Dear Reader

You like the tips of your  fingers and tongue to touch  on the barely there.  Close your eyes and imagine a selkie baby slips from your hand. You’re at my feet, soles touching, a lit cigarette between your fingers –  at its tip, smoky jellyfish swim downward – their tendrils twist upward  and upward.  I am submerged – the air is salty,  my body’s raw follicles sting, but –  Shaven labia mimic the mythic. Your voice  is a noise underwater Selkie, Baby – I will slip from myself like bubbles along a torso –  like smoke from a lip – like the smoke from your lip. Let me be the white curl that licks at your nostril,  be the hair that uncurls  between your legs. --- Laura Warner is a poet and a PhD student at the  University of Exeter. Her research project, Uterine Poetics, explores lived experience of endometriosis through poetry and poetic approaches.   You can follow her and her work on  Twitter: @warner_writer.

Through a stone window slit, the world looks like a single tear.   I bought silk to splice my braids but you cannot make a ladder from hair.   I dream how men unravel  in front of me, how disease grew wild and families, split and splintered.   History will untangle why we were up here . Men, let us down, like unpinned hair.   You cannot make a rope from gold, or a ladder from money.    My lockdown tresses fall to nothing.   --- Anna Saunders is the author of Communion, (Wild Conversations Press), Struck, (Pindrop Press) Kissing the She Bear, (Wild Conversations Press), Burne Jones and the Fox ( Indigo Dreams) and Ghosting for Beginners ( Indigo Dreams, Spring 2018) described by Fiona Sampson as a 'beautifully evocative read'. Anna has had poems published in journals and anthologies, which include Ambit, The North, New Walk Magazine, Amaryllis, Iota, Caduceus, Envoi, The Wenlock Anthology, Eyeflash,  and The Museum of Light. She has been described as ‘a poet who surely can do an

They would have done anything for the  privilege of dying without passports. To know that their armchairs and vases would exist, to be used by  their great-great-grandchildren. Once, I sulked that Savta’s wedding dress from the photograph wasn’t kept for me.  A child, simply misunderstanding  how things were never left behind  out of spite. I cherish the photographs now –  threadbare sepia moments of  lives I will never truly know. Sometimes I put on Aunt Polly’s black velvet cape  and feel held through the generations by its warmth. And I cried when I hung the Mezuzah on the door of  my first home, knowing I could stay  as long as I chose. --- Galia is a British-Israeli writer, musician and crafter, who works full time as Head of English, media and film at a secondary school in North London. She has lectured at the Shakespeare Institute, the British Library and is on the committee for the London Association for the Teaching of English. Follow her on Twitter @galiamelon

(After Twin Peaks.) The FBI Agent asks the Waitress about her perfume but he’s not flirting, it’s connected with the case - the dead girl worked on the fragrance counter and every customer is under suspicion.   Agent Cooper won’t let lust affect his work. He knows how desire can immobilise the brain. He tells the Waitress, as she smoulders in scarlet, that the curls and curves of her handwriting represent a  romantic nature and to be of that mindset is dangerous.   The music with its indolent jazzy refrain drugs the viewer like a sleeping draft and the swaying steps of the seductive girls are mesmeric as a swung watch.   But the rapids which plummet down the rocks remind with their thunder  of an immortal appetite for velocity -   a hunger that leaps from body to body like the ghoul the agent has dreamt of,   the one who festers under the skin of so many of the inhabitants of the town.   Luckily  Love  lives on too finding its permanent home in the house of friendship   making a lifeti