Image: © Courtesy of Manchester City Galleries What’s it like to be Irene Hedges? Or Linda Jones or Dawn Cooper, or any of the others who are not like you; who are normal? Do they know how lucky they are? You have no idea which piece is missing from your clockwork, what has made you […]
Current Issue
2 poems
Image: © Courtesy of Manchester City Galleries I Think That’s What Love Is I find you in the small canteen. The noise around an elegant TV mast. Oh god, the sadness. A series of paving slabs implanted into a field like a proto-spine or a history of unstructured gangrene. I eat my wet sandwich […]
2 poems
Image: © Courtesy of Manchester City Galleries Control The Pontotoc manwho confessedto killing his best friendduring a fishing tripbecause he believed this personwas summoning BigFoot to harm him,has been convicted. The man recounted seeinga twelve foot BigFoot crouchedand hearing his friend howlthrough a drainage pipe. He claimed his best friend also insistedon catching a […]
Shaped
Image: © Courtesy of Manchester City Galleries i. The Bra You were nine the first time your shape displeased you. The bra had been a present on Christmas. Absurd. You’d wanted a doll. The bra was white and smelled like a grandmother’s house. You were less than enthused when your mum showed you how to […]
2 poems
Image: © Courtesy of Manchester City Galleries Your Cathedral I remember the first time you brought me here:your roofless cathedral you called it, showed me the way samphire gets washed in gold whenthe sun falls over the mudflats of Morecambe Bay, Lakeland mountains bruised violet by the sky they touch,charcoal smudges across the water, huddled […]
Spilt Milk
Image: © Courtesy of Manchester City Galleries Charlie had noticed her at once on walking into the hotel’s breakfast room that morning. She stood by the generous bow window that faced out to sea, in an attitude of restful contemplation that he found charming. And somehow the next moment there he was, standing by her […]
3 poems
Image: © Courtesy of Manchester City Galleries North Star(a e h i l n o r s t anagram) Terns strain as east sleet threatens,it thrashes these northern shoreson seasonal rotation. Stern, here.As the sea lathers, the inlet silts,its islet less isle, its saline isolationstolen as the straits start to thin. See those tell-tales? […]
Our Life Together
Image: © Courtesy of Manchester City Galleries I don’t know when it started. I, for one, have never been that interested but it’s happened that gradually, over the years, as our life together has become ever more uneventful so our desire to discuss politics has increased. You could argue that it’s not surprising given the […]
3 poems
Image: © Courtesy of Manchester City Galleries Happy Fat Brown Puppy After Utagawa Hiroshige’s woodblock print:Ushimachi in the Takanawa District About this view by Utagawa H – who else would set an oxcart wheeleye-level, and so in your facethe uncrossable distance of artseems semi-zero?Or persuade a fading rainbow’s curveto follow the rim of the wheelon […]
Great Potential (trans. Beth Fowler)
Image: © Courtesy of Manchester City Galleries Sometimes, Amelia hides behind the railings and stands there watching her classmates swarm out and launch themselves at the mothers waiting for them at home time with sandwiches wrapped in tinfoil, donuts for the lucky ones, and maybe even a Bollycao for the chosen few. Amelia likes to […]
My Dog Ate the Sun
Image: © Courtesy of Manchester City Galleries And tumbled through the door when Ilet him in. His rust coat moved like awindy sea. I turned on the porch light: itdidn’t make any difference. “You’re dead,”I said to him; he cocked his head to theleash on a chair. Of course, he wouldwant to go walking now, […]
Rue Garenne (trans. Ruth Ward)
Image: © Courtesy of Manchester City Galleries There’s this woman as eccentric as Christ walking on water. She writes poems on her painted toes, which will never touch the ground because she slips them into platforms high as half her head, or higher. Grey pigeon feathers decorate her hair along with leaves of fresh mint and laurel. And each […]
Signs
Image: © Courtesy of Manchester City Galleries It began the way of all rumours. Coming from nowhere, permeating the air like smoke then gaining form and substance from repetition until it became truth, or at least Fact. Someone had said it in the marketplace, or a prophet had come down from the hills. Then there […]
3 poems
Image: © Courtesy of Manchester City Galleries Telephonophobia I sprint three stairsat a time, dying to hearwho’s on the line.I lift the receiver to my trainedear, my lips purse tiny airholes.He said he was a doctorabout to visit our schoolneeded to conduct the firstexamination. Are you alone?I’m alone, I say, thinking of the lollipops […]
Issue 27: Editorial
Image: © Courtesy of Manchester City Galleries It’s been a year since the current editorial team took responsibility for The Manchester Review, and we are delighted to present Issue 27. This issue blends some familiar names with plenty of new faces, and as is tradition for the Review is comprised of different styles across fiction […]
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 […]