By Carol Elva Greenwell Sibyll is still lying. Still in bed. She has not gone to the kitchen, made tea, logged on, sent and read emails, for a fortnight. She has not rung any of her daughters. Fiona has added both of her sisters’ numbers to Sibyll’s speed-dial. Not her own. Catherine is lying at the bottom of the stairs, left leg at a daft angle, the guilty feline draped across her silent breast. The others haunt their empty bowls and ‘go’ elsewhere, than amongst the litter

By Patrick Julian Hunter I had been fascinated by the idea of seeing my innards for years, and finally mustered up the courage to do the inevitable. I began by filleting my sides with slow, careful cuts— to grasp the meat and begin the laborious task of peeling and pulling the flesh, working inch by inch until I had the desired effect. Once completed, I stitched myself a Saran Wrap suit to hold everything in place and keep the alley cats from licking the vital parts. Oh, the

By Mike O'Brien Dazed, I walk through the house In pursuit of the ghost of her. A bookmark reveals Where she’d finished reading...for now. Her hand would have smoothed that page, Warmly caressed the print. Though her hands were often cold; Her eyes burned, processing the words, Triggering thought, The kind of thought that transports, Leaving me stranded. The blanket she kept On the back of her chair, Slumbers like a sleeping cat. She wrapped it around her legs in the even

By Matthew Vorley The sunflower once stood tall gold halo, head lifted to a sky I could never reach but now its petals hang like torn confessions, colour drained, spine cracked, a monument to everything I failed to hold. I watch it die slow, deliberate, the way love dies when the voice shakes and the mind shuts down and the heart forgets how to speak. Its stem folds in on itself just like my chest did the day I walked away from the only warmth I knew. Now there’s nothing but

By Sid Wilson Knit your entrails together, Wrap them around your needles and tug to craft yourself into something new that forgets what imperfection feels like. Compress yourself against the inner edges Of the shape you used to be. Fix the insides first. Cleanse the pollution of nerve tissue, unrefined organ matter. Women made by male-manufactured belief, to make you believe it too, and it must be true because lies are ugly, and they are beautiful. You want to be beautiful

By Maryam Imogen Ghouth There is a room beneath the noon—no clocks, no sun. We fold morning into a coin, slip it under the tongue, enter with pockets full of hours. Outside the city bargains with horns and flyers. We learn the economy of absence: how to make a day vanish between two breaths. Sometimes life asks for me back: I hand myself over as a crumpled note. I carry in my chest the debt of having been gone, but I like the red lights that rain, the downward spiral, the vel

By Vincent Kenny It’s an excuse for a romp really beyond the unspoken unspeakables of civil society How could it be otherwise – to loosen the chains that keep it all…. well - civil! The thoughts behind those flickering eyelids, the un-uttered slowly released …. sigh, boy; that released primeval urge – chemical surge…. Ejacula, ejaculus ejaculorum; Sperm casts into the void – that utero place we called home; (as it was at the beginning, is now, and never ending) We mortal

By Damen O'Brien Three changes of lights occur before she has the nuts undone. The crunch and drum of wheels griping through the intersection are like a murmur or a mantra or The Beatles played backwards. She watches two cars run the lights on successive reds, daring the camera to flash. The cameras blink as belatedly as a hangover. Butcher birds gargle out their chorus in a tree nearby and magpies scrape their washboard calls up and down her spine. The man in the boot of h

By Alan C. Smith There are poems hiding under the clothes strewn on the floor of my bedroom, under the open unpaid bills, caked dead skin in corner sills, many legged wasp-red creatures with stings. I tiptoe through in darkness lest I trample them, get stung, inject with punishing pain, potent poison. There are poems hidden in my water-heater closet under the dust bunnies and petrified roaches on their backs, crisscrossed legs tight to their abdomens, poems squirming in the

By Zofia Koren Here, in the town that life forgot, Beware, O, dreamers of this place, — where lovers, weavers go to rot. Here, puddles pool in hollow heads, Stillborn of fouled liquified thoughts, — still and born of spore-spreading dreads. O, Fear feeds on the wretched lot, Festering fools who fumble in, To the town that life forgot. An early grave awaits you there, A death so foul — so void of soul, It eats your heart and strips you bare. Fools’ll twist your tendons as a kn

By Arran Potts Thinking about the end of the world, dad idly pours coffee onto an anthill. Perched against the peppered stones of a ruined abbey; he feels the sharp edges of endings that line his skin. Clouds of crows croak and bark in the air around him. Ravens rustle in the trees; while jackdaws and rooks settle like shadows on the yellowed grass. ‘We could eat them, I suppose. We could lure them and hunt them and farm them to survive. Pull out their black feathers, rip off

By Mykyta Ryzhykh We were stolen at birth and brought into this world. This world has robbed us. Cats will never again sing under the window about their nine lives in the nine circles of hell. We are no longer cats. We are no longer dogs. Only occasionally does one of us like to sit on a leash in puppy latex. We are heavy, sir. We are light, Lord, like fluff. We are airy, Lord, like chitin. We are homeless, Lord, like heaven. We are rich, Lord, like the poorest poor man. We a

By Hetta Jones 6.33 am. It’s raining. So softly, I cannot see or hear it, except where it pools on corkwood. Perches over the town. Air still, full of the thrum of dual carriageway, and nothing else. Later, people will rattle empty bins over gravel. Still air here, busy roads there. It isn’t cold. It isn’t warm. It just is. To the left, Jane Sandeman Court. Celebratory in purple-splodged scaffolding. I envisage my tense muscles embellished with purple splodges of pain. It is

By Isaac Thornton An old man—whose wrinkles are oft mistaken for blemishes, but are testimonies to the stories he could tell—cradles the hand of his wife and watches as she trembles in the wheelchair. There is not much to write about the wheelchair, other than it is made of metal, brown as dried blood, and turns in on itself, much like she does. Is it heartless for me to write so much about the chair, so little about her? Or is it the heart that moves me to look down at the c

By Philippa Greasley I don’t remember the clocks facing into the walls Or the light hanging so low, in this hall. Souring the air, cheese-butter fog, Treacle tendrils behind my eyes. I don’t remember these noises inside Breathing bruise-marked floorboards Moth-wing, insect-legs brush my throat Cotton-cracked ribcage bones. I don’t remember something growing Up in the ceiling fissures A larvae showing, twitching, shaking loose Landing – knick-knack wet-splat – in the rot below

By Gabrielle Munslow So I bend my knee— the faithful kneel in the presence of the greater good. The embittered Eucharist wisps away during the final benison. So I kneel on a bed of nails, much like your halo of horns— devotion shaped by punishment, grace barbed in its design. Hot black wax drips between my breasts, baptises me in blasphemy. I rise, ash-smudged, smelling of candle smoke and salt, mouth still sweet with disbelief. I turn my head toward the other mourners. I rea

By Robert Lipton The geometries surround us, the drunk boys on the frat house steps, industrially incapable of irony, are still morose about losing something, to someone, this has parallelogram written all over their pusses. Two infinite lines of frat houses on Euclid, an equilaterally elaborate taco truck with no outside angles, squats on the corner, gravity dripping off it like liquid gerbils, Seurat painted a pear the size of a hot air balloon, but I measure all human di

By Daniel Sowa I ran, of course— laced my shoes with someone else’s hands, chased horizons stitched from their thread. How gallantly I stumbled over roots they never warned me about. The dream was always a tenant, never an heir: it wore another’s face in the mirror, left its fingerprints on my coffee cups, whispered 'almost' in a voice not mine. At night, I rehearsed their victories with tongues heavy as unopened letters. Even my shadow grew tired, bent like quest

By VaadMyst Morning oozes with pus — I lie crippled by weakness, Twisting in bed, crying amid dead dreams. Under depression’s whisper, dawn proclaims despair, From the filth of being — poison seeps into my blood. Time doesn’t heal. The past still rots inside, Under the shroud of loneliness, my strength dried out, feeding necrosis. The awareness of joyless life grows like mold, And depression’s whisper is sung by a ghostly choir. Crows scream, taking off in a devilish swarm, I

By The Mystical Bard of Eire Three score and ten! They say that is about what we get. I wonder about that sometimes. Who will follow in my footsteps? Everyone I have known seems to have gone away. Faded into the silence. It seems the silence is the only one who has stayed with me. But the silence is a great listener. Always there with me, hanging on each word I say. Never judgemental, just perhaps a little cold at times. And never seems to have any opinions. Sometimes I screa