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