Sally Long

Sally Long

Loss My loss comes wrapped up in phrases:… no more funding… have to let you go. Yours has no such delicate packaging:the click and boom of gunshotsthat violate the rushing street,the angry blade that rips through flesh. I add the experience to my CV,gain advantage...
Robin Thomas

Robin Thomas

The Deliverance of St Peter David Teniers the younger, c.1645 On one side of the massive door,which stands unaccountably open,the guards, so steeped in reality it hurts,are playing dice, that means of transport fromreality into some other sphere of things,where it’s...
Maggie Wadey

Maggie Wadey

On not Being the Last Bird to Sing my child’s face, stretchedin pain like a Noh mask, relaxesand she sleeps at last,leaving the land around usto lie awake under a crust of starsthat mists the sky with light likethe illuminated face of a watch.On the hillside, a hare...
Kevin Graham

Kevin Graham

Let’s Do Cartwheels and watch the great world spin.Everyone will be on the green againplaying football or tip the can.Parents will pop out every now and thento check we’re still alive and then some.All the flowerbeds will be shakingwith laughter, ickle secrets...
Jan FitzGerald

Jan FitzGerald

Daffodil Bulbs I could stare at these tubs of dirt all day,waiting for the miracle. This is where I buried them,swaddled in their papery skins now wintering in a secret hideawaylike swollen nodes of sleep. I envy their dark cocoons of privacy. One more change of...
Christopher Palmer

Christopher Palmer

The Sides of an Obelisk Three thousand five hundred are the yearsI’ve travelled, past all my known forebearspast several kings named Henry outbreaks of the plague there, and thereto be pinpointed along time’s gradientwhere creatures are shaped into language and...