by the hoar rock in the drowned wood* there was once a feasting-cup city pearl and aquamarine of its precincts and palaces sea-green peridot of its square miles but no one knows a way back through time to when Lyonesse was fresh from the hands of its makers No one can bear to think of its libraries given to or snatched up by the … Continue reading Two Poems by Penelope Shuttle
It began when you opened your desk and found everything gone, replaced with sand. You opened the wooden pencil case your brother had made and it contained nothing but sand. Next, your books filled with sand and the words began to wear away. Your homework was late because sand ate the sums and solutions. Study time vanished in to the time it had … Continue reading ‘Sand’ by Jane Commane
Inside the camphorwood chest – forgotten treasure: a pair of leather cowboy boots with metal toe caps. How they shone. As loud, proud and polished as the men they sparked a trail through. Three decades of dust can’t hide the cracks. A genie-rub conjures up swirls of dry ice, the wink of the glitter ball, and the Night Fever dance floor, a chequerboard where … Continue reading ‘High Society’ by Ian Humphreys
The valley was filled with things that should have frightened us: leeches in the Bowmont, ticks clinging in the grass. Combines dipping like warships through the ripe wheat, green clouds over Kelsocleuch, their guyropes of lightning. Nothing was forbidden but the ruined shepherd’s cottage on the Law, the gubbed skull of its walls like a smudge in the high trees. It felt like miles from … Continue reading ‘The lucky little girls’ by Claire Askew
Ship-breaking These folks were not the victims of migration…these folks mean to survive – Stuart Hall I watch old films of ship yards on the Clyde: cranes ripping ships apart, their metal hides peeled back by men in goggles wielding fire. The shock of innards: girders, joists and wires, a rusted funnel toppling in slow motion. Those open flanks rain down the cabin’s foreign detritus … Continue reading ‘Ship-breaking’ by Hannah Lowe
