By Tim Reaper The tracks don’t sleep. They grind their jaw all night, chewing distance, chewing names, chewing the metal taste of might-have-been. I stand by the platform edge and feel the air turn predatory— a cold animal with shining ribs. The rails hum their familiar hunger, electric and patient, like a dog trained on silence. In my pocket, my phone is a dead eye, your messages a museum of almosts. I imagine the train arriving with its mouth open, headlights like saints wi

By Tim Reaper She was small enough to still believe the world was made for touching— hot stove, sharp shell, the bright rule of what happens if. He was smaller, milk-breathed, a soft new noise in the house that stole the room’s attention the way flame steals air. The bathwater waited, perfectly still, a dark mirror with no opinion. It held the ceiling light like a trapped star and she thought: How deep does a star go? No anger. No storybook monster. Just the clean, blank wond

By Tim Reaper Morning arrives like a bandage pulled off too fast. The sky is raw, pink with damage, and the sun hangs there like a cautery tool— bright, clinical, unforgiving. You walk through streets still wet with night, past bins that breathe, past shuttered shops with their metal eyelids down. Somewhere, a siren threads the distance— a thin red stitch trying to hold the world together. You think of the person you used to be— how easily they laughed, how loosely they lived

By Tim Reaper In this country, we inherit metal the way others inherit cheekbones— a birthright you can hold, cold and certain, with your finger resting on the future. They call it freedom and hand it to you in a cardboard coffin, foam cut to fit the shape of a decision you can’t take back. The classrooms rehearse lockdowns like hymns. Small hands learn the grammar of hiding: corner, silence, the holy text of don’t move. On the news, grief is weather— rolling in, expected, me

By Tim Reaper The ceiling light stutters like a guilty witness. In the socket, a nest of copper tongues licks the dark awake. You press your ear to the wall and hear it— the thin, bright choir of current dragging its chain. Somewhere inside you, a smaller room fills with smoke. Your name is written in melted insulation, in blistered plastic prayers, in the soft-pop of a heart overloading. When you finally cry, it comes out as sparks— brief, bitter stars that die before they r

By Tim Reaper One: a toothbrush with your bite in it, bristles bent like prayers that gave up. Two: the last shirt you wore, still holding your shape— a soft absence folded into cotton. Three: a glass with lipstick ghosting the rim, a tender bruise of colour. Four: your name in my mouth, heavy as a coin I can’t spend. Five: the silence after the door, after the phone, after the last sentence didn’t save anything. I line these items up like evidence. I tell myself this is what

By Dorit D'Scarlett (Dark Poets Prize III Winner) Beneath the crooked yew, they bloom— not roses, not lilies, but something else, pale as...

By Dorit D'Scarlett (Dark Poets Prize III Winner) The night it happened, the stars did not blink. They hung, empty-eyed, in the yawning...