By D. Dea My most unsettling thought is not about death or monsters, but it is this question: what if nothing is real? Not the coffee cooling in my hand, not my hand holding the coffee, not even this poem I'm pretending to write. What if we are all phantoms living a dream or avatars in someone's game with no memory of entering? What if there is no god, no devil, just us, wearing many skins learning to live different versions of ourselves while the rest fills the void, s

By Poppi Hmlenitsky For Ellie It has been raining for eternity. Somber trees creek. Plumes of silver escape my parched lips, Cracked as stone ruins of a gothic cathedral. I creep from my crypt: Life-depraved, sickly-creature that I have become, Whimpering on the edge of oblivion. The air shudders at the sight of me, such a young thing with Ancient blood painted along my shackled spine. It gushes from my orifices as if engorging aqueducts. Great clods of molded leaves pi

By Angela Cheveau Pale pumpkins pall the streets and an old man hocks up a phlegm ball moon and bins spew condoms cans canisters of laughing gas and boys on street corners pass packages palm to palm and there’s kids with knives in their stomach their chests their backs but the blood is not fake and the appetite for true crime rises and rises it rises like the sewage soaked sea and costumes celebrate real life killers and the Menendez brothers are suddenly celebrities and the

By Scout Clancy Batreau Well, I say, sprawled out on the chapel floor, fragments of relics and rubble perforating ribs, beaming up at Michael entombed in blues, reds and gold, the good news, the only news, is that Earth is dying. You were right, his face remains nonchalant, but there is a flicker in his flames. My mother would sing here, I point to a cracked organ sprouting greenery, I’ve told him this before of course, but stories are all we have now, Alexandria has burned f

By Sticks & Stones Poet Yeah good, You know keeping busy, Getting lost in the hours, One day bleeding into another, Breathing amnesia, Adopting contagious resistance, To literally everything, Becoming adept at exchanging banalities, Isolating in solitary sweaty exchanges, Living on the outskirts of the consumer-driven dream, Constructing little hedonistic monuments, Dry humping the carcass of my last hope, Desperately trying to get a rise out of it, Carving idols out of shado

By Anthony Gorin (Beauty In Normalcy) A number I’ll never call, still have the contact on my phone; an email address and phone number. Both house and mobile. Long passed the house being sold on, I try to visit, have photographed once, for the memories, but not wanting to seem weird. Oh the memories I have down that estate, from the earliest part of my childhood, until close to the end.. Seeing the contact, the name, familiar but distant, and a number I hadn’t remembered. I on

By Roger Vickery Leaf blower in gloved hand, I speak into your intercom, humble as a serf come to tend the laird’s needs, explaining council can’t approve felling the oak that blocks you from a pristine view until I conduct an ‘arboreal review’. As we stroll your ample grounds, I’d love to ask if your mind ever strays to the Caesar stone dust that layered your cutters in silica snow? Some days my brother came home looking like a moulting polar bear. But you mustn’t catch the

By Brindha Shyamsundar Moody night without a moon, revulsed by the red-eyed owl’s perky hoots. A vapour lamp’s burnt-yellow hollow claps thunder into its widening bruise. Teeth clack in the dark, syncing with the mangy dog that growls at the scent of my regurgitated grief. What I swallowed returns now, looming, rising, a shadow finally disgorged. I search for eyes and find none, only his slender, bony fingers folding me into a wordless hug. Cold spills from his touch, and a g

By Marc Brightside One could call it darkness, you or I, that which churns below the plume, irradiated, lingering and unrelenting, bodies shimmering with textured sin, the fear that burns beneath your skin. Scarlet, electronic eyes close in. The eyes know if you walk, or drive, what you drink and where you buy, what medicines keep you alive. Who you think of, late at night, as your hands creep below the sheets. How to hit you. How to make it bleed. How many times you’ve tried

By Clair Mangan The morsel of frozen pastry sits on her tongue, her ears pricked for noise, hands stuck to the fridge door, as the last light of the day exits its ugly head through curtain folds. A packet of biscuits 3 birthday cake slices 3 donuts 6 mini sausage rolls Half a cheeseboard. Leftovers- she’s just getting started, a balloon fit to EXPLODE! Is it the thrill of eating stolen food? Or that her housemate Joanna has started to ask questions about her rapidly depleting

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