Potholing by Catherine Redford

So I descend a little further into the yawn,

night spliced with a pit of grunting pigs,

weaving round intervals of whale vertebrae

that sing like singed tree-stumps in the round.

I meet a heavy argon sea of phosphorescence,

dip a bottle into the waters and watch it gulp

the flickering amethyst fish into its belly.

The waves fold in on themselves and turn their backs.

Tired soil will give up her secrets, and her bones;

in this swallowed world, avenues graft and split like veins from the galleries below.

Terra ignota, crawling into the unmapped.

The danger of wrecks is that they lure us into believing we can reconstruct.

---

Catherine Redford lives in the West Midlands. Her poem ‘Between women just grown up’ was commended in the 2021 Sussex Poetry Competition, and she has poetry published on Atrium and forthcoming in New Welsh Reader. She has also published widely on Romantic and Victorian literature, with a particular focus on post-apocalyptic texts and the Gothic. Twitter: @C_Redford_

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Home by Jessa Forest

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I grasp a piece of invisible text from Delta of Venus and bite so hard juice runs down to where I'm smooth inside. I am falling over the edge in anticipation of your mouth. My lips curve like the rim of the roll top bath, they smile, then say, fuck me over the side. Open mouthed, soft inside, I swell, clitoral bulbs freeze framed in slow, they grow - lento. I’m an Attenborough nature programme, my clitoris evolves from want. Don’t stop - you make me summer. --- Wendy Allen has been published in Atrium, Re-Side, Brunel Writer and Northern Gravy. She has a Legitimate Snack coming out shorty from Broken Sleep and is about to start an MA in Creative Writing at Oxford Brookes.

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