Category: Past issues

Fries   It happened the night I met Wanda. I didn’t know it was going to be that easy. The night I met her I knew. There it was, plain as the white lines that run clean down the middle of the road, my life. ‘Honey, you didn’t know it…

The Zookeeper’s Shadow   Before At school the kids called Sally ‘Rabbit Girl’. She was born with a harelip, which early surgery had closed but left a scar and a twist to her upper mouth. She did not have the cleft palate too, but even so she grew to mumble…

Neighbourly   So I finally go over to Hamlin’s house. Been watching him avoid me since January after that time when I heard gunshots out back and then a pack of yipping and yowling coon dogs squirrelled up into my yard and put my cat under the deck and it…

Photos I have worn   white tucked socks there – a dress homemade Dad? ring of lace wish   The Gothic arch of the church door frames the small group. A returned serviceman from Vietnam, a very pregnant and elated woman wearing a short silk dress, flowers in her cropped…

Falling   Love like that plummets into you, like a cartoon anvil crashing onto your head and pushing you into the earth. It devastates, obliterates. She wouldn’t accept anything less, she decided. She wanted that heavy, falling kind of love that is both good and bad, because you turn into…

The Last Resort   She felt rather than saw the heat outside the car windows as all three of her skinny kids disembarked in excitement. Mo hadn’t told her about the pool, he hadn’t told any of them. It was his big surprise, as if the holiday they’d scrimped for…

Eclipse of the Moon at Hotel St. Marie   you lean from the balcony trying to see the moon   then make love to me as if we had just met   by cold morning, through a window you see the disc   covered by darkness like the slow street…

1 | 2   Vicki   On my first day back as a senior school teacher in the East End of London, I felt like a new girl all over again. This was a classroom, after all. Everyone had a desk and there was a desk for me in the…

1 | 2   I Will   I was playing with love and squalor All Elijahs in the room, fire and stony brim and losing the light in the shadows I was dreaming alone in the hollows All Alice in the glass breathing down the past and shooting the stars…

1 | 2   Dreams Are Like Sand   You threw the curtains open on the morning The northerly had brought the rain in the night Our clothes were lying half undressed fallen on the floor. You looked lovely in the light. You said did you sleep through the storm,…