By Brendan Craig I understand that space-time reaches out in all directions like black silk. But that says nothing about the feeling that I am here and now where you cannot be. And I remember thirty years from here we met by chance on a Noumea beach tide because our travels crossed paths on white sand. But that says nothing about an 11-year-old boy wide-eyed at the curving mystery of porcelain-skinned young women. I have seen the way grey cancer eats the red organs t

By Joe Dolce We call on you, word mortician, to use all your skills. Let us remember it beautifully. Do not show us bruises and the settling of blood. Do not describe the sunken and shrunken birdlike bones or tissue skin wrapping dry vein. Do not tell us of fingernail becoming claw or dissolving lung or of pain hammered by drugs. Open your bag, word mortician, open your jars and bottles, cover the bruises with powder, pencil youth on the lips, brush perfume and wind for hair,

By Clare Marsh the Waddington quins died on delivery ~ their shared placenta burned by local custom their miniature bodies sent to Dr Hunter as medical specimens pallid flaccid ghostly water-babies hang in a tank suspended in solution their skin ridged like hands left too long in bath water liquor-steeped foetuses sightless eyes mere hooded slits ribs protruding wraith limbs dangle a chorus of stringless marionettes wailing mouths gape in soundless distr