Do the three blondes sipping Ombre Pink Drinks
believe they’re on break from coding at Fitbit
or know they flew the coop, birds with lonely wings. Continue reading “Sh-Boom by Mare Leonard”
Finders of hidden places,
young children, explorers, climbers,
crawl under fence wires, dig, cut,
trespass on private property, Continue reading “Make A Way If There Isn’t One by Heather Saunders Estes”
It burst out of you like a swarm of bees,
And you didn’t recognize the scream.
Moonlight drizzled across your forehead
Like milk and honey seeping from the comb. Continue reading “Creation by Erynn Pontius”
Mulure Mike is an award-winning Kenyan social entrepreneur, film-maker and musician. Born in the rural town of Siaya in 1986, and raised in Kericho, he moved at a young age to Nairobi. He ended up in the city’s notorious slum, Kibera, the largest in Africa. But it was, in his words, “a blessing in disguise.” There he met someone who owned video equipment and who offered to teach him how to use it. Continue reading “Mulure Mike: In Conversation with C.C. O’Hanlon”
When he died, they covered his tracks and made him hard to trace. Eighty years on, he’s the talk of a frontier town. Philosopher, critic, storyteller, Jew. A father who never knew his granddaughters, born later to an exiled son in London. Continue reading “This Is Not A Memorial, And Other Stories Of Remembrance by Alan Nance”
Foreclosure
Her alligator appetites had long devoured
the marshes, owned the bayous
in the rooms of our house
by the time she was widowed at sixty.
Our live-in-the-moment mother
trained us to feed on each other, Continue reading “Two Poems by Janet Reed”
i. dirge the sea
shall we put an end to the sea?
re channel its eerie cries
calabash its black bawls,
––– elsewhere … Continue reading “Sahara by Petero Kalulé”
When I was nine, I dreamed of going to Mars. I dreamed of being swept away to fantastical lands. I dreamed of joining David at Groosham Grange, and travelling with Sarah in her quest to the Goblin City. I’m still a dreamer, but I no longer dream of escape. The ordinary and the fantastical inhabit the same world. There are ghosts, vampires, goblins, cyborgs, and aliens round every corner, lurking down every close. There are mermaids and krakens in the ocean, dragons in the sky. Continue reading “Dreaming St. Conan’s Kirk by Ever Dundas”
In my dream vision
(which is like Dürer’s except with less water)
There is the same feeling of columns.
The sky staggers on the hill –
The shape of a stomach
Is gestated in the clouds. Continue reading “Dream Vision by Lucie Richter-Mahr”
Do the flyswatters know
that inside the belly of unheard voices
every hummingbird started off as
a bug? That a drop of our blood could drink
sunshine & become white sand beckoning the seas
& the oceans that eat up our feet to the knees
& make us dissolve in that forgotteness? Continue reading “Arrival As A Form Of Departure: the lamentation of an immigrant by Bola Opaleke”
“A frontier region… the resort of brigands and bandits”
– Sir Clifford Darby, from The Medieval Fenland
Two summers ago I walked coast to coast across England and Wales, from Great Yarmouth in Norfolk to Aberystwyth on the Welsh coast. The idea was to etch a furrow in the map along a route that traced familiar haunts and places of personal significance. My aim was to rekindle the memory of places I once knew in East Anglia and the Midlands; join up the dots, to connect all the places along the way with a line made by walking – a pagan pilgrimage, if you like, a personal songline. Continue reading “The Tyranny of the Horizon by Laurence Mitchell”
There’s a five-mile block in the northernmost part of Prenzlauer Berg that I haunted during my last weeks in Berlin. Within this five-mile block, I allowed myself to fade in and out of memories – I let past and present mingle surreptitiously. I chose it in the exact breath it chose me. Even knowing what writing my memoirs would mean, I had no idea the gravity, but each time I got too lost or too overwhelmed, one man was there to encourage me forward. Continue reading “On Becoming A Storyteller: A Berlin Memoir by Jessica Ciccarelli”
“…I miss the possibility of Buenos Aires. And by missing its possibility I can miss my own hometown without the uncomfortable bits, without all the impossibilities, the proximities, the complexities and familiarities. The parts that can hurt.”
Fernando Sdrigotti is a writer, editor and occasional translator. Born in Rosario, Argentina, in 1977, he was expelled by the economic crash of 2001. He lived in Dublin and Paris before settling in London in the early noughties. Continue reading “Fernando Sdrigotti: In Conversation with C.C. O’Hanlon”
Why Would I Fantasise?
I am not a philosopher.
You came to me in a dream.
Already, I digress.
Subject + verb + object (direct).
You and your syntax.
You are a verb that requires many objects.
I . Want. To. Break. That. Continue reading “Objects In Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear, Four Poems by Sam Lou Talbot”
In 1976, Larry Buttrose, an Australian playwright and poet, journeyed to Deya, on the Spanish island of Majorca, to seek out the then 81-year-old British poet, author and classicist, Robert Graves, renowned for his historical novels, notably I, Claudius and Claudius The God, a memoir, Goodbye To All That, and a ‘speculative study of poetic inspiration’, The White Goddess.
I stepped out onto the steep cobbled street outside the Villa Verde. I had arrived at the hostel’s door in the wilting afternoon heat of the day before, after having taken the overnight ferry from Barcelona, and the bus up from Palma, along with the locals in breeches and headscarves carrying bound, clucking chickens on their laps. Continue reading “Meeting Robert Graves by Larry Buttrose”
A mural of a massive wave
painted on a concrete wall
can’t provoke a disaster,
can it? Fenced off so no one
can smut it with graffiti,
this careful reproduction
Continue reading “Under A Wave Off Kanagawa by William Doreski”
I started work on The Catskills Dream series after creating the first collage – The Catskills Visitor.
I’d visited New York several times but on one visit, I became intrigued by an area well to the north of it, known as the Catskills. I didn’t go there but I began to research it: stories of the old Borscht Belt, the summer circuit for Jewish entertainers, abandoned hotels and motels, retired lives, old secrets, broken promises.
Continue reading “The Catskills Dream by Anna Louise Simpson”
Mayfield Road
I wander Dudley streets – old canals and factories. All faces are sad now. I take a road I’ve never been down before. Continue reading “In Dudley by R.M. Francis”
15:20 backlit wisps and railroad tracks in the sky. flashes of starlings’ wingtips. I look at the river too long, and now see it every time I blink. Continue reading “Writing A Winter Sunset by Oliver Cable”
some nights i, molested by some
morbid desire, stand before my mirror
and examine myself: my chest, my breasts,
two halves divorced, barren land between.
BURNING HOUSE PRESS 