Dear Reader

Look to the city’s forests. Those monoliths and museums, cathedrals and palaces  and theatres whose stories have sunk deep under the pavements, have rooted themselves in the silt at the bottom of the river. Think of the architects spreading sketches across tired wood, holding up samples of mosaic tile, wondering what sort of mark they’ll leave. Think of the tongues of flame, the sirens, the silence before the shells fall. Think of the thousands and thousands of feet that have walked here. The myriad secrets whispered across the vast blue dome, where the apostles keep them safe. Think of the nightingale you heard here that night in November, wrapping its song around St Paul’s in ribbons of winter.  Tiny in the face  of all that history.  Dauntless, nonetheless. --- Jen Feroze lives by the sea in Essex with her husband and two small sleep thieves. Her work has recently appeared in Atrium, Ink Sweat & Tears, Ekphrastic Review and The Madrigal, among others. Her firs...

W orcestershire-based actress, director, producer and poet Amanda Bonnick holds a BA degree in Philosophy and Sociology from the University of Warwick. As a theatre practitioner, she has produced a number of plays for the Melting Pot Theatre Company and has written street theatre. She has recently been Poet-in-Residence at Worcester Cathedral. Solace in the Silence is the outcome of her period in that residency. Cathedral residencies have become quite popular for poets in recent years and some, such as this one, have led to publication. This collection, however, amounts to far more than an imaginative sequence of poems, it is also a prose diary covering the period from mid-2019 to Easter 2021 which offers up a personal record of what amounts to a ‘pilgrimage’ describing, among other things, the author’s reflections on her own creativity and her insights into the life and work of the cathedral.   Her journal also expresses something of the emotion felt when the building was close...

I give you these ribs to help you live. They form a bridge across  thirty years of wild rain, and sun,  and the apples  in a basket that were brought  and placed next to each of the bones.  Between each porcelain thread  are little voices, hanging  gently, smouldering like the final wisp  of a spider’s web long vacated, their soft hands so carefully aligned  in this thin bone cloth. And those promises voiced in the harshest throat of winter or the thrill of April rain become us now. The earth is fresh; the world is a curve in the heart, and  where it beat. --- Marcello Giovanelli is a writer and academic from Leicestershire, UK. He has recently published poetry in  Ink, Sweat and Tears ,  Poetry Plus , and  The Poetry Village .

you snap a stick off a sunburnt beech meet the river’s rush and throw / chase the current as it cradles your battered branch across the cascade crashing to the wash below / i wheeze freezingly behind / catch the autumn crabapple burn in your cheeks / tear a twig from a lumpy yew / aim an elbow at the knucklewhite rapids / hurl the wood with herculean strength straight at my wellied toes / a lost robin rides your silent smile to the sky / another try / i twist  a sprig off a crisp birch / grip  my frostglass fingers / feel them melt as you wrap your mittened hand around mine / arch my arm back gently / teaching me to let go --- Laurie Eaves is a writer from the village of Yapton. His debut collection, Biceps (2020), is published by Burning Eye Books and his work has been published by Bad Betty Press, Ink Sweat & Tea...

Now I am naturalized and marketable,  my brain useful my forearms strong. I gleam squeaky-clean from scrubbing hospital floors. You can forgive my skin the colour of midnight plums at least temporarily when I apply gauze to your suppuration you wince avoid my eyes when I empty your bedpan tell me to cheer up when you make a joke about my ancestors. My scissors not nearly as sharp as your corrections of my grammarly faults. I am dizzy tolerated, jostled kept on until something better home-grown comes along. --- Marina Sofia is a translator, reviewer, writer and blogger. She is also a global nomad, which sounds much better than 'immigrant'. She has published poetry and flash fiction in a few online and print journals, and thinks poetry is the best way to procrastinate when she should be working on her crime novel.

  —Dick Allen, “B&B”    Wind exhausts with its icy fists. Knives of rain wear me down, & leaves in their helicopter swirls like leaflets dropped from a plane. October depletes me, & November. They’ve too much busyness. They send me spinning, dancing, lonely with the rake, the broom. I surrender, collapsing like an old barn, debris of me piling in a chair with clear view of the television.  News is on. It spends me. Talk of politics, also. I’d like  to shut up the voices that fatigue. They hum like a B-flat in the pipes. They bicker & scold, condemn. They expend me like carrying  groceries up a flight of stairs  until I’m too drained to care  which side they’re on. --- Ace Boggess is author of six books of poetry, including  Escape Envy  (Brick Road Poetry Press, 2021),  I Have Lost the Art of Dreaming It So , and  The Prisoners . His writing has appeared in  Michigan Quarterly Review, Notre Dame Review, H...

I need to tell you exactly what colour it was. Did you ever suck an American boiled sweet – a blue one – slip it out of your mouth  hold it to the sun to admire it before sliding its smoothness back in and licking the wet sugar coating from the pads of your thumb and index finger? It was nearly that blue. And did you have that gel toothpaste so bright you squeezed it the full length  of your brush’s bristles even though you knew the tube said ‘pea-sized’? The kind that had you wondering how blue  made teeth white? It was almost that kind of blue.  And it shone like the first strokes from a bottle of nail polish  labelled ‘electric blue’. And there it was  hanging from the branch of a tree within reach,  four firm knuckles at its base and no one had picked it. So I got it for her, that bluest of apples, and all the way to her house excitement held my stomach captive as I imagined her biting into it or wanting to put it on display  for the whole wor...