Damian Ward’s work explores the subtle interplay between nature, memory,
The Buried Museums
Holy Grail, hollowed bone, half buried in the dirt. Above the
Brow God is moving his furniture, wardrobes of thunderclouds,
heavy driving migraines into your skull
Within these hills there are buried museums. Gleaners,
looters, archaeologists scrape the dust, sift for clues. When
the rain comes flashfloods will turn this dirt to mud,
exposing doll’s prams, tin bathtubs, a mangled accordion wheezing
Boy on a stolen moped dragging it uphill towards the church
cowboy swagger
I sit by the shrine of plastic flowers rolling a joint with
shaking fingers. A cracked Now That’s What I Call Music CD
hangs from a tree, a fetish token for the homeless woman
winter-death, grief-moon
Dig into the dirt with the heel of my boot remembering the Dog
King. Somewhere down there in an old tin can are his tethering
ropes, latch keys, can-opener, flick knife cassettes of mad
muttering, dog-howl
In buried museums beneath these hills, your memories, earth-
weighted mad saint’s bone relics, nightmare archive.
Jeff Young is a Liverpool based writer for radio, theatre
& screen. His memoir ‘Ghost Town’ was shortlisted for the Costa
Prize and his second memoir, ‘Wild Twin’, tells of his years
hitching around Europe & living in Amsterdam squats.
Poet, performer, visual artist & broadcaster, collaborator
with artists & musicians, he is currently writing ‘Lucid Dreamer’,
an alternative history of Liverpool counterculture.
Bluesky http://@wildtwin.bsky.social
Before Sunday Dinner
My brother scrubs hard
the yellow
from his two smoking fingers
until they blush
like mortified teenagers
who scream, don’t look at us!
Niall M Oliver @NMOliverPoetry is an Irish born writer who lives in London with his wife and two boys. He takes inspiration from his roots and everyday life, and has previously been published in The Lake Poetry, as well as a couple of anthologies but has yet to meet anyone who claims to have read them.
Banner Image “Siblings” by Robert Frede Kenter. Tweets at @frede_kenter.
“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”
BURNING HOUSE PRESS 