MASQUERADE
by Özge Lena
right here in the middle
of a sick summer
I swim in a sea
of masks
terrifying masks
love-stained masks
leave me alone now but
do not leave me ever masks
grinning masks with glass eyes
pretending to have a lot of fun masks
wet-lipped lust-lipped dead-lipped masks
borrowed masks from the false joy of the ferocious sun
I have to know you because I owe you masks
I’m drained of all these masquerade masks
dripping down slyly leaving little pieces
of maroon jelly on rusty craniums
assembled to form awry cages
bright soul-sucking things
murderous masks
that I want
to pluck off from
their faux faces layer
by layer by layer by layer by
The Trout
by Anthony Tomkins
Would you believe it!
A two-metre-tall trout
in a phosphorous duffle coat
just tried to sell me some grain.
He said it was the good stuff,
from his trout sources,
beck barley and milk fat.
Ideal for horses.
‘I don’t have a horse
and you’re a trout.’
He replied:
‘Your loss.
This grain is from my world, a world you’ll never taste now.
A world of crop and scale, a fantasia of shimmering kelps and rosehip.
Its flour makes bread that tastes of horizon air.’
parchment
by Katie Byford
What Bird alone bringeth forth aliving creature º produceth milk
for laruæ º ignoble, Uermin
or like uermin
º grovveth from the tree
as frutt: for when one doth dropp
the reſt follovv
º middle-beaſte cunning : unſound of spirit
cf. Æsop
crauen º fauovrs darke
obſerue the vvings hath clavvs : draconic
ſhe doth take greateſt delight to feed
vpon gnats by the pregnant moon º
it is a ſoueraign counter charme againſt all ſocerie if a man
naile her head dovvnvvard vpon his vvindovv.
Here upon this leaf find the Battes spine pinned
so as to justly demonstrate the head hath not feathers
but haires : and the wings are thin skins or pannicles
not unlike parchment: and that the wings have digits
unnaturally long yet not unlike a human hand.
Özge Lena has a published novella titled Otopsi and her poems have appeared in Ink Sweat & Tears, Green Ink Poetry, Red Ogre Review, Harana, Acropolis Journal, The Phare, After Poetry, and elsewhere, also forthcoming in iamb. Her poetry was shortlisted for the Ralph Angel Poetry Prize 2021 and her poem Summerlepsy was shortlisted for The Oxford Brookes International Poetry Competition in 2021.
Anthony Tomkins is a PhD researcher at the University of York, working on addiction narratives. He writes about the hills, flats and plains of his Brecon Beacons home and other equally magical things. He is an enthusiastically average runner and cook and his poetry can be read in Amethyst Review and forthcoming editions of Dreich
Katie Byford is an alum of the Barbican Young Poets and The Writing Squad, and was the winner of the Oxford Brookes International Poetry Competition in 2020. Her first pamphlet, He Said I Was a Peach, was published by ignitionpress in 2021. Katie is in the current cohort of the Emerging Writers Programme at The London Library. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Magma, bath magg, Finished Creatures and Modern Poetry in Translation. Katie is writing a book length poem / sequence about bats.