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