The girl has shoes on her feet – hand-me-downs, scuffed in and comfy – with petrol fume lungs and a head full of stories. “Ours was the...

Mum brought her kazoo to Zoom. She dragged her bed into the garden to hear the blackbirds in the morning: cooked a trout on a fire,...

The December night, silently freezes the hurdy gurdy: the steam horses and burnt burgers. The lights are pin prick bright. At the edge of...

Hollow ice ghosts skate the causeway to Horrid Hill: long left low lying

I steal through secret morning streets with no excuse – no work or exercise but just the need to feel the pinch of night before morning’s...

When your head smells of Sunkissed Raspberry or Joy and Jasmine, it masks the days of sea swimming – wild jumps from Liscannor’s rocks. I...

Poem by Sarah Hehir

Stands he or sits he? She wonders which as she lies naked, asp-gasping, beneath Egyptian sheets: the king of cottons, fit for a queen. Or...

Five-a-side football sweat, salt on skin & cigarettes. Photo by Mong Mong from Pexels

This girl, this English nurse, flings her flaming hair over the bath and sings. We laugh – we, who were born to be Dovedale mothers and...

Undercurrent echoes of living flesh sing through half-sunken subs: sounds that, leaving Lincolnshire and heading South, bounce around The...

Manchester 2000 Ben’s Flat In the slanted grey light of a Manchester evening, you lay out your clothes, ready for leaving: boxer shorts,...

‘You’ve got your tit out a bit,’ a Margate youth points politely, speaks quietly. I say, ‘What?’ and then look down. Oh fuck. I tug at my...

The grandchildren wait – old enough to accept that a last breath is death and yet…and yet. The sun is hot. Not just hot, it’s Greek-beach...

A rented room: dark enough for shadows to stand against the warmth of orange light. Us two: up so early that night is like a hot breath...

Mixed by an alchemist, with all the prized magic of exotic origins: eggshells and the shells of umbilical fish. Their own origins – his...

She sits and stares and I do too. Outside, the billowed silk is cold: the cubic art with Scottish lines, drawn hard. But these – the...