Like birdseed, a sequinned gown, They would glitter them into the crowd each year around Christmas time. It was your smear- fingered -smile Little treat. We curled our tiny bodies into the ruby- lip slippered red of those opulent seats, sat tight as a bow. We savoured the buttons up… Hush, now let us begin. Slam Searing Black. That gunshot spike crack was the very worst sound of my life. I wanted to shred shed wolf peel at my skin. Wings battling uselessly into the wax of lights. You're a hunted animal. Fresh. screams, fever, green gaping horror-mouthed memories bashing again and again and again and again at the walls. Trapdoor. Claw. After a while, you know the hot scent of desperation. It's the ugly, stubborn snarl of curled fag smoke. If you want a light, you always, always, always have to ask them, even though you can hear them: their crabapple laughs crackle, vines choke at your ankles along the whole sterile length of the aisle. Snare, trap, flare. You're cored. You can no longer bear the sight of them. You shrivel in the corner and lick at your wounds. Fawn and Freeze. Retreat, curl up and Dry. Eventually, you don't even recognise your own white face. You are definitely not today The fairest, fairest… Each nightfall, animated eyes blare in this hunter's wood. They watch, watch, watch Watch. Your hair witches with time. You hold out your finger not for a ring, but for yet another bite of heat and blood; Your body spread out on a slab. Be good or they won't let you out… Gasp down til you bloat leak and weep like a frog. It's not real, it's not real. It's not real… Now you're encased into tall ivied walls. What you know is that they long to return the lush butchered prize of your heart. who even is the villain Anymore? One night, someone pads. tears at the plastic with fangs- and there's that familiar sweet purple glint once more. It's winking at you: royal like a cloak. About the author:
I'm an autistic social researcher based in Cardiff with a passion for heritage and museums. I also live with chronic eczema. I use poetry to engage people with research, and I am inspired by connections between artists and their work as well as interpreting well-known histories and stories from fresh perspectives, or uncovering under-appreciated historic figures and the tales they can tell.
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Oh ! Love I give my warmth to the scaly hands Who crush my oven and spit on it Oh ! Love, Yet, I look at them with rosy imagination And they make stinky by throwing me into a pit Oh ! Love, I give my thorny carpet to welcome you Oh ! love, I give a sandy dream to build a castle for you Oh ! love, Yet, I do not know how much unscrupulous I am Oh ! Love, I don’t want to be pardoned Oh ! Love, I want to be burnt to be alive Into a pit of ash of rotten bed Oh ! Love, Give me nectar to be dead Give me hemlock to be alive So that I can rest there alone With the fire of atonement By breaking the fundament About the author:
Partha Sarkar, a resident of Ichapur, a small town of a province West Bengal Of India, is a graduate who writes poems inspired by the late Sankar Sarkar and his friends (especially Deb kumar Khan) to protest against the social injustice and crimes against nature. His poems have been in different magazines both in Bangla and in English. Once, he would believe in revolution but now he is confused because of the obscurity of human beings, though he keeps fire in soul despite.
If sex were a flower head, as it is meant to be, I’d respond to sunlight better than to rain. If only I could convert the positives in life to food but I’ve always gorged on the past. Maybe you’d have to have been a child whose father died to understand. You take what you have and weave story cloaks from them. I’d be a sloe berry, best picked after the first frosts. Have you ever noticed that moorland plants carry on growing however often the mists entangle them? I’m woody now, thick-stemmed and when I sway in the wind I rage up a ruckus before my fruits fall. See those moor ponies with their unfriendly ways? When I sing into the cold, they nestle against my shoulders and breathe their warmed air with mine. About the author:
Hannah Linden has struggled with depression and anxiety most of her life. She’s a survivor of multiple traumas, including the suicide of her father when she was a child. Her poetry explores many kinds of impact from mental health challenges and she is particularly interested in the way trauma, and the experience of marginalisation, is explored in folklore and fairy tale, in both negative and positive ways. She has a Northern working-class background but, for many years, has lived in ramshackle social housing in Devon. She is widely published and, most recently, won the Cafe Writers Poetry Competition 2021, and was Highly Commended in the Wales Poetry Award 2021. Her debut pamphlet, The Beautiful Open Sky, (V. Press) was shortlisted for the Saboteur Award for Best Poetry Pamphlet 2023. X: @hannahl1n
I have been asleep, what can I say? I missed a few years, gliding in and out of old nightmares, not always night dreams. Sometimes I’d daydream my way through months before the screams would force me back into the darkness. Sleeping was better than being awake and watching the reactions to my twitching (how horrible to witness yourself in a nightmare). I hadn’t noticed it was twenty years since I had had a thought, a real thought that breathed in the air. Sleep thoughts seemed so convincing (I do dream in colour, don’t you?) and the thought woke me and I realised I was naked (I always sleep naked, don’t you? Well you don’t have to say, you weren’t on display whilst sleeping) and a fig leaf won’t do, not after all these years, a fig leaf doesn’t even begin to cover it. About the author:
Hannah Linden has struggled with depression and anxiety most of her life. She’s a survivor of multiple traumas, including the suicide of her father when she was a child. Her poetry explores many kinds of impact from mental health challenges and she is particularly interested in the way trauma, and the experience of marginalisation, is explored in folklore and fairy tale, in both negative and positive ways. She has a Northern working-class background but, for many years, has lived in ramshackle social housing in Devon. She is widely published and, most recently, won the Cafe Writers Poetry Competition 2021, and was Highly Commended in the Wales Poetry Award 2021. Her debut pamphlet, The Beautiful Open Sky, (V. Press) was shortlisted for the Saboteur Award for Best Poetry Pamphlet 2023. X: @hannahl1n |
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