OUTBOUND
by Liv Aldridge
Two bannisters hang / from the root. / Ladies crackle / assured / wands / in the carriage. / Mostly / to mock, / but one has / eye sockets / like crow-bowls / and / hair like / bony black feathers. / The carriage / is dry / but creams / vision / as it trips / through / ridges. / Vertigo uncontrollable / fall over carpets / legs lick the seat. / Fields spin, / crows hit / dark whiffs of farming / bunched up. /The protective glass / sucks scents / between / shoulder blades. / Stealing / the pink edges / off our light / our light / someone cracks / a strongbow / open.
Green Ears
by Finlay Worrallo
Twelve years from now, meteors will bathe the skies of the earth in a lime-coloured light for three nights.
The following day, one percent of humanity will awake to a noise they cannot identify, like a song in an unknown key, entwined with a million different whispers. It will deafen those in the countryside, but those in the city will catch merely a snatch of song at the bottom of their gardens.
Slowly this network of disparate souls, webbed across the world, will reach out to one another, share their stories, go to the same psychiatrists, set up forums, meet in coffee shops, leave their partners who cannot hear the voices and seek solitude, sit for hours in forests with eyes shut, listening to the rustling voices in their heads, stomachs twisting at the thought that perhaps the world has turned them mad at last.
Musicians will try and repeat the sounds in their head that no one has ever played before, will attempt with trembling fingers to echo inhuman songs on human strings. Holy men and women will leaf through their scriptures seeking an answer, asking if this is blessing or curse, praying to understand the tongues that keep them awake at night with indecipherable wisdom. And scientists will begin the experiments that pave the way towards the quieting truth. They will chart the ebb and flow of the voices in their own heads, transcribe the stories of their fellow listeners, wander through gardens with brows furrowed, sweat in the desert and feel the voices fade away, press their ears against trees and hear the voices clearly enough to make out foreign syllables.
One by one they will realise that what they hear is three trillion trees around the globe, singing about the touch of the sun on their leaves, the world flickering around them like flame, and the slowly spreading silence.
The green ears, as they will call themselves, will go cold at the vast secret they share and will feel its weight on their hundred and forty million shoulders. Then this scattered nation of nomads will step up to the rest of the world and reveal what they know, proving with their numbers and stories the truth of what they hear.
And the revelation will reshape all futures from that moment onwards.
Aeronaut
by Sara Forgarty Olmos
I’m staging a mass for this song of the past. The congregation
are beetles and spiders, they forget
the words to the Hail Mary but they know how to mourn
in private. I was seven when I realized that every inch of me
was damned, that my ankles were traitors,
that my limbs would
calcify in
these strange tangents.
My body is so stupid it got stuck
to the
pages of our textbooks.
Your fingers know how to plait hair,
how to steal without getting caught.
Chickens ought to float wherever you go.
This is the place
cursed by monks.
Your new heavy notes bloat my belly.
Strange rains continue to fall maddening winds knock out
our neurons. Oh love,
sink to the floor tell me about your ghosts
Liv Aldridge is a writer and poet from rural Sweden. She is pursuing a Literature degree in the North
of England, but is living in Kraków for a year. Her poems have appeared in The Gentian and
Carmen et Error and her reviews appear occasionally in NARC.
Finlay Worrallo is a queer cross-arts writer studying Modern Languages at Newcastle University. He writes poetry, prose and scripts, and is always up for experimenting with new forms. His work is published in Crossways Magazine, VIBE, Queerlings and the Emma Press’ anthology Dragons of the Prime: Poems about Dinosaurs.
Sara Fogarty Olmos is a manc poet and a recent graduate of Durham University. Her work is inspired by apologies, Catholic mythology and her deepest darkest fears. At the moment she is working as a boarding assistant in Hertfordshire and cannot wait for the day that she returns back to the North.