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