Dear Reader

Graveyards are expected to be quiet, somewhere to pay respects. This hillside in Heptonstall mostly achieves that. A bench gives a view of headstones in lines. The grass has not been cut but some individual graves are tended. A light breeze counters the humidity. There's no map of names. One has a burst of speedwell, fidelity, where bees gather nectar. Even her death is busy with life. --- Emma Lee’s recent collection is “Ghosts in the Desert” (IDP, UK 2015). “The Significance of a Dress” is forthcoming from Arachne (UK). She co-edited “Over Land, Over Sea,” (Five Leaves, UK, 2015), reviews for The Blue Nib, High Window Journal, The Journal, London Grip, Sabotage Reviews and blogs at  http://emmalee1.wordpress.com. ​

Each day they sent us down on our knees to holystone the decks: scrubbing boards while the sun sloughed skin off our backs, or rain thrashed round to drown us as we sucked in water-logged breaths. The threat of superiors’ boots never far from cracked lips, we would spend these hours praying for blasphemous things: a slip overboard for the captain, a storm to wreck the ship, capture by pirates. Death was the dream, the way to freedom, but God will send us the strangest saviours instead – a crew of forty men offer us a choice: a ship armed with eight cannons, Nassau bound. --- Kate Garrett is the author of several poetry books of varying lengths, most recently  The saint of milk and flames  (Rhythm & Bones Press, April 2019) and  To Feed My Woodland Bones  (Animal Heart Press, September 2019). Born and raised in rural southern Ohio, she moved to England 20 years ago, where she still lives in Sheffield with her husband, five children, and a cat. Mo...

locals gather                 centre of the village an old man flying                    kites             high above the square which is small / somehow oriental she stops to sit beneath the fingers of the husky oak             a postcard to a lover . . . it rains heavily here                         but the town is like a painting . . . long september nearly over                  coastal pathways              down to hotels snaking past pie...

I can see it on Google Earth,  the hillside cluttered with brambles where one day I turned my ankle  and sniffed back snot and tears as we scrambled to the top; on the brow of the hill we stopped  to look back: at houses and flats;  the salt marsh checkered by rhynes;  the smokestacks of ships in the docks  and khaki fumes from the chemical works;  the silver glint of the Bristol Channel  and over the water, Wales; then on we rushed, past cabbage fields,  through the wood’s green hush  to the pond, carrying jars for newts  we caught to take home: quick  and brown, yellow bellies spotted black.  Mine lived in a seaside bucket  until I got bored or forgot. I zoom in to find the wood, exactly  as I remember it, though the fields are  covered in barns, the salt marsh striped  by a motorway’s asphalt. However hard  I look, there is no trace of the pond. --- ...