Dear Reader

sensitive to a subtle change the nymph slips from birth water to dry earth feels the icy rush of air against her body pushed on by irresistible instinct driven higher to a place of changing elongated leaves spiral in the breeze anchored to bark twisting in a drying skin wings folded stickily to her body thorax muscles ripple trapped in the hardening carapace a labour obstructed six x-rays exist in hospital files cephalopelvic meat on a photographic plate breech baby and me wings now a leaden cape a well of foreboding opens instruments clatter on a tray pumping fluid into a tracery of veins with the energy of desperation slipping from me like a dark spill the icy rush of air on a fragile new form --- Laura Brinson is Melbourne based. She reads, writes, recites at open mikes, gardens, and sews. Her sewing room, in which she makes wedding dresses and costumes, catches the morning sun. Her poetry is reflective.

Fifteen tubes of pastel, tooth-rot happiness tumbled from pink palms to the counter in Spar. The older girl smirked, counted my 10p pieces like a slow handclap. Home, I’d unpeel each packet, scoff and crunch, mouth all fizzy. But hoard the pale purples – the sweetest, the prettiest –  in a sandwich bag, back of the wardrobe. I could be a mean girl too, didn’t want to share. He never knew about them, nor did she , or the people they worked with, or the neighbours, or teachers, or the dinner ladies, or the girls who weren’t my best friends, or the girls I wished were. * Now I am taller, a bit, and remain a mean girl – not the sweetest, not the prettiest –  and no one can make me, no one can force. Some never stop trying, tell me how much they want this sharing . I know how hungry they are – jaws spasm to bite down on any shred screeing off flimsy partition walls, mouths wet for pavement-scrapings. Half-chewed half-truths – no...

A fox lives under your house in the burbs where he isn’t welcome. He finds a way into the crawlspace Behind your closet because he used to live there too. Your town sits between interstates 71 and 675, a tapestry of burgs speckled with gas stations, Episcopalian churches, dirty public pools. You know every single person in this Walmart, and everyone pretends to be somewhere else, like France or their girlfriend’s couch in New York. You fist fight your third grade bully next to the dumpsters outside the mall. You haven’t seen him in eight years. Everyone’s lawn is covered in straw but their grass still grows in yellow, and the corn is a foot deeper than the lake. Summer in Ohio feels like summer on Mars, dusty and thick, the sun a watery marble in the clouds. It always threatens to rain a day or two before it does. Your beer cans pile up. Your books are limp, everyone is moving through honey. You sleep on the hood of your car or in a cocoon of s...

The city of swifts, where we walked crook-footed over cobbled mosaics, eyed flickering geckos on sun-flecked walls; lay silent under the crisp cotton sheet side by side in the heat, untouching; swam in shallow water as the sun made tortoise-backed patterns on the shifting sea bed. We were so thoroughly unprepared for what came next. --- Penny Blackburn lives in the North East of England and writes poetry and short fiction. Her publications include pieces online in Bangor Literary Journal, Atrium and Ink, Sweat & Tears and in print with Paper Swans Press, Reader’s Digest and Maytree Press. She is on Twitter and Facebook as @penbee8 and on Instagram as penny.blackburn.5.

Driftwood was washed ashore shortly after the break-up: rope, lobster pots, some wood from a frame, all scattered along the shoreline. Months later, the waves returned a plank on the morning high tide intact, immaculate. In white letters on blue was painted a name I’d begun to forget, a name that should not resurface: Isabella white letters on blue like the crest of a wave at the moment of breaking. --- Stewart Carswell is from the Forest of Dean and currently lives in Cambridgeshire, where he helps to organise the Fen Speak open mic night. His poems have been published in Envoi, Ink Sweat & Tears, Algebra of Owls, and The Fenland Reed. His debut pamphlet is Knots and branches (Eyewear, 2016). x

We wore silk kimonos, twined roses in our hair, danced barefoot at dawn on the dewdamp grass as the river's morning mist haunted the garden. Porcelain dolls, mimics of ourselves, watched us take tea in thimble cups glowing blue beauty, like our veins, against the light. Our teacups now are squat and brown, thick hands too clumsy for fragile things. Cardigan-layered against mild winds, we worry about flooding from the river. There is ache and throb in our danceless legs and no-one now sees beauty in our veins. Come Sister, as the light fades from our sky, let us dress in silk kimonos, twist vivid roses in our pewter hair. --- Penny Blackburn lives in the North East of England and writes poetry and short fiction. Her publications include pieces online in Bangor Literary Journal, Atrium and Ink, Sweat & Tears and in print with Paper Swans Press, Reader’s Digest and Maytree Press. She is on Twitter and Facebook as @penbee8 and on Instagram ...

At some point, in the lifespan of my soul, I want to know what it’s like to be one drop of rain. To fall from the sky and splash into a flower, and then linger in its luxurious core. Perhaps I could then, ever so slowly, like the beginning of a rollercoaster, dive from petal to ground, and then nestle myself deeper, deeper, deeper, into the warmth of an inviting earth, simply to rest forever in her arms.   --- Tiffany Shaw-Diaz is a Pushcart Prize and Dwarf Stars Award nominee who also works as a professional visual artist. Her poetry has been featured in Modern Haiku, The Heron's Nest, Bones, NHK World Haiku Masters, The Mainichi, and dozens of other publications. Her first chapbook, says the rose, was published by Yavanika Press in 2019.