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”
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”
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”
“…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”
Isn’t every fruit soft, if you wait? In small bodies the time is softly passing. Peach had a twilight air. It wore a yellow curling-up sticker that read ‘gog de magog’ in black print (something from The Bible I think) with a picture of a purple desert tree and ‘the fruit of paradise’ in tiny print across the top and ‘paradiesisches obst’ along the bottom. Continue reading “Peach On The Beach by Kate Feld”
We arrived in a thunderstorm: lightning fingers shot down, pinning horizon
to dark highway. Then the low rumble. Taut Dakota midnight. For weeks
you’d made me promise to avoid photos, insisting I see firsthand the slopes
of ancient clay rising from the prairie. Rain fought the roof of our rental; Continue reading “Badlands by Betsy Housten”
On the vast land of a hospital in Tokyo, there is a pond filled with plenty of water. Water springs up not only in the pond, but here and there. It is the source of a river. The underground water passes through the downtown of Tokyo and flows into Tokyo Bay. No one knows this is a water land and I’m dreaming of the ocean through the vapor. Continue reading “Waiting For The Ocean by hiromi suzuki”
Once young
The land meant everything
Patches of green and brown
Wild things and half wild critters
Cross our path
As we made our way along
Collecting small mysteries Continue reading “Wonderment by Tara Lynn Hawk”
You claim to make a new life
Then proceeded to backtrack
As you stay deep inside your edwardian
cottage of decay and old newspapers Continue reading “Chainsaw Demolition Waltz by Tara Lynn Hawk”
BURNING HOUSE PRESS 