out and uniforms stuck to rounded bellies, when the road becomes an ochre river, with toddlers stomping and thwomping and lying in the torrent, mothers’ fingers fishing leaves and cicada skins and gecko tails out of tangled hair at bath-time, when oldies on verandahs with cups of black Moccona, yell to be heard as the parched lawn drinks in gluttonous gulps

By Italo Ferrante “pierrot is akin to the immortals, if not of them.” irene mawer i was told not to lead with my teeth / but with my desperation / i wish i could cudgel the shadows of my offenders away / i can only grant mock damages & take pratfalls in the sand / all these men beg to use my throat like a toilet brush / no / i can’t lube my chest / i won’t be their human wipe / god / shower me in greasepaint & hide all hickey bruises / lord / bring me a razor i can handle lik

By Georgia Heart fills my chest and I meet grief. I meet grief the way a dazzling golden sun meets the sky, welcoming the heart-wrenching pain that already knows my bones. I say yes to grief like a prophet meets God, like parched trees drink the rain, like lifetimes wait for a moment. With wide open arms, I say yes to this bountiful teacher, grief. And here, in this wet surrender, I find the roots of my being. Roots steeped in compassion. Roots soaked in the sorrowed la

By Jiya Julia Marie What happened when we named Nature? That day of walls and windows when wild became somewhere we visit when she became Outside? What a relief to keep out the storms! Her endless cold her terrifying unpredictability empty bellies long walks and Us surviving. How precious the shelter felt then! (Safe) We could not tell how the walls would thicken. We did not know then of the high rises. Human branches

By Emma Yalçin Tragedy was not buried, only hidden beneath snow and silence – retold in whispers beside hearths, worn thin, like a prayer repeated too long. In the hollow rifts of the eastern dağlar, where embittered winds carve grief into stone, the air smelled wrong, like spilled milk and broken oaths. Even the old shepherds grew quiet – for they knew what scent brings the wolves. Not just wolves. Bozkurtlar – grey spirits of the steppe, born of fire, dusk, and ancient bloo

By Llorraine Mc Colgan Tom is dead. A shot of him atop the coffin in the cold country church plonked amidst, it must be, forty fields bare of cattle just resting green. For someone loved, someone vivid, the prayers are perfunctory delivered flat and the only stories told of him are by a Polish priest who never knew him but got them second hand.. When the cello curls in on its own heart the walnut wood of the pew vibrates and all of the ghost roots reattach. Where stone is bru

By Darryl Houston Smith They promise us fresh, tender skin, A chance to cleanse the spirit at dawn, But birth is merely the beginning of sin, A carcass replaced, a grave withdrawn. To cry again! To taste the bitter air! To feel the heavy weight of lust and time! This earth is but a slaughterhouse for prayer Where souls are dragged through centuries of slime. We are the compost of a thousand lives, Recycled through worms, wombs, and mud; The Wheel turns ceaselessly with knives

By Maddison O'Donnell In my younger days I thought horror was the looming monster in my closet, or the gargling ghoul crouching under my bed, or the skeletons I dreamt marched down the road towards the house and climbed up the scaffolding to sneak inside my bedroom window. I thought it was corpses reanimated in the cemetery across the street and hungry vampires waiting in the woodland and mischievous ghosts clanking around with the bats in the attic and naughty neighbours thr

By Charlotte Smith I went into the sea again, long strides against the incoming tide. Playing fate with the sand with bare feet. I howled into the waves and they roared at me. The way we knew each other was insane. From the shore only underbellies, The ice-cream bodies domain. Here we are only water, and come water again. Nothing can cut me as it drags me around: It buffers, it bruises, half drowns. Ahogada like a hollowed-out sound, It is endless till I surrender. My Limbs

By Peter Devonald Back here again in the hospital made of snow, we shiver as IV drips into the back of our hand, another catheter for another broken memory. We fade as twilight is a hush of whispers in the wind, as snow shudders in with promises it cannot keep, in a ward of last regrets. Our heart is made of crystal, our bones are made of glass, our lungs full of ground-glass opacities, our skin weakens, fragile as angels wings. We watch the stacking up of snow as we fold int

By Anna D Invernizzi There you sit, Dark Prince, Not a man, nor king, Beast, nor mage. No. You are a prince, Sat upon a hollow throne of borrowed power, As you never dared to claim your own. Instead, you stole, clawed at freedom, wretched and rotten under Fingernails that tore their Way through wild and beautiful things. And to think, for all these years I lived terrified in the wake of your shadows, Never realising it was my light that cast them. And without it, you simply c

By Sarai Nichole She told me to write—a cure in a tidy sentence. Not that the corners of my bedroom ever learned to leave. I learned to be an artist by accident: a body stitched together by wars no one visits. They drink from our blood like ritual, no pity for the open casket as colour thins from my veins. I do not brew tea to begin. I do not stroke a sleeping cat. I pace until there is nothing left of me on the shelves, then choose the floor because the bed remembers my spil

By A Mother Bereft My to-do list looks different these days. No longer hastily scribbled notes of things to chase, no columns of musts and maybes, no flower doodles unfurling in the corners. Now, it’s how to breathe. how to be. Focus is evasive. My mind drifts like smoke unanchored, shapeless, always curling back towards you. I catch myself staring through the window, eyes scanning the road for a shape that will never appear. Some part of me still expects your return the soun

By Zi Lloyd-Jones Gaping maw like no other Knows Rivulet of blood from infant born I live for these hills, this land I was raised But burning like flame within My instinct to consume Skin, flesh, mortal grain I care not, feed the fire I do not want to be this way I do not want to live For destruction So upon each setting sun I watch Waxy glow suffused amber, ichor Bury me in the long grass that itches Embed me in the soil of our Mother Should the urge overcome me again And r

By Abigail Pinder I watch my lovers trembling hands reach for sacred thighs Gripping my velvety flesh with wonted abandon, he splays them into the old hay My body doesn’t fight as his fingers press trails into the blue lines of drying veins The stillness I gift him pricking his exposed appetite Heavy hot breath dripping between us, against the frosty draft penetrating the slats of the barn Unfrozen, black blood seeps, oozing down my paling skin to meet his calloused touch And

By Sonia M. Your silence now reigns—raw and painful. Almost like the rubble after an earthquake: land littered with broken homes and still corpses. Yet, yours is so much worse: a sign of neither loss or acceptance. Disappointment sews your lips into that tight pursed line. There will be no grave mourning, because only loved ones plan funerals, and you have chosen bitter resignation—the 20th century widow that raves of his wife’s fallibility, flipping all her portraits as

By Alethea Cavanaugh Don’t listen too closely as the voices hush. I am the jarring echo of brittle laughter that blossomed within the cacophony before the quietude. I am words that once felt safe — camouflaged by white noise — but now sink in unanswered awkwardness across the divide. My words cut the silence, but the chorus in my mind whispers you’re a broken record. As a stopped clock is right twice a day, there are instances your pitch offers melody or harmony, but do not

By Pamilerin Jacob That arrow you shot at me, O Lord, passed through me like air through a keyhole. It is why I am desperate for belief, having grazed it for a moment. Let me proceed into the kernel of silence armed only with the promise of delight. I know that light falls gently because it does not want to be wounded. I could crawl & crawl into myself only to meet the world waiting like a serpent’s gape. I will die on a certain day, but as Brooks admonishes, not toda