Issue 15
John McAuliffe

Editorial

Some recent literary works about Manchester  share a distinctive aesthetic and a fascination with the city’s disappearing histories and new developments. The playwright Alistair McDowall’s Pomona at the Royal Exchange took the Pomona area’s seemingly empty site and re-imagined it as a dystopian fantasy; earlier this year the young Irish theatre company Anú took Angel […]

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Michael Farrell

Early Wilde / Late Wilde

dear Bird          your Feathers stretch becomingly Beneath the Settee. i love your Beak more than you Know; and when i go among the Habitats – of the River when home, the Zoos when away – i Smile to think of your Lines. of course I mean this Ambiguously. i like to think your Gold eye Shadow […]

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Daniel Bennett

Two Poems

Monkey Business We don’t. Put it in a vow, put it in the diary, I’ll meet you as arranged. Take your pick from the usual places: the red café near the railway arches, the motorway where the yellow sodium flares. You’re right to wonder if they deserve us. You’re right that sadness capsizes things: the […]

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Rhiannon Thorne

Royalty

Royalty When I was little, my aunt dreamed of daughters. On the weekends, she would take me, my dimples and my temper, show me flowers blooming in her garden: the ground moist, yellow pansies and sweet peas taller than my four feet. I collected garden toads, plucked one from the soil then another, and she […]

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Mark Prince

Three Poems

Lorna Grove This is as far as street view goes. New green chainlink swelled by greenery. Sky-coloured puddles network into a pond’s skyscape. A warning sign encircles a family of slashed and circled pictograms. Analogy is enclosure. I am looking for where the woods have the furthest to go before hitting road. An interior, off-path, […]

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Tom French

Relativity

Relativity And even if the story never went, the story goes – when Einstein was on the road explaining Relativity to the academy, his chauffeur caught the gist of it so quick and Einstein got so bored, they settled on a quick change act and changed clothes; (not unlike the time my dead brother came […]

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Jannine Horsford

Three Poems

Dilemma That girl with that face and from that part of the world. Who commits daily assaults against ‘th’ yet respects every syllable in ‘strawberry’. With that shape and heft and magnitude of backside. Got an arse on ‘er that rolls like the moors. At The Grove she guides the mop across the floor like […]

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Fergus Cronin

Night Music

There he was, a priest in the sun; like an actor on his mark. He looked away, effacing, as if to say ‘I have you’, from the start. ‘I have you’, I thought.           I had just guided the stylus onto the first track and as the scratchy hum from the speakers confirmed contact I heard […]

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Kerry Ryan

Telling Stories

‘I am not attracted to you,’ Sonja said one night when they’d stayed behind to drink their tips. ‘Well, thank God for that,’ Ruth replied knocking her shot glass against Sonja’s. ‘I can’t thank God. I don’t believe in baby stories anymore.’ Sonja had left Sweden as soon as she could. It was not how […]

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Beverley Bie Brahic

Three Poems

A Field Trip History looks out on the playing field and some chestnuts in bloom along the Seine, which is out of bounds. These kids are too big for the classroom. They knock over chairs, fumbling for gear— compass tip to caress, electronics to drop. Outside, on the pitch, playing football, they aren’t clumsy, they […]

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Roy Marshall

I’ve been high

I’ve been high When a Chamois broke from mist thick as choked bonfire smoke, one hoof loosening a river of stone. And again, near Llanberris, spradeled like Spiderman on the angled slab, twisting a chock from the crack. A flight above the Kent as an air-cadet, a green blear under the wing. Terrestrial dabbling with […]

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Barney Walsh

Things I Couldn’t Tell Her

I told this story to my best friend Kelly, that crack-of-dawn morning in her flat, when really there were other things I should have been saying – I just couldn’t work out what any of them were. It wasn’t my fault, I was tired, I’d been up all night. At the hospital, sitting with Kelly […]

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Joseph Minden

Three Poems

Hateful Things After Sei Shonagon Juicy news interrupted by a huge, squidgy baby; a man who bangs around between the bed and the door; an indelicate dog woofing through a midnight clinch, not cat-distracted or bone-dreaming; a misled, nude stud who uses the word I more than never and bolts in the morning. (A good […]

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Sara Jean Lane

Three Poems

Wind Chimes, Too These used to be wine bottles. She is growing, they say, but it is not so much becoming taller as zooming out. At dark she shines a flashlight through the glass, watches the beam grow fat as it runs from her, and says that maybe the sun is just someone holding a […]

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Annabel Banks

Susan Frankie Marla Me

The next morning he’s early into work but I have to get home anyway, because I’m shopping with Susan. Big Asda, not the high street. We like it in here because the wide aisles can contain our conversations, and the ceiling is high enough to cope if she gets the giggles.           We put the baskets […]

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Laura Legge

Lazarus, Hiding in the Chill of a Mountain

A second-grade teacher who thinks herself benevolent writes to Marcus Wing, Inmate #A-04014 every morning for six months before she finally runs down her crime-slimed street to the post office. By then she has accumulated one hundred and eighty-five articles, from decoupage paper cut into the shapes of olive branches and Sacred Hearts to vintage […]

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Maria Taylor

Two Poems

My Stranger hangs where the plaster cracked and the ribs of the house show. He’s the only stranger I can afford, a middle-aged man in a plaid shirt smiling for an artist. Nothing to me, but still I hang him in the hallway and call him dad. Of course visitors have doubts. I know they […]

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Cathal McCabe

Three Poems

The Coastguard’s Cottage Tu non ricordi la casa dei doganieri sul rialzo a strapiombo sulla scogliera                                                       – Montale We never forgot the coastguard’s cottage out on the tip of Cranfield Point. Still no one lives there; maybe it’s waiting for us to make up our minds and move in? The plans we had the day […]

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John North

Three Poems

Rose Here is the rose I cut from the rosebush yesterday, placed upon the ornamental box, a study in life after death. It is morning and you and I have just woken. There is birdsong. Are we becoming light? Our bed is a small Church of England grave, a country place, where the dew settles […]

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Elizabeth Smither

My mother’s house

Once, near nightfall, I drove past my mother’s house. She was inside it, moving about some task. I saw her move from room to room. I could have stopped. Shortly she would draw the blinds but a knock on the door might alarm her who had her routine for night. It was all those unseen […]

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Seán Hewitt

Two Poems

December I imagine winter returning as if woken from a dream, clambering from the iced rabbit-hole of the field, open-mouthed. The sound it makes coming home knee-deep in the night, its slow feet, the numb toes. I listen for the pain in the white shins of the birches, splinter-trees charred by cold, limbs creaking. What […]

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