On a Map
by Jayne Stanton
in The Great Cartographer’s freehand there’s a point
where the line between land and sea is
blurred, erased, redrawn
where the wind whips as you walk
to forget where you came from
till you stop looking back.
On the edge of a salt lake, you turn
to standing stone
your sights transfixed
by the sun’s Midas touch
on marram grass as far as the dunes can reach
while the tide rises
like mercury
up the creeks
colouring outside the lines.
I Am Definitely Not Suggesting Testing This
by Julian Cason
You would think
if I swung an axe
to cleave
a church,
stained windows smashed,
gibbets of lead
for jags
of hanging glass,
arthritic pews
rounded up
for a desecrated
brown wood pyre,
the axehead sparking walls,
goading
all those hiding,
shaky stones,
and, as a culminating act,
deeply gashed
the anaemic altar,
you would think
tearing apart a church matters,
carrying the same risk
or reward
as the splitting
of an atom.
Flitting
by Zoë Green
Dear Gustav, Happy Birthday, love from your father, who lies alone in the cold, dark earth.
Birthday card circa 1915, translated from the German.
All his life, he was afraid of the dark, his eighty years
feared of death and dying – of being laid to sleep
in the dark cold earth; and when the time came,
to lay him down in the cold dark earth, we buried him
with his owl. I felt bad for this owl, it being my idea:
something to accompany him instead of the figure
of Mephistopheles his widow proposed.
As I say, I felt bad for the wooden bird, to be laid
aside him down in the cold dark whilst the larvae
ran through him like a black dew, and I felt sick
for the owl alone in the dark after the worms
had sieved his skin. In the stealth of a hawthorn night
I dream of this owl bearing him aloft on the shush
of its wings vair, rushing him to the tangle of elms
around our house where, at midnight and again
at three, we wake to the call of an old wooden flute,
a tune of loneliness flitten from an otherwhere
as we stand barefoot on this coldest of earths.
Arbor Low
by Catherine Edmunds
Man of stone—tesserae stream from your mouth,
sprouting leaves and acorns. Attendant hares stand
to attention while you, imperious, wave away maps,
shred common prayers tight-bound in print.
The meeting-men from the ministry,
umbrella-ed and cartographed, have come to stand
on platters of moonrock, to perch on rusted
cast iron pillars. Rampant cock and papered pie,
Arbor Low has risen: let the meeting-men die!
But stop, hold. They bow their heads, as respect,
unsought for, flows like pink granite from Jura,
coursing their river veins; contouring their love.
Alex Mepham (they/them) is guest editor for issue 7. They are a PhD student investigating how background noise impacts speech understanding. Alex writes and translates poetry and short prose, with work appearing in Magma, Dreich, Berlin Lit, Ink Sweat & Tears, and Modern Poetry in Translation among others. Alex is the current Poetry Editor for Queerlings and a Poetry Reader for Kitchen Table Quarterly. Alex lives in York, UK, and can be found at amepham.carrd.co.
Jayne Stanton’s poems have appeared in numerous print and online magazines, and anthologies including Best British & Irish Poets 2017. She has written commissions for a county museum, University of Leicester’s Centre for New Writing, poems for International Women’s Day, and a city residency. A pamphlet, Beyond the Tune, was published by Soundswrite Press (2014).
Julian Cason lives in Cardiff. His professional life has been mainly spent working with the terminally ill. He is published in Envoi, Pulp Poets Press, Nine Muses, The Dawn Treader, Black Bough Poetry, Bindweed, Full House (Featured Creator), Ink Drinkers, The Frogmore Papers, Sarasvati, Southlight, Dreich, Ninnau and Dream Catcher (Pending).
Zoë Green is from Montrose, Scotland. For the last ten years, she has lived in Austria, Germany and Switzerland. Her poetry has been published by Under the Radar, the London Magazine, and Poetry Salzburg Review. She won a 2023 Candlestick Press prize, was Highly Commended in the Manchester Poetry Prize and the McLellan Poetry Prize (Scots category), shortlisted for the 2022 London Magazine Poetry Prize, and Commended in the 2023 Winchester Poetry Prize. Her debut pamphlet, ‘Shadow Child’, forthcoming with Hedgehog Press in 2024
Catherine Edmunds is a writer, artist, and musician whose published works include two poetry collections, six novels and a Holocaust memoir. She has had numerous publication credits in journals including Aesthetica, Crannóg, Poetry Scotland and Ambit; and was the 2020 winner of the Robert Graves Poetry Prize.