By Wing Yau The    ghost of   my   deceased  workplace  still  haunts my  new   uniform   as  an unspeakable    sweat     stain.   It haunts my work shoes that squeak like my tightened windpipe    as I walk into the    pale      daylight. I mean, through     daylight into a relentless   odour    bounded by   empty   spaces   in my    life indenture.   At      night the ghost  always  returns  to    the clock    and     strikes the most  feminine   pose to beguile time.    She

By Alice Hatcher We weep at memories of misted fiddleheads, the milkweed seats of chrysalid kingdoms, sacred scrolls of silver birch roseate at dawn, glacial till of pungent loam and marbled stone, gardens seeding themselves in endless resurrection, all the nectar of mottled fruit we found wanting.   We walk accursed in wilderness, across barren plains, through scabrous lands and bedeviling dust. Gloaming is too soft a word for sudden nightfall, the world’s hard turn into unc

By Sezin Devi One day you wake and you’re not yourself. I feel like I’m peeling out of my skin and I get flashes of heat, skin on fire, boiling this lobster in a pot that’s my full body ache. I’m 17 again, acne that’s not, it’s actually cysts and I can’t pop them because now at 46 my skin scars and I have itchy tits and wake in the middle of a thought at 3am, heart pounding and can’t sleep, it isn’t trauma, it’s this change in me I knew was coming I was bitten a women, it’s t

By Nadia Beckett The door was locked, but it wasn’t enough He broke in like a demolition crew Leaving only dust where foundation used to be. My skin still recognises a wrong touch. An imprint Cellular panic Screaming a silent name. I search for the woman who lived here She’s gone Hiding behind my eyes Whispering; You didn't fight hard enough. Violation isn't a scar, but a shadow glued to my heels It taught me the feeling of unclean How ownership can be revoked in a single wre

By Lewis Brown Speaking as a lover of cat piss, pantyhose and older women, I can say confidently that this perfume is for everyone. It opens with bold top notes of patchouli and incense followed by the unmistakable scent of pastrami sandwiches the kind your high school bully used to eat and vegetables slowly spoiling in a hot rubber bowl. Next come the middle notes or as I like to call them, the Incident: an accord of caribou musk and poison, undergirded by a whiff of sour co

By Jim Gill The hue of the skin, the scent, the heaviness hefted in the hand will indicate whether it is ripe and ready to   consume. The innards, the fleshy parts within, are not so easily revealed, it takes a dedicated thumb, or knife, to part the skin and   flesh. Some take an anatomical approach, dissect segments symmetrically, while others choose to rip and tear with no attention to   the art. Some suck juice vampire-like, pick the pith from between their teeth, though s

By J. Sawyer Clack - Ta-Tack,   A great scythe sweeping claw, Bone reforged in metal -   Perfection,   Scalpel-like, it cleaves, cuts, no -                   Slices ,   Flesh is separated from skin, Blood replaced with ichorous oil, Arteries of vanity -   Man? No, nor Machine -   Something greater,   Clack-tack,   A faceplate, bearing God’s mark, Smile down, Machine Lord -   For our work is done,                   Precision outweighs will,   Thunderous applause,              

By Bellatrix I saw it in an aged photo Not the digital kind The one with oxidized fading Light and orb flashes gently nestled where they felt invited No edits, real and raw Faded by time and its propensity to speed the unwanted years Tattered, yellowed and frayed, stained from cigarette smoke and cocktails de jour In a different time, from decades long passed by There she was with her velvet coat The gentle folds of the black midnight fabric Looking so soft What were the stor

By Andrew Otto Psenicka Black briars slithering out of her back and the middle of her chest. Thorny and bare scraggles, grasping wildly at the air and anything near. A substance—resentment— that only the worst of tragedies could pen about this nightmare queen. The hood pulled over her head, and sparse roses on the death vines, still I know who she really is— Liquid that you can’t drink, bitter. Still, she tells me, “I’ll put the kettle on” pretending, for her own sake, I don’

By The Neo-Revsolutionist Desecrate the dead heart. Dig with nails. Scar with breath. You are in control. My hands are wrapped around brass rails. Assault me with whispered words. Attack with pelvic thrust. I cannot escape. My wrists are marked with suicidal failure. And you would be the death of me If I were not already deceased. Money: My sheltered mind, you are asleep Faith: A passionate soul is purged Love: My country heart, you are despaired Lust: A body of

By Rosie Bogumil depression hides. in your unwashed sheets / unwashed hair / unbrushed teeth exhaustion so deep your bones ache with effort but still you can’t sleep – because falling asleep means you must submit to waking up and waking up means another day spent with your same cruel thoughts.   they will suggest the usual things to combat your sudden and inexplicable exacerbation of depression. you will remind them this cannot be a relapse since that implies reprieve. yes, t

By S.J. Wildling You said I reminded you of birds. Curiosity curled upon my chewed lip Hopeful you had made some complimentary association with grace. Your eyes gathered storm clouds  as you glared up at me Eagle eyed and menacing. “You remind me of birds” you said “how they do as they please, How they just up and leave. How they make a fucking mess. And all that fucking noise How you'd Shit on me from a height, Flap and squawk and take flight, If I gave you a chance I know y

By Madeleine Dale Walk me to the covered bridge – that far, at least. Under green rush & heather thatch there is no snowfall, or dead leaves gathered. Skin flashes in the dark river and I cannot say my own rites – our prayers have been stolen from our mouths. We must reconstruct the ritual by hand. This will be like opening a bruise – old blood on the altar knife, a new language of mourning inherited from whorls of dead timber. Summons of salt and evergreen. I watch you leave

By Phoebe Owen We walked the bracken paths, stumbling through rotten bark and crimson leaves. She breathed the earth, her 80 years ad blissful infinitum. I swept away the gnats and brambles clawing at my swaddled limbs.   She asked me, through her cradle walls, held firmly by the world’s wide arms which forest path I’d wandered most to scratch for blackberries, track for badgers, spar the oak trunk knights of castles past; I said: “My bushes bore white plastic fruit, and the

By Lena Mante I made a bet with Pascal that you exist. Yet I was wrong. This appearance is the most infernal salvation, and repetition: the most merciless lesson, after which you never learn anything. That’s why you are given the freedom to walk the same roads, to drive the same hospital-white car, to be a servant to the same meaningless gestures. To drag a body, seething with hope for life: back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, while outside the world remains asthm

By Jeremy Keighley The acid rain falls outside a tiny room of bare white bricks, almost dawn when a flock of red cranes takes flight all colour bleached out by the night-light iced aqua blue which freezes my tears as I call ‘take me in your arms, in your arms as you did in the lake, then.’   But my voice is only a smoker’s croak too faint   under the rattle of death trains by the window a lightning bolt above my eyes, you slip further into the darkness where the sheet envelop

By Katy Cossham Had my feet been dipped in cool paint as I descended the stairs that Sunday morning? I couldn’t explain it away By the time I reached the hall, “It’s MS - I’ve got MS” Like a stopped clock, a worrier is sometimes right The strangeness spread; my fur rubbed backwards Within days a firestorm blazed in my personal substation My body waged war with itself At night whole sections were wiped out I revived, Lazarus-like, in the morning With frayed live wires in my mi

By Helen Laycock Water-thin, silver-hemmed figures bloom and fade like failing lighthouses in the between-   world as they search for barren heartwrecks. They are soft-light,   starved moths long-crept from castle-dank and hospital-rust to this griefsea,   powdering crepuscule with the blown chalk of doused lives.   Sibilant-whisperers, they sing in minor keys, transient laments wheedling into the shells of the sleeping stricken.   Snowbreath-featherers, hair-lifters, they ti

By Ingrid Leonard In the coal-shed By Ingrid Leonard   Posh Paws sits in a basket with all her newborns, which lately have been soft, indiscernible things, snug-suckling at their mother’s underside; now they watch me without moving, their eyes bluer than the sea and all its sparkles, greener than the rain-splashed grass, five pairs on beds of glowing fur; black, silver-splodged and their tortoiseshell mother, who watches me without moving, quiet and content with her queening,

By Dom Armstrong I return to my garden, expecting roses, and a neat order of beds, Life .   Instead: a massacre. Death .   The tulips are snapped like broken necks. The hedges scalped. The sunflowers look like they’ve been interrogated, their petals confessing to crimes they did not commit.   The pond is gone, too. Not drained, but beaten. Smashed flat with a brick as though someone thought water was showing off.   The grass is no longer grass. It is a green smear. Even the s