Dear Reader

I hear her downstairs, plate spinning a chicken dinner on her head. Pots pang against each other as they’re drawn from the cupboard. A blue sky serves us sunlight through dust stained windows. The dog lies in her dog setting. A cat pauses its life on the stairs. I enter a kitchen that is a science lab of dinner making. Mint sauce squats beside table salt, gravy, pot-holes yesterday’s mug. Steam fogs out of her mouth as she asks me how much broccoli I want. I nod with a betting man slowness. Hear a jackdaw bark somewhere. Feel the gap in our lives as two passing seasons outside the window. Carrots become orange fence posts, cauliflowers cloud my plate, spuds tumble from a colander as I pour lemonade into a glass. We sit with a television playing in our heads. Catch words in between teeth we wear away each summer on ice cream. The sofa keeps us bus-quiet, food fills up what has been lost. A shade falls out of a tree that stands behind a wall, paints over smiles we once grew in walks arou...

I remember them well those great balls of blue in the shady corner  down the side of the house Mum watered them with a secret recipe she mixed up in the shed it made them that special hue in neighbours’ gardens all were pink with my siblings I played tea parties with the fresh bright leaves as big as dinner plates on spongy grass in a circle with our dolls  I pose beside the massive mopheads in the dress with sprigs of wild flowers hydrangea blue collar daisy lace trim in my palm I can still feel the silky touch of sun-limp petals captured in black and white no one will ever know the magnificence of those blooms of blue --- Laura Brinson is a Melbourne-based writer. She is also a seamstress and a gardener and was reading regularly at open mic events when that was a thing! In lockdown she is very happy that her workroom looks out on greenery and catches the morning sun. Her poetry and prose has been published in Australian and International journals of poetry.

I hear the scrape of gravel and wish for only grass, the sponginess of it reminding me that there are things that are stepped on that don’t collapse or die, but duck, bearing the weight of something a thousand times their own and reemerge, arching their backs and swaying because they are strong but not infallible — like a blade. --- Beth O’Brien is a English Literature graduate from the University of Birmingham. Her debut poetry pamphlet, Light Perception, was published by Wild Pressed Books in 2019, and her first full-length poetry collection, I Left the Room Burning, is out February 2021. In 2019, she was featured in the Black Pear Press, Pressed Flowers, anthology. She is the Editor of Mad Hatter Reviews and a reviewer for  Riggwelter Press .