Modern Romance

I never want to see you again.
– Angus (sent at 17:38)

Kitty Sashkovich sat there, crying
on the train
as suburbia passed her by.

She didn’t know
that he had sent the text
to the wrong number.

Jessica Edwards

That’s Not My Name

I hadn’t had time to watch Thor
or to read any of the comics
so I had no idea why you
were wearing a red cape,
brandishing a large hammer,
and referring to me as ‘Jane’.

Jessica Edwards

Just try

Oldskool. Words printed on cellulose papers and bundled up in a book. Now, that’s going a step further. Or, shan’t we say, back? Words printed on a cellulose paper then folded up and inserted in a bundle of papers with a bunch of words. That has its own charm. Try to stick this bookmark in an e-reader.

Jan Orrok

Inception Haiku

Five in the First line,
Seven in the Second line,
Five in the Third line.

Dan Broadbent

Good Pluck

The day I was dumped

I stopped plucking

my eyebrows.

I haven’t had a good

pluck now for

nearly three months.

I used to pluck

every day. Or,

rather,

I wanted to pluck

every day but my

tweezers,

they only wanted to

pluck me every

second, third or fourth

day.

I’m getting pretty hairy.

Kat Franceska

Pioneers

This table
is the high seas
Open water, bread crumbs
We reach across
opposite shores
and let our glasses travel

David Luetke

Casting

A wild howl
Hunts from above
Tearing my cells up
In honeycomb hunks
Leaves fall from the trees
Moulting hair parting
Revealing me fleeing
That enormous tongue
Flickering and testing
The air like a snake
Narrowing on my body
Locking on, casting out
Plunging down
Like a drinking straw

Forged in your pits
I peel away from myself
Rolling and burning
Over and over
Hardening to a foetal
Spherical skeleton
Concertinaed and shifted
In upward contractions
Reaching wet cheeks
Swilled and spat out
Scuttling along the ground
Piddling ghostly trails.

Lucy Winrow

Three Strangers

1

As the patter
of our passing feet fades,
I wonder
how hair on a head so young
could be so mortified to grey.

2

A pity,
that the mystery she weaves
can be dispelled
by a common name
scrawled on her coffee cup.

3

She careens across the street,
louche-limbed,
lush-lidded.
In her eyes,
a glint shines still.

Hazem Tagiuri

Over It

I’m SO over that, says the girl student, imperious, to her sidekick boy. Y’know? SO past the age where, like, I have to get drunk and emotional. She sighs.

From the other side of the carriage, I smirk. The girl wears an outfit in a style pre-dating my student days. A twenty year cycle; now it’s the hip new thing.

An older woman opposite peers over her reading glasses at the paper. As the girl speaks again, the woman looks up at me. I realise I’m tutting out loud. As my eyes meet the woman’s in the hope of complicity, she drops them, and her mouth twitches into a smile.

Laura Windley

The Look Out

I can immerse myself in stones

and pebbles here.
A gathering of tens of thousands
of boulders; rolling, rough but as
meaningful now as a human heart,
a similar size and as rich in history.

To my left a friend is
mapping out the coast;
rock-slides have left a minefield here,
deposits from another age –
but he’ll walk it.
I listen to nothing but the frish
and shush of wave-sets.
I look straight ahead and try
to see France.

Christy Hall

The Grump

Lives his life in knives and forks
He often talks a kind of squawk
A clump of a man
Slumped into a beanbag
A complete mess
A face of stress
Going nowhere fast
The grump

Zach Roddis

Dear Andrex

I think I should tell you
I have been poisoning
Your dog
Because
It Watches me
Poo

Adam French

Molar-coaster

Julie left the orthodontist clutching her mouth. She hated these visits. Her braces were tightened and the ache lasted for several days. She had always chosen colored bands to go over the train tracks but today she defiantly went with the natural color of the elastic. It was her protest. The truth was that she hadn’t been concerned about her teeth. She would have preferred a hip shaving operation in order to slim down the childbearing beasts housed within inherited chubby thighs. Julie stepped into the passenger seat of the car that her mother sat in, the engine quietly sniggering. The ache in Julie’s mouth continued the whole ride home and her resentment built. With each twinge of pain that eased the crooked pearly soldiers in line, Julie considered another part of her 13 year old complexion that could benefit from alteration.

Julie proceeded through life blaming her parents for highlighting the flaws of her body – for pointing out the imperfections that she had once been blind to. Their casual indifference to ‘correcting’ their daughter lingered, and Julie’s confidence slowly diminished. At first Julie tried extreme dieting – altering her body shape through juice cleanses and cabbage remedies in an attempt to reach what she believed could be perfection. Next it was her lips; they received multiple collagen injections and her face was hardened with repetitive botox. After some careful consideration and a lifetime of self loathing, Julie decided she would be more comfortable as a man. She lived as the opposite gender for over a year and booked a sex change operation with the local consultant. Julie’s mother pleaded with her to only have the breasts removed, but ever defiant, Julie had her vagina turned inside out and made into a makeshift penis. To Julie’s father’s surprise, he actually found his daughter more alluring as a man.

Julian had some real poise. And a perfect smile.

J. A. Hall

The Anus Scale Chart

o
Sparrow

o
Otter

o
Pig

o
Debbie McGee

o
Leopard

o
Bison

o
Elephant

o
Whale

o
God

John Allison

Gastropods

I watched it so,
As to not be seen.
Cracks of chapped lips,
Received Vaseline.

Now on her face,
Encased in slime,
Two slugs do rest
But not entwined.

Callum Copley

Outside the doctor’s

Walking past the surgery
A queue of ailments
Wish I knew what you all had

Jerry Turner

The Shift

Again in this extended box,
that isolates any chance of my
escape plan mutating alongside
the others here,

whom I know search a similar plea
with empty hands, that struggle
to have their previous contents replaced.

We hold out our callous free palms,
hoping our life lines will be once again rubbed with gold, just enough
to keep any wolves at bay.

But for now, our fingers hover like dragon flies, over the keyboards that are now clogged with dead skin and visible traces of boredom, and the voices then start to pour down the lines with a vaccine-less venom.

And to release each one at will would be a far to easy escape; instead I allow that headset to
melt with my skull, and allow the first hour to take its toll, and lead me once more in this merry dance.

Jonathan Butcher

Blue vein

blue_cheese

Admiral of cheeses,
placed on high behind the glass,
your steady survey indifferent
to the taunts of creamy sisters
who flaunt in rows for late night shoppers.
Who are they to me?

You reason in my basket and whisper,
humiliate my bread and beer
with lectures of exalted pursuits
and simple daily pleasures
when rhyming poets walked with gods.

I will not martyr you in modern ovens,
nor melt your maturing angles
(and with it my prejudices)
on burning toast,
but slice your flesh and serve you with a cheerful dried fig.

Ramon

Alley

  I still hear
          the split of your laugh

the sound of the half-way dead nee alive

      in the smallness
growing, dizzy on dark
          at the back of the old cinema
making homes for strays
and legends
      myths
      unravelling at the hems

our laces brambled tangles
and pockets
       bleeding an unpieced puzzle
on forgotten tarmac
discarded
       debris of our ghosts
turning walls in the day-lit hours
            until our echoes ring faint

and no-one remembers
us
      or the traces that we left.

Zelda Chappel

The other

We’d gone to see it on our way home,
That place he’d held noisome fun before St Vincent ended the party.
Standing on the path, we looked past
His house, the thing we’d come to visit, and elsewhere,
Out onto that palely glowing surface.

When it happened,
When the white sun melted into a sheen and the waves broke
Far away, you took my wrist
And asked me if I felt it,
The soft, cold approach of night
That made our day curl backwards
In on itself. I did.

But that evening had been our friend,
So I kept quiet, not wanting to spoil what was coming,
To leap ahead to darkness and miss the twirl
Of thin, translucent, bright grey silent light.

Emily Jeffrey-Barrett

And then there was light

The Lady of the Night had the darkness wrapped in a colossal handkerchief. She settled the cloth over the town of her creation – because not only was she the Lady of the Night but the lady of life. This was, if truth be told, a rather large hankie, but equally this was a rather large lady. As the fabric fell the light crept in and the sky without moon lay on its back across the ceiling of the town hour upon hour. Shortly before the sun stretched out, creaking its bones, and awaking the belly of fire, there shone a beaming voice shattering the town:

“Ellie breakfast is ready. Hurry up!!!”

Rumbling earth followed briskly beneath their feet. Houses tumbled and bounced and many a person was knocked along the ground. Time passed between the voice and the beginning of daytime, but daytime, they knew, would eventually shine. They were made in her image but on a much smaller scale; she brought so much feeling and hope to the people – the Lady is love!

When the darkness came they only ever assumed peace, quiet…darkness until the slow rising of the light much, much later. Water rushed and dragged homes with it – person after person lost in the swell. She with her mighty hands scooped the crushing, tumbling jar of light from its path of destruction, quashed the mighty waves and soaked up the town. She, the omnipotent – the gentle saviour.

Morning never came gradually, the time to adjust never factored in; it happened in a sudden sweep and those that have been around to testify say that you can see the darkness seep and drag across the blue sky like a magician’s table cloth tugging, pulling in it’s wake the sun from the ocean but leaving the sky un-harmed, leaving the stars and moon in place, hidden and outshone by the brighter. As we now know we have no organic order to control our cycle, there is only her, the Lady.

Nigel Buckley