Image: © Courtesy of Manchester City Galleries [Content trigger warning: abortion, medical procedure detail] Can you not feel anything in your body? This is the question a friend asks, sitting across from me in a low-lit cinema bar on the corner of Niederbarnimstraße, in Berlin’s Friedrichshain district. Half-drunk glasses of beer stand between our elbows. […]
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3 poems
Image: © Courtesy of Manchester City Galleries Saxifrage Our ten-year-old feet running along the drystone wallbetween our houses, the saxifrageslumped so thick over the bubbling stone, we didn’tknow there was a gap betweenmy garden wall and hers. Did we everrecognise a certain lack of solidityas we hammocked across the gapbetween her and me? Rockbreakers […]
Comfort Me with Violins
Image: © Courtesy of Manchester City Galleries After I gave birth, the world became sleepless. We spent a year lost in an exhaustion so deep it split my brain. I saw rainbows refracted in the kitchen’s french doors, opening out to the yard glistening under the soft morning light. My eyelids twitched. My body swayed […]
And the Radio Plays
Image: © Courtesy of Manchester City Galleries Ahead of them, the road lays out broad and straight. Tulips on the embankment are holding strong; clouds high and stratus smeared. Jack is driving, as he always drives, because Mary’s migraines are rare but unpredictable, and because Jack, they both know, has problems ceding control. He is […]
2 poems
Image: © Courtesy of Manchester City Galleries Toad Tide Waking from winter-deep half sleep to acheand seep and sap, you stir in the ooze,heave your tender bulk from mud to air,begin the heavy-limbed creep to the watersof your making, weeping soft poison to ward youon your way. Risking rat and road and raptor,you find […]
3 poems
Image: © Courtesy of Manchester City Galleries A Competition Buzzard over crow, buthooded crow over raven. Salmonthrashing on a hook and leaderover sugar in the evening. Winterbranches scribbled on the sundownlike witches’ fingers overthin silk leaves of bible paper.Corroded silver forks, I think—never sold, just given—overlate-night radio, coruscant streets.Silence over apology untilwe insisted on […]
Stuck in the Middle
Image: © Courtesy of Manchester City Galleries “Applying for a visa extension?” the man behind the plexiglass in the Holborn post office asks you. “Yes,” you say, slightly out of breath, clutching a crumpled letter from the Home Office. Your stomach had started churning as soon as you saw it this morning and you had […]
The Curse
Image: © Courtesy of Manchester City Galleries [Content warning: descriptions of illness, blood] I had been bleeding for twelve days when I picked up the scent of the Ally Pally Witch. This time she was lurking in an audio clip from the Open University’s digital archives[i]. Robert Rowland, a former head of production at the […]
2 poems
Image: © Courtesy of Manchester City Galleries bee me up talk to me about tender.are you blue from slender.are you bruised from under.or are you billowing bright.were you green this morning.or are you new to this leafing.hell bent. on sky filling.are you made of light.is this rain again.or a recent memory.and is this density.this […]
3 poems
Image: © Courtesy of Manchester City Galleries Cloaca Maxima God bless the modern malefactors,for fellow travellers praise be God,bless boldness, bless servility. We used to sweeten cities, drainingbeneath the polity, expelling refuseto oblivious seas and barbarous lands. Death and dirt and inconveniencewere flushed to cleanse our rituals. Sometimeswe showed the process off, sanitised and […]
Incident at the Castle
Image: © Courtesy of Manchester City Galleries [Content trigger warning: suicide] There was an incident at the castle. Someone fell from the walls. Or jumped or was pushed. Jason says we must have a look. It will be so much fun. When we get there, there’s already a cordon of blue ticker tape and a […]
Windwatt
Image: © Courtesy of Manchester City Galleries Windwatt Tide wrack windsthrough clotted estuary mud,mud so thick it stops the breath,but gives life to riverine shell-creatures,and makes mudflats blossom with detritus, estuarine silt flowers;clay-born and half-formed things. Taf-torn, river wrought,the Landsker Line* splitsmore than language; even this island town, from which castlesslide into swamps, leveesdissolve […]
3 poems
Image: © Courtesy of Manchester City Galleries My first white chest hair My dentist told me I lack wisdomteeth while filling my root canal cavity.His slender three-eyed metal swan shonelight on my every misdeed. I had ignoredmy body, as if it was mine onlyon a monthly subscription. Free repairs,as long as I kept paying […]
Mating Habits
Image: © Courtesy of Manchester City Galleries While Louie fumbles with his zip, I lay a newspaper down on the floor of the Wendy House. I can’t help but think about next week’s presentation while he does it: a conference paper on the mating habits of waterbirds in the Bering Sea, specifically their fidelity to […]
Damilola
Image: © Courtesy of Manchester City Galleries Damilola with eyes the colour of sepsis, Damilola with surname like a hieroglyph no one can decipher, Damilola with underwear on back-to-front dawns on his knees begging for virtue, naps upright from Clapham to Charing Cross, thumbs the biblethick in-tray, laughs almost. Damilola wonders whether Mrs O’Donoghue will […]
Issue 28: Editorial
Image: © Courtesy of Manchester City Galleries Issue 28 of The Manchester Review presents works of fiction, non-fiction and poetry from writers across the globe, gathering together pieces of disparate tones, forms and thematic focuses. These texts span across those that masterfully employ more familiar structures, to those that explore experimental styles, evidencing both the […]
3 poems
Image: © Manchester Museum, The University of Manchester Coffee Once a currency of the colonial kings of the seas, Captain.This simple plant. It will grow and die and synthesiseSo why, sir, is it stained? Men enslaved; families separated, Killed.Yet the brew drips, drips, […]
On the Falseness of Wolves
Image: © Manchester Museum, The University of Manchester wolves aren’t real She said it with the smooth-shouldered arrogance of youthful certainty. At first, I wasn’t sure I heard her right. I asked her what she said and she calmly […]
Eingang freihalten, bitte
Image: © Manchester Museum, The University of Manchester Perhaps motherhood is a solitarywalk down the road of an interrupted dream You point out birds, flowers, how the road arrivesat Spring. Behind you, two balloons dance their strings in your hands. You are heldback on the path, wait at corners, guard against the muffled shadows of […]
When We Were Raucous
Image: © Manchester Museum, The University of Manchester It’s raining. I’m in the back of the car, Beth is in the front with Dad. When there were four of us, Beth used to sit next to me and we’d watch raindrops slither down the windows, try to guess which one would get to the bottom […]
Belief
Image: © Manchester Museum, The University of Manchester “But you have to believe.” We are standing in her kitchenIn front of the stove. That urgency in my grandmother’s voice soft, yet desperate? […]
2 poems
Image: © Manchester Museum, The University of Manchester This Sunday Morning I watch you from the kitchen window, digging in, reaching for the good earth, summer-baked in suspended animation, knee-deep in love. The kids are asking for Daddy, the dog needs to pee, and the coffee has dribbled its last drops into the pot – […]
An Adultery
Image: © Manchester Museum, The University of Manchester “Sex with my wife hasn’t been the same,” my lover says, “since her breast cancer.” Where bedsheets retract, the shoreline of his body emerges. Lumps of burnt pink, freckled all over. Behind him, glass slats combine to windows, and then the Mediterranean, its green light stretching all […]
Daisy’s Place
Image: © Manchester Museum, The University of Manchester A scramble of hairpins, then a wedge of smooth sea. Down the coast, the Costa del something. High-rise hotels, Dan said, and street fights. But out here, he said, it was a different world. No bars, not on this trip, eating in and he’d cook, and anyway, […]
2 poems
Image: © Manchester Museum, The University of Manchester Rialto Blues In May I take the train from Genoa to Venezia Santa Lucia, but I am late, and see you before you see me, standing on the bridge, face hard as Istrian stone. What irony that we should reunite in Venice with its web of artifice—wrecked […]
3 poems
Image: © Manchester Museum, The University of Manchester I Heard Her Drumming in the Spring Haw frost comesand light snow duststhe solid ground. I take paper bagsof peanuts,sunflower seeds — black, unhusked— and do the jobyou used to do. I fill the feedershung on a stumpyash tree — a pollard we cut years ago.Binoculars, yours,sit […]
The Scent of Magnolia
Image: © Manchester Museum, The University of Manchester Something was wrong as soon as we drove into our street. We heard the shriek of a siren as we passed through town. Now there was a police car outside our house, an ambulance with its blue light turning. Two paramedics loading a stretcher into the back. […]
The Headman
Image: © Manchester Museum, The University of Manchester July can be unforgivingly cold. Walking outside, the chillness feels like multiple blades cutting the skin. He’s sitting in his bedroom hut, thinking of Mucha. In his mind he’s walking towards her. His heart is pounding. “Ndeipi” he says. “Where were you yesterday?” Mucha says. “I got […]
The Brain that went for a Stroll
Image: © Manchester Museum, The University of Manchester I’m at my desk staring at a stack of forms waiting to be checked and captured on the system. It’s a busy time of year. There are performance reviews coming up. I’m right in the middle of a weekly stats call when it happens. I start retching. […]
To the Man Sleeping in the Airport
Image: © Manchester Museum, The University of Manchester Your arm is reaching into the carpeted walkway,where hundreds travel the gentle slopetoward the cold tile of the ground-floor lobby.Your pink stomach winks through the risein your shirt, keeps watch as the crowd followsin rippling curves to miss your hand, palm-up,your fingers slightly curled as if tied […]
Pridesongs
Image: © Manchester Museum, The University of Manchester Oblique Strategy #1: Is it finished? It’s morning, sometime in late 2021, and I’m standing near the Queensland Gallery of Modern Art’s river window, waiting to hear something special. Today’s a bright day – the kind where light seemingly leaks from the air itself, and the river […]
Death Robed in A Gown, So Beautiful, So Majestic
Image: © Manchester Museum, The University of Manchester For my Grandfather In the old elm that crowded our backyard fence a lone magpie cawked— a woman was wading her feet through a water that had found its way into her stead, & she cursed heavily— […]
Editorial
Image: © Manchester Museum, The University of Manchester After a longer than expected break, we are very happy to announce the passing of the torch to a new editorial team which is excited to bring you this new issue of The Manchester Review. In issue twenty-six, the new editorial team has endeavoured to remain faithful […]